Fox News’ Eric Bolling Chastises Guest, Says “It’s About Time” Muslims Condemn ISIS
Tuesday night, Eric Bolling was guest-hosting The O’Reilly Factor, probably because he is a lot like the blowhard namesake of the show. He has no problem being a little loose with the facts. Tromping over the other speakers. And generally coming across as an ass.
On this show, one of the segments featured two representatives of the Muslim community. One was Osama Siblani representing the Arab-American News, and speaking in favor of the people who had made an announcement condemning extremism and starting an outreach effort to stop young Muslims from joining ISIS. Unfortunately, since the host and the other guest, Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, didn’t think they went far enough, they ganged up on this man.
The first comment “It’s about time” should have been a red flag, but Mr. Siblani answered tactfully saying that they have been addressing the issue for a long time but you are finally listening. Of course, Mr. Bolling had to up the ante and say that they pay close attention to the Muslims and they haven’t heard it before.
It didn’t take long for the host to bring up some info spun wrongly in the typical Fox News fashion though. He mentioned a recent Pew Research poll and got the numbers approximately right, they were a little high, but within reasonable ranges, but then he mentions a Gallup poll and inflates the numbers of Muslims in the country dramatically. Instead of having 2.75 million, they went to having 300 million, which is just about the total number or people in the country.
However, he only mentioned these polls so he could defame Muslims. In this poll, it had a section mentioning suicide bombings and how many thought it was justified. Though the numbers of Muslims around the world who think this is justified has actually dropped since the last time this was asked, Mr. Bolling had to bring it up because it said that 8% of American Muslims believed it was sometimes (7%) or often (1%) justified against civilians. That just plays right along with the Fox News Islamophobic theme.
No one I know of agrees with this sort of violence against innocents, but to say that followers of the Christian religion don’t advocate the same sort of things are delusional. One only has to look at the issue of abortion to see very similar parallels. Just ask Troy Newman what he thinks should happen to the doctors and providers of abortions. He would be very happy to kill them all, and so would his followers. By the way, he has endorsed Rafael (Ted) Cruz for President.
All I can say is stop demonizing one religion without truly examining your own. It’s sad that even if you think a group doesn’t quite go far enough in your estimation to curb the worst aspects of their religion, that just because you don’t share their creed you feel justified in denigrating them. You can say day in and day out that American Imam’s haven’t been preaching against the evils of terrorism, but you’re wrong as usual.
