It's no surprise at all that the congressional hearings called last week by the Congressman Peter King to look into real or imagined radicalization in the nation's Muslim community would cause a stir in the Irish-American community, most especially that part of it most devoted to politics.

Peter King is well-suited to being a congressman. Republicans, Democrats, and independents have voted him back to Capitol Hill time and again from his Long Island district.

The GOP representative is no diplomat, however. Wording is important when you are dealing with an issue as sensitive as that which was argued by, and before, the King-chaired Homeland Security Committee.

The way King presented his case had more that an whiff of Napoleonic Code about it – that is guilty until proven innocent. Coming at the issue from the other side, that of American jurisprudence, would have raised fewer hackles.

That would have been to say that the American-Muslim Community is part of our greater American community, innocent in every way but arguably under threat from people who don't care a whit how they manipulate young and impressionable minds. So how do we protect our young people who happen to be Muslim, just as we might have tried to protect kids from being sucked into the vortex of violence that for so long crippled the wee North?

Anyway, too late now. The genie is out of the bottle and King, no stranger to taking his lumps, has taken quiet a few, some of them from people who have long seen eye to eye with him, at least in the context of the Irish peace process.

One such is attorney Brian O'Dwyer, a Democrat, yes, but a man whose interests in the Irish peace would tend to intersect with that of King who, of course, is now also chairman of the Friends of Ireland in Congress.

As the Daily News noted in a report last week, on March 13, 1995, O' Dwyer and King sat together as Gerry Adams addressed the New York States Senate and Assembly in Albany.

"Peter should look at his history books, and remember our people. There were days and years when Irish Americans were stigmatized, they said we were all terrorists. It took many years to overcome that stigma," O'Dwyer told the News.

"We got the same criticism from the British government that Irish Americans were not doing enough to combat terrorism. I think this is really unfortunate, it's the exact same issue we faced in the 1980s and early '90s," he said.

Which is not to say that Irish America is somehow pure as the driven snow, but there's no doubt that you have to be conscious of the width of your brush when you start talking about an entire community.