'Islamic Radicals Programmed and Trained My Son to Kill' — Melvin Bledsoe Testimony at House Homeland Security Committee Hearings on Radicalization

Mr. Bledsoe's testimony is here: "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response."

It's riveting. And almost heartbreaking to hear how Mr. Bledsoe pleaded with his son, at 2:40 minutes, "not to take Dr. King's picture off the wall." That of course is not in line with the progressive narrative, I'll tell you. Kinda sad, when you think about it, how lamestream Democrats hijacked the hearings and thus effectively drowned out the messages of people like Mr. Bledsoe. Truth is the new hate speech, so look for the Bledsoe family to be sold up the river by the nihilist left. LAT has the story, "Hearings on U.S. Muslims Stir Passions":

Melvin Bledsoe, speaking in his deep Tennessee accent at a long-awaited House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the domestic radicalization of U.S. Muslims, said his son Carlos "was captured by people best described as hunters" after he converted to Islam.

"He was manipulated and lied to," Bledsoe said, recalling the events that preceded his son's arrest in an attack on an Army recruiting station and the death of a soldier.

His testimony that his son was radicalized by Muslims in Tennessee bolstered assertions by committee Chairman Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) that more needs to be done to investigate radical U.S. Muslims and convince Islamic leaders they must cooperate with authorities.

But prosecutors in Little Rock, Ark., where the 2009 shooting occurred, tell a different story. They believe Carlos Bledsoe, now known as Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, was radicalized while abroad in Yemen, where he spent time with extremists in jail, and they have not charged him with terrorism. Rather, he likely will go to trial later this year on a state charge of capital murder.

That dispute symbolized the divide at the hearing, the first in a series that critics of King — Democrats on the panel as well as leading Muslim officials — said could exacerbate the problem of homegrown terrorism rather than help end it.

A defiant King said after the hearing that he had "broken down a wall of political correctness on an issue that needs to be addressed." At the beginning, he blasted his many critics, saying they had engaged in "paroxysms of rage and hysteria."

The Times reports that prosecutors say Carlos Bledsoe was not in fact "radicalized" in the U.S., but instead in Yemen, although it's been something of a revolving door, so that sounds like a distinction without a difference. Either way, listen to the testimony. Mr. Bledsoe is acompelling figure.

RELATED: At New York Post, "Dad reveals his torment over son's 'brainwash' by Islamists: Warns House panel of recruiting by Muslim 'hunters'." And, "The mindless left still won't face the truth."

Betty Friedan famously wrote about "the problem that has no name." Decades later, domestic Islamic radicalism bids fair to become the new nameless problem, at least if the left gets its way.

The outraged reaction to Rep. Peter King's hearings into the radicalization of the domestic Muslim community was so mindless, it bordered on a collective self-lobotomy. If the congressional committee devoted to homeland security -- which held hearings on "The Future of FEMA's Grant Programs Directorate" among sundry other topics during the past two years -- can't examine why some Muslims born and raised in the United States wage war on their own country, we might as well turn off the lights on our common culture.