The grand drama at Rep. Peter King’s Congressional hearings investigating the radicalization of American Muslims last week was provided by Rep. Keith Ellison, who broke down crying while telling the story of a Muslim-American hero, Mohammed Salman Hamdani, who rushed to lower Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to assist in rescue efforts, and died in the collapse of the World Trade Center. Ellison said:

After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.

I found the performance odd and vaguely troubling, and now that I’ve thought about it for a few days, I know why. The statement by Ellison, who converted to Islam, and the tears that accompanied it, raise a few ethical issues, beginning with the Ethics Alarms standard, “What’s going on here?”

What was going on was that Ellison, like many other Democrats and much of the media, was trying to cast King’s hearings as an exercise in bigotry and persecution. King’s hearings may have been premature, it may have been an exercise in self-promotion, it may have been a waste of time, or not. But Congressional Committees have held so many fishing expedition hearings, self-promoting hearings, hearings to push political agendas, and hearings that stuck Congress’s nose where it didn’t belong that didn’t spark a peep of protest that one has to regard the venom heaped on King to be passing strange.* Several American Muslims have been involved in jihadist attacks. The argument that this is a tiny percentage of the total Muslim-American population is bizarre to the point of disingenuousness. Three cases of bubonic plague or four instances of deaths from spoiled baby food will launch widespread investigations in other sectors. If part of Al Qaeda’s global strategy is to work to radicalize Muslim citizens of other nations, and that appears to be the case, an inquiry is in everyone’s best interest, including Muslim American parents who would prefer not to see their sons grow up to be suicide bombers. It it proves that there is nothing going on, better yet.

The bigotry card was played in a similar manner by the Italian-American community when Congress investigated the Mafia decades ago. Growing up in the Boston area, where the Mafia was very active in the Fifties and Sixties, I was often treated to radio interviews of weeping leaders of Italian and Sicilian groups, who swore that the Mafia didn’t exist, and that it was an anti-Italian myth, a contention belied by the daily discovery of shady guys with Italian names hanging on meat hooks. I can certainly understand such defensiveness, but the denial of the possibility of a genuine problem was irresponsible. then as now. The fact that investigations of the Mafia caused some bigots to treat all Italians as criminals was unfortunate, but the remedy is to confront the real bigots, not to accuse those who want to hold legitimate investigations of being bigoted.

By the standards established by decades of Congressional hearings, King had more than adequate justification for his. Accusing him of discrimination or demonizing Muslims was and is unfair.

Self-promotion? That’s something else.

Which brings us back to Keith Ellison. We should give him a pass for leading the charge for offended American Muslims; after all, he is the only Muslim Congressman, and he should be expected to be the one to express their understandable discomfort with King’s investigation. During the Mafia hearings, several Italian-American representatives could be counted on to  complain that the hearings were smearing and denigrating millions of patriotic Italian-Americans; that’s politics as usual. His statement, however, had other problems.

To begin with, it was contradictory. Ellison was praising just one of the many 9-11 victims among the rescuers explicitly because he was a Muslim, then concluded with “his life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.” Well, who was doing that? Just Ellison, as far as I can see. And to what end? What does Mohammed Salman Hamdani have to do with the efforts of Islamic terrorist groups to radicalize Muslin-American youth? Not a thing. Ellison highlighted one of many casualties of an American tragedy as a Muslim to show that we shouldn’t define people as Muslims.

Now, if Ellison’s claim that people spread “false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim” had any validity, I understand. But many, including me, have tried to find evidence of Ellison’s conspiracy theory, and it just isn’t there. I had never heard of this guy, had you? I have not been able to find anyone who had heard of him. Ellison made it sound like rumors that he was part of the plot were burning up the blogosphere and media wires, that he was a Muslim Richard Jewell, robbed of the credit for heroism he earned by rumors and unfounded accusations. But the supposed conspiracy theory appears to have been derived from just one lone report, in the New York Post, a month after the attacks, regarding the fact that the FBI had investigated Hamdani, and even that was far from accusatory. I would expect the FBI to investigate any Muslim who was on the scene; being investigated is not an indictment.

Meanwhile, as Matthew Shaffer points out at the National Review On-line, Congress singled out Hamdani for praise—over and above the non-Muslim victims—when the Patriot Act was signed into law six weeks after the Trade Center fell:

“Many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have acted heroically during the attacks on the United States, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Pakistani descent, who is believed to have gone to the World Trade Center to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.”

Hardly proof of rampant and bigoted suspicion of a hero because of his Muslim faith. So, if Hamdani was not in fact unfairly maligned—and one New York Post article reporting that the FBI was doing its job does not indicate that he was, exactly why was Ellison crying? Was he crying because of the non-existent conspiracy theory that impugned this one man—because he that man was a Muslim like Ellison? The disgraceful conspiracy theories, still flourishing, that Jews were tipped off before the calamity and that the Bush administration engineered the attacks are genuinely tear-worthy: if Ellison is so lachrymose, why isn’t he shedding tears over these? Was he crying because Hamdani died? 3,000 Americans died that day: why is a Representative who is lecturing us about how ethnicity and religion don’t matter weeping about the death of one victim because of his ethnicity and religion?

Finally, there is reason to be skeptical any time a public figure weeps on camera. The ethical question, a close call, is whether this is acceptable theatrics, or dishonesty, and I have wavered in my opinion over the years. Tears are a powerful tool of persuasion, and politicians are advocates, just like lawyers. Clarence Darrow, the greatest trial lawyer of them all, could weep at will, and used his crocodile tears in many of his most effective closing arguments. Bill Clinton also has the crying skills of Sir Laurence Olivier, as did Ronald Reagan. Glenn Beck appears to also have this talent. Public speaking is performing: if we are going to condemn fake crying, we also have to rule out fake anger, indignation, fury, jubilation and sympathy. Today I’m willing to accept tears as ethical, though just barely, tools of the trade. Ask me again tomorrow.

And, of course, the tears may have been genuine.

The ethical problem with Keith Ellison’s tears was that they were shed over misrepresented  facts, using dubious values and priorities.

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* Note: Some commenters have noted that the real objection to King’s hearings arises from the Congressman’s long and open support of the Irish Republican Army, a terrorist organization. I regard this as a separate issue, unrelated to the validity of the hearings. It was absurd for Speaker Boehner to allow a Congressman with a record of encouraging foreign terrorists to chair the Homeland Security Commission, but once King became chairman, his duties involved looking at threats to national security. What was he supposed to do, sit in a closet doing penance for two years? He shouldn’t have the job at all, but he does have it, and his performance in it has to be assessed on the basis of what he does now, not what positions he held in 1988.