In a March 10 editorial, The Wall Street Journal endorsed Rep. Peter King's hearings on Muslim radicalization, writing: “Congressional hearings on the Islamist terror threat inside the U.S. begin today, and our friends on the left are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one. What a pity.” The Journal further stated that King's hearings “can be ... an opportunity for some honesty.”

From the Journal editorial:

Congressional hearings on the Islamist terror threat inside the U.S. begin today, and our friends on the left are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one. What a pity. Terrorism experts have been warning for years that future attacks will be largely homegrown, and Americans are entitled to an assessment of how serious a threat this is.

Whether that's what we'll get today remains to be seen: The witnesses called by Representative Peter King's Committee on Homeland Security include Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, the first Muslim-American Member of Congress; L.A. Sheriff Leroy Baca; and Melvin Bledsoe, an American whose son, Carlos, converted to Islam and murdered a soldier at a recruiting station in Arkansas in June 2009. None of these witnesses is incendiary, and the hearings are not an exercise in naming names.

What they can be is an opportunity for some honesty. Since 9/11, there have been more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil. These include plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline. Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan's November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.