Bill Cosby wrote an op-ed recently that you would think Fox News would have praised, slobbered over even. It offered up harsh criticism of African Americans’ “apathy” over drug use in their own community. He even admonished them for being harsher on white drug pushers than their own. Instead, the Hannity show seized on one paragraph in which Cosby praised the clean living of Black Muslims. So out came Muslim-hater Allen West to call Cosby crazy.
Here’s what Cosby wrote in an editorial in the New York Post, a sister company to Fox News.
I’m a Christian. But Muslims are misunderstood. Intentionally misunderstood. We should all be more like them. They make sense, especially with their children. There is no other group like the Black Muslims, who put so much effort into teaching children the right things, they don’t smoke, they don’t drink or overindulge in alcohol, they protect their women, they command respect. And what do these other people do?
They complain about them, they criticize them. We’d be a better world if we emulated them. We don’t have to become black Muslims, but we can embrace the things that work.
But in the hate or be-hated world of Fox News, that was way too respectful. So respectful that Sean Hannity overlooked a message he normally promotes in order to smear Cosby. West is not only known as an over-the-top hate monger, he had already responded hostilely to Cosby’s editorial. So Hannity and his producers knew exactly what they were getting when they called on West to respond – without benefit of any balance to defend the critique.
Hannity began the discussion with, “Tell me why you felt the need to respond,” thereby deliberately opening up the floodgates for West to spew a catalog of Muslim cruelty and crimes (as if we couldn’t cherry pick examples of brutality and savagery by Christians). For extra Fox News hate-mongering points, West worked in a swipe at the Obama administration.
I guess Cosby didn’t realize he needed to clear his views on Islam with a Fox News contributor who was forced to resign from the military for his mistreatment of an Iraqi prisoner and who called our Attorney General “a bigger threat” than Al Qaeda. Yeah, he’s got all the credibility Cosby needs.
Faux Spews Channel pundits remind me of school on Memorial Day: NO CLASS!
:^)
Which brings me to what I took from this: How much of this felt like “black” was a stronger key word than “Muslim?” Because it felt that way to me, and I can’t even explain how they did it. It just felt like they cashed in on one bigotry to employ another in code.
