Steve King’s bigotry

As I was coming home from Staunton, VA this weekend, I spent some time in airports watching CNN on the monitors. At one point, OVER AND OVER, there was a Republican from Iowa, a guy named Steve King, repeatedly saying that if Barack Obama was elected all hell was growing to break loose, because the terrorists would be emboldened by the US electing someone whose middle name is Hussein. I had to laugh out loud at such a silly argument! But apparently people are taking it seriously. So I turned to a scholar of middle eastern studies who reads Arabic newspapers to understand more of what people in the middle east (who are NOT terrorists — just like we have fundamentalists Christians, they have fundamentalist Muslims, but that’s only a small minority) are saying. Juan Cole’s essay is interesting, and repudiates King entirely.