King: America at war with radical Islam

U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, said he’s been “turning up” his own focus on national defense and security in the wake of what he sees as alarming events.

“I believe that we are at war with radical Islam,” King said. “They’ve declared that war against us. They keep announcing they’re at war against us. We should take them at their word. Eventually, we’re going to have to have defeat that ideology.” During a wide-ranging discussion at a western Iowa development gathering King introduced the national-security topic, saying it is of grave importance to all Americans.

The Republican congressman said it is not impossible for the United States and its allies to defeat an ideology, citing victories over Japanese imperialism, Italian fascism, German Nazism and the Soviet Union’s form of communism in the last century.

“It’s not going to be something that’s a cold war victory,” King said. “Or it’s not going to be something that I think is a conventional war victory, which we demonstrated in the Second World War.”

The approach will involve shutting off radical Islamic groups’ ability to interact and recruit on the Internet as well their money supply and educational system. King is encouraged at prospects of the United States working with moderate Muslim nations, “Egypt in particular.”

King said he had friends among the 200 people who were at the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas, the location of an attempted terror attack recently linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

King invited Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who, according to CNN, has sought to outlaw the Quran and who has called Islam “the ideology of a retarded culture,” to Capitol Hill.

“I had invited him to come to the states and organized four events for him the previous week,” King said at the Iowa development session.

“One of them was an outdoor press conference we knew was a high-security issue.”

Wilders was also the keynote speaker at the targeted event in Texas, King said.

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On other issues:

• King said he supports eliminating the estate “death” tax. “The tax, to me, is offensive to the American dream,” King said.

• The congressman supports the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and the creation in its place of a national retail consumption tax.

• King said there is a method to his own unpredictability. “There’s power in being an enigma — if they don’t know how you’re going to react,” King said.

• The congressman commented on The Des Moines Water Works lawsuit to force 10 so-called “drainage districts” in Sac, Calhoun and Buena Vista counties to obtain permits and limit pollution that escapes the districts, which are composed primarily of farmland.

Water Works monitored the water that flowed from the fields for many months last year and found its nitrogen compounds regularly exceeded the federal limit for safe drinking water. Water Works provides drinking water to about 500,000 customers in the Des Moines metro area. It draws water from the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers and is forced to remove the nitrates when their concentration exceeds a federally mandated threshold.

King trained some of his own rhetorical fire at Water Works Chief Executive Bill Stowe over the municipal entity’s own discharge of nitrates.“I’d have a hard time living in that glass house and throwing stones,” King said. CV

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who resides in Carroll. He and his family own and publish newspapers in Carroll, Jefferson and other neighboring communities.