2013-01-03 15:05:23 -0500

Joshua, please try to calm yourself a bit here. Saying that you “couldn’t care less” about Fox News and then calling people liars is not an indication of a calm and unemotional discussion.



Regarding the “All terrorists are Muslims” comment, and regarding Bill O’Reilly’s unfortunate statement on “The View”, you immediately fell into the semantic pitfall I was trying to have you avoid. Having watched the segment of “The View” again, I agree – O’Reilly didn’t say “The Muslims”. But he did say “Muslims killed us on 9/11” and it was as a direct support of his position that a mosque should not be allowed to be built. You can parse that one all you want, but you can’t talk your way out of the serious issue that this statement presents. As for Brian Kilmeade’s really scary statement of “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims”, your attempted defense of it is truly puzzling. Do you not understand that this isn’t just an untrue statement, but an offensive one?



As for your attempted false dilemma of what to say about Muslims who condem the actions of the extremists who committed terror attacks on 9/11, that’s an irrelevant question. Of course there are Muslims who are disgusted by murderous behavior – by anyone, but particularly by people who purport to represent their faith and do not. By the same idea, there are plenty of Baptists who will condemn the Westboro Baptists for their behavior too. Doesn’t make any of them bigots. It means that they are morally disgusted by the behavior of a few arrogant people who insist they are speaking for an entire religion or even for a diety. And Muslims who condemn the 9/11 attackers are joined by people of every other faith who condemned them as murderers. That’s not the same thing as Brian Kilmeade saying that all the terrorists are Muslims, or as Bill O’Reilly trying to defend a bigoted position with a statement that was so outrageous that it motivated people to walk off the set of The View.



By the way, if you actually watch the O’Reilly clip, you’ll see that it wasn’t just what he said that caused the problem. It was how he did it. He wasn’t just calmly, dispassionately opining “You know, Muslims killed us on 9/11, and let’s discuss that…” He was yelling at the women on the couch with him, trying to shout them down while he ranted about the mosque. There’s a bit of a difference between the two thoughts, as I’m sure you’ll understand.



Regarding your apparent non-perception of the bigotry on display at Fox News, you really should look at the archives of this site, as well as at the archives at various other sites that keep track of this stuff – particularly Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. If you don’t see the problem of Sean Hannity’s repeated, angry declamations of “these people want to kill us!”, if you don’t see a problem with a network repeatedly bringing on and spotlighting people like Ed Klein and Wayne Allyn Root, if you don’t see the nastiness regularly being stated by Michelle Malkin and Monica Crowley on the network, then perhaps you may want to think about whether you’re in agreement with their statements and behavior. This isn’t a matter of just having controversial guests. This is a matter of bringing these people on and encouraging them in their beliefs or rehabilitating them when they get into trouble.



Do you think it’s just a coincidence that Fox News repeatedly has had Donald Trump on, and that he has repeatedly stated hateful and untrue things about the President with little or no challenge? Do you think it’s just a coincidence that when the immigration matter is discussed, Fox News almost always backgrounds that with the same two stock shots of people climbing over border walls sometime in the past 20 years? (Thomas is correct to note that they did this during the DREAM Act discussion, but they also do this whenever the general issue is discussed on Hannity or O’Reilly.)



You state that having extremists guests on like various preachers who have said offensive things, or having various “experts” who have said offensive things on or off the air doesn’t mean that Fox News supports those positions. But that’s not the issue. Fox News supports the people holding those positions, and by giving them a regular soapbox on which to appear, they validate what those people stand for. Between that, and the many comments that do get made on the air, you have the “dog whistle” of the right signals being sent out to the people watching the programming. You must be able to see that Fox having multiple people on discussing President Obama’s birth certificate as a serious issue sends a reinforcing message to viewers who are disposed to think him illegitimate. You must be able to see that Fox repeatedly having John Sununu go on the air and call the President unintelligent and lazy sends a reinforcing message to viewers disposed to think that. Viewers who weren’t pre-disposed to think that start to believe that these are legitimate questions to be asked rather than crank questions formed not from logic but from anger.



Regarding your comment about “union thuggery”, I strongly recommend you actually research the issue. The Fox News and right wing position is that unions are thugs and that we don’t need them. This flies completely in the face of the history of unions in this country. Without unions, you get the race to the bottom we’ve been seeing across the world, and you’d never have seen workers earn the right to a decent workweek, decent pay and decent benefits. You talk about people being forced to join a union, without mentioning that even in businesses where the union membership is stated as compulsory, it’s entirely possible for people to opt out via financial core. The reason why the union is covering all the workers in that business is to give them a unified voice to be able to receive a living wage, a pension, a health plan, etc. Under your scenario of the workers opting out completely, those workers would be working for much less, making a significantly worse living and undercutting all the other employees. Of course, your idea of “thuggery” might be the edited videos presented by right wing comedian Steven Crowder when he went to Michigan to provoke union demonstrators. In that case, you could look at the longer videos put up by other people at the same event to see the problem with his version of events.



The comments you quote from the Muslim Canadian Congress are their opinion, and they are entitled to have them. But not all Muslims agree with them – and I’m sure there are many people who would have issue with the sinister comment made about possible Saudi involvement with the mosque. That statement, about the mosque being a “slap in the face of Americans” if there is any Saudi funding, would seem to imply that ALL Saudis are responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and not just the murderers who planned and executed them. (And this is the implication made when the idea is brought up on Fox News) And that takes us back to where we started in this part of the thread. If you believe that it would be incorrect to hold the entire religion responsible for the actions of a few extremists, then why do you think it is acceptable to quote a statement that holds an entire nation responsible for the same thing?