Refreshing to see a Republican willing to stand up and not be bullied by CAIR and the left into ignoring the problem of radical Islam.

Washington (AP) — The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is pressing forward with his public examination of Muslim extremism in America, pointing to his first, tense hearing on the subject as a step toward desensitizing a taboo topic and rooting out terrorists on U.S. soil.

“There’s an elephant in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. We talked about it today,” King said after the four-hour, emotion-filled session Thursday.

Just holding the conversation, he said, advanced the fight against al-Qaida’s efforts to recruit one-man terrorist cells from within American Muslim communities and to suppress any effort to report those activities to law enforcement officials. King next will turn to the issue of Muslim extremism in American prisons in hearings planned later this year.

“I remain convinced that these hearings must go forward — and they will,” King said as he opened Thursday’s session.

But the conversation — a government examination of one religion in the U.S. — is fraught with distrust and political pandering that reflect the nation’s ongoing struggle against terrorism nearly a decade after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.