The United States has been lucky it has not experienced another incident similar to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., in a speech to AU students on Monday.
"This enemy - Islamic terrorism - is an adaptable enemy that can strike anywhere and everywhere," he said. "This is more threatening than the Soviet threat was."
King, whose speech at AU was sponsored by the College Republicans, also discussed the possibility of another terrorist attack in the United States and his work in Congress to prevent more from occurring.
"People forget how terrible 9/11 was," King said. "We have to do whatever we can to make sure it does not happen again."
Preventive measures, like the Patriot Act, are necessary to prevent another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, King said.
"We have to be lucky all the time - they have to be lucky once," he said.
College Republicans President Will Haun said he didn't think the threat of terrorism was going to recede in the near future.
"It's something we have to be reminded of constantly in order to continue the dialogues on solutions," he said.
It would be difficult to find al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, unless he turned himself in, and King's recent travels to Afghanistan proved how tough it would be to find anyone hiding there, he said. However, the United States still has to fight terrorists everywhere, King said.
"This is a fight for survival and, quite frankly, we have to kill them before they kill us," he said.
King, who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1993, endorsed racial profiling as a law enforcement tool in 2006 and proposed that people with Middle Eastern and South Asian descent go through additional security checks at airports. That same year, King also called on the Justice Department to investigate The New York Times, which he claimed violated the Espionage Act after publishing how the Bush administration tracked financial data through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
"This jeopardizes our relationship with other countries we have close ties with and who feel an even greater threat than we do," he said.
Students for Life President Steve Isaac, a sophomore in the School of International Service and School of Public Affairs, said he recently found out about King's position on racial profiling.
"I have questions about that, but I understand why our government would want to look more at Arabs," said Isaac, who is from Lebanon. "I agree with Peter King on the issue that the Muslim community should step up and speak out against terrorism. We need to be more outspoken as Arab-Americans against terrorism."
Meghan Dorsey, a freshman in SPA, said she thought some of King's ideas were valid.
"Congressman King was very interesting and had good points on national security, and I agree with him on [security] not being luck but prevention," she said.
