After a week of being gratuitously demonized on Fox News – and elsewhere by the right wing – it was reported yesterday that Bowe Bergdahl’s family has received death threats and is receiving security. 

From Reuters:

The first of the death threats sent to Bob Bergdahl at his home near Hailey, Idaho, was received on Wednesday, the same day the city canceled a planned rally celebrating the release of his son, Hailey Police Chief Jeff Gunter said.

“There were four specific emails with death threats given to the FBI and they are looking into it,” Gunter told Reuters in an interview.

Authorities are providing security to Bob Bergdahl and his wife, Jani, but Gunter declined to elaborate on those measures.

This after Fox News deliberately and repeatedly set out to demonize Bergdahl’s father as anti-American, based on nothing more than speculation:

• Bill O’Reilly: He has learned to speak Pashto the language of the Taliban. And looks like a Muslim. He’s also somewhat sympathetic to Islam, actually thanking Allah right in front of the president.

• Fox News’ Ralph Peters: The final straw for the men and women in uniform was when they saw that Rose Garden pageant of craziness where, you know, Pops Taliban and his beard and his remarks in Pashto.

• Sean Hannity to guest Brigitte Gabriel: “What that father was saying in the Rose Garden - …Walid (Shoebat) is suggesting he was declaring the Muslim victory call …He calls it the ‘war cry of Allah.’ Is that what that is, when he said that?”

• Brigitte Gabriel’s response: “It is the war cry of Allah.”

• Donald Trump complained the father’s tweets were “really, like, anti-American.”

• Sean Hannity to Bowe Bergdahl’s friend: What is your reaction when you hear the father praising Allah in the Rose Garden and wanting more Gitmo detainees – terrorists who killed Americans -  freed?

Shades of Dr. Tiller, eh?

The disgusting thing is that with the exception of Peters, none of these people have served in the military, much less had a son held captive for five years (though Gabriel was injured as a child during a bombing in Lebanon).

On CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley today, retired General James Mattis, former commander of U.S. Central Command, who has kept in touch with the family throughout their son’s captivity, noted how awful it is for them to be undergoing this new, needless and unwarranted suffering in the wake of all they’ve already endured:

Well, these are two salt-of-the-earth people. They’re regular old Americans.



I think most of us got over judging people by the length of their hair by about 1975 in this country. They have been through an extremely coercive experience. 



Just think where you and I have been, Candy, for the last four or five years and thinking of every day in their position, wondering if they’re going to get that knock on the door saying that this enemy has killed their son. 



So you can imagine what it’s like to have gone through something like this for them, and I think a certain amount of compassion is appropriate for a family that’s been through this.

It’s time for Fox News to dredge up any sense of decency it may have hidden in its closet and put it to work.