Pete King is getting a lot of flack for the direction his planned hearings on homegrown Muslim radicalization have taken. But one aspect of the hearings that should be getting more attention–and credit–than it is concerns the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is “essential,” King told me recently, that we discuss the Muslim Brotherhood’s impact on American Islamic institutions and what King calls the “overimportance” of the organization in the Muslim community.

The official reason for the hearings is two-fold. First, King explains, they are to:

“Inform the entire country of the threat that we face from Islamic terrorism within. Al-Qaeda has altered its policies because it realized it is very difficult to attack from the outside. So they are recruiting Muslim Americans living legally in our country. And this is a change which has evolved over the last several years, and there’s any number of recent cases–Zazi in New York, Major Hassan, Shahzad in Times Square–where we have al-Qaeda or their affiliates recruiting Muslim Americans living in this country.”

The second part to the hearings has to do with the perceived lack of cooperation that U.S. law enforcement agencies are up against when they try to solve cases in the Muslim community:

“Unfortunately when I meet with law enforcement, they tell me this almost uniformly, they get very little cooperation from the Muslim community. The Muslim community is not cooperating with us, even though their own people are being recruited to fight against the country.”

The Brotherhood, however, is one of the reasons law enforcement faces this obstacle. Its affiliates, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, push a “no snitching” policy on members of the Muslim community.

CAIR is far from the only powerful Brotherhood affiliate that serves as an umbrella group for Muslims here. Founded in 1928 by Egyptian teacher Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood (also known as the Ikhwan) is an Islamist group that works toward the establishment of Shariah law in each country in which it has a chapter–now in 70 countries worldwide.

The Brotherhood seeks to act as a chameleonic organization, taking the form of the most socially acceptable subversion of the existing political and social order. In some countries, this means supporting violence. In others, such as the U.S., it means establishing ethnic pressure groups under the rubric of progressive multiculturalism.

Since the 1960s, it has been building such institutions as: CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the American Muslim Council (AMC), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA).

The IIIT works as a Brotherhood think tank in Virginia, established by current Malaysian opposition leader and noted anti-Semite Anwar Ibrahim.

Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, told me that the hearings can bring to public attention information that experts already know. “CAIR was created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States,” he said, matter-of-factly. But few people know the connection or what it means for how CAIR operates. “You need to delegitimize these organizations and expose them for what they are.”

Emerson says the Muslim Brotherhood should “absolutely” be named as a terrorist organization–though he conceded it would be difficult to pin that on the Brotherhood affiliates who, he says, do warn Muslims off from working with the FBI, as King alleges. He said at the very least officials from Brotherhood affiliates cannot be allowed to continue their cozy relationships with the U.S. government.

That means radical preachers like Anwar al-Awlaki need to stop showing up at prayer services on Capitol Hill, and Hamas operatives like Kifah Mustapha cannot be welcomed into the FBI’s Citizens’ Academy, Emerson says. “It sanitizes them. It would be the equivalent of sending a KKK official overseas or letting a KKK official go to Citizens’ Academy.”

King says this is all part of saying publicly–or getting others to say publicly–what officials know privately. The unwillingness of the Obama administration to name Islamic terrorism as a threat hampers American security efforts, even if the administration has kept many features of the Bush administration’s war on terror in place.

“The administration has to stop being schizophrenic,” King says.

King added that Obama’s nomination of James Cole to be deputy attorney general is another troubling sign of this inconsistency:

“Here’s a person who basically trivialized the attacks of 9/11 and put them in the same category as drug deals and gangs … and he is such a strong advocate of civilian trials for al-Qaeda defendants. To me, it shows that on the one hand, the administration is, I think, way off course on issues such as that. Holder still wants to have the 9/11 trials in New York. On the other hand, when it comes to the Patriot Act, when it comes to interrogations, when it actually comes to closing Guantanamo, the president is deserving and keeping many of the Bush policies.”

The recent criticism of King’s hearings aside, if he indeed does take on the Muslim Brotherhood the lesson to the left–and the administration especially–will be: watch and learn.