“Terror expert” Brigitte Gabriel used a slew of falsehoods, plus a dollop of pop psychology to blow the “secret Muslim” dog whistle on Fox News last night. Just like Steve Emerson’s claim that Birmingham, England is now “totally Muslim,” Gabriel again proved that Fox News cares more about incendiary soundbites than truth or credibility in its so-called experts.
Gabriel was there as part of yet another Fox effort to fear monger that we’re about to be slaughtered like Charlie Hebdo cartoonists because of President Obama’s semantics.
The pretext for this particular discussion was new video of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. According to Fox, the only significance of this video was how it was one more reason to attack President Obama’s word choices.
Gabriel got right to the hate mongering and fear mongering. She claimed that the reason Obama does not use the word “Islamic” to describe terrorism is because he is “on a mission to protect the image of Islam.” Of course, host Shannon Bream didn’t challenge that assertion.
Gabriel continued:
…Protecting the image of Islam is very important to him because he was born into the Muslim faith, raised by a devout Muslim father in an Islamic country whom he idealized and he feels he does not want to give a bad image to Islam. And he’s more concerned about protecting the image of Islam than protecting the people of the United States.
Bream partly corrected the record but in a way that still validated Gabriel: “Brigitte, to be clear, he had very little contact with his father but we know he grew up all over the world and has different viewpoints maybe than the average American would have.”
It was Alan Colmes, the other guest, who correctly pointed out that Obama’s father was an atheist.
Colmes continued with a nice pushback on the meme: “Those words should not be used together. It’s not Islamic,” Colmes said. He quoted the brother of the Muslim police officer who was killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, who said “Islam is a religion of peace” and that the attackers were “false Muslims.”
Colmes added:
To say that this is Islamic or that this is Muslim would be the same thing as saying that Christians who kill people at abortion clinics are representing Christianity. That’s not Christian when you act like that. You are not acting in the name of any faith. You may think you are, you may use those words, but that’s not Christianity and this is not Islam.
Gabriel insisted, however, that terrorists “have not hijacked the Koran” but are “following in the footsteps of Prophet Mohammed.” She contended, “The sooner we can recognize this reality and have the courage to utter those words and deal with the problem, the sooner we win this fight.”
Besides being too eager to smear Obama to check her facts, there’s no reason to consider Gabriel a credible expert any more than Emerson. Gabriel’s own website offers not a single credential in the field of either terrorism or national security – other than her own say so and the fact that she wrote books with such Islamophobic titles as “Because They Hate” and “They Must Be Stopped.”
But I have no doubt Gabriel will be back in Fox’s expert chair in the near future.
Watch it below, from last night’s The Kelly File.
N — NAZI
N — NEWS
C — CHANNEL
Always remember this scooter: IF IT WALKS LIKE A NAZI, TALKS LIKE A NAZI, AND ACTS LIKE A NAZI……well, I definitely believe you’re smart enough to figure out the rest.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/13/glenn_greenwald_on_how_to_be