Daniel Pipes: Hagee Is A Patriot, Not An Extremist
Reported by Ellen - June 8, 2008 -
In another blatant attempt to tarnish Barack Obama, Hannity & Colmes (still ignoring the stock market plunge and oil price soar), devoted a segment on Friday night, 6/6/08, to the fact that British politican George Galloway, as Sean Hannity put it in his scripted introduction, the “anti-war politician who is accused of having ties to Saddam Hussein, praised Senator Barack Obama in a recent interview with HAMAS TV” (Hannity’s emphasis). But right-wing zionist guest Daniel Pipes may have gone a bit too far when, in his zeal to favorably compare John McCain, Pipes sang the praises of McCain-endorser Pastor John Hagee. With video.
The FOX News agenda can be seen right on its page with the video which they titled suggestively, “Terrorism Troubles? Anti-war activist with alleged ties to Saddam Hussein endorses Obama.”
The choice of Pipes as the guest is telling, too. He’s a former member of the Bush administration whom Sourcewatch describes as “identifying and denouncing what he sees as radical Muslim penetration of American institutions.” But none of Pipes’ leanings were provided to the audience of the “We report, you decide” network. Hannity introduced Pipes with the innocuous and impartial-sounding title, "director of the Middle East Forum."
Pipes said that Galloway is “just one of a whole sequence of extremists who are coming out and not quite endorsing but showing their enthusiasm and saying what a great president Barack Obama would be.” Pipes declared Obama so left-wing as to be unprecedented in a serious presidential candidate.
Hannity complained, “It’s sort of like everyone’s in a hypnotic trance... The media is so in the tank for Barack Obama, it’s almost like the MoveOn media. He’s got like 10,000 press secretaries out there writing articles, doing reports.”
Once again Hannity has distorted his facts. The Project For Excellence in Journalism recently found:
The trajectory of the coverage, however, began to turn against Obama, and did so well before questions surfaced about his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Shortly after Clinton criticized the media for being soft on Obama during a debate, the narrative about him began to turn more skeptical—and indeed became more negative than the coverage of Clinton herself. What’s more, an additional analysis of more general campaign topics suggests the Obama narrative became even more negative later in March, April and May.Think Progress futher noted, “[n]o other story line came close to attracting as much coverage as the Wright-Obama association, and most of it was negative.” Obama’s so-called “bitter” comments was the third most-covered story.
During his portion of the interview, Alan Colmes asked, “Why aren’t you holding John McCain responsible for being endorsed by John Hagee? He had to retract the endorsement, a guy who said that Hitler was sent by God to hunt Jews, who offended Catholics, he had to apologize for that. By Rod Parsley who said that Islam is an anti-Christ religion? Why don’t you apply the same standard to those who endorse John McCain? ...He sought their endorsements.”
Pipes said, “But. But. But, (Hagee) is someone who is not at the extremes of American life, who is dealing with and close to or endorsed by those who hate the United States. This is someone who’s a patriot.”
Colmes replied, “Wait, wait. You don’t call Hagee – someone who says (Hitler) was sent by God to move the Jews to Israel – you don’t call that an extreme positiion?”
“No, I don’t call that at all,” Pipes said. “(Hagee) is working within the mainstream of American political life. He is a serious and important actor in the pro-Israel movement. And I might add that I’ll be speaking for him next month at his conference.”
Colmes continued, “And he says New Orleans got what it deserved because they were gonna have a gay rally and then Katrina happened. That’s not an extreme position?”
Pipes shook his head. “A lot of things I don’t agree with. But these are not people who hate, he is not someone who hates the United States.”
