Fox host Laura Ingraham won tonight’s “Make Any Story About Benghazi” award when she suggested Benghazi was partly to blame for the recent kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls. For extra Fox News credit, regular guest Zuhdi Jasser attacked John Kerry, too. To listen to Jasser and Ingraham, you might think the Obama administration was almost the sole cause of the Nigerian kidnapping and all other Islamic radicalism.
Ingraham claimed to find the Nigerian kidnappings story heartbreaking. But as The O’Reilly Factor host tonight, she paired it with the rather irrelevant and trivial news that “Hollywood elites” are boycotting hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei because of his anti-woman and anti-gay laws. The real topic of the discussion, as she put it in her scripted introduction, was “Is this latest clash of civilizations exposing the true face of Islam?”
What she really meant, though, was, “Is Islam exposing the true face of the Obama administration?”
The choice of Jasser as a guest guaranteed a virulently anti-Islamic and right-wing perspective. Jasser quickly went after the Obama administration - even though they are only tangentially involved in the Nigeria story and, judging from Fox's reporting here, not at all in the Brunei boycott.
Jasser complained that Secretary of State Kerry “just gave a speech in Ethiopia, didn’t use the word ‘Islamism,’ didn’t talk about Islamic radicalism. This administration has no strategy. …We let radicalism fester.”
Apparently, that made Ingraham think of Benghazi:
I think part of the problem here is that we have a dead American ambassador - we have no one in custody. Not to go back to Benghazi, but we’ve no one in custody …anywhere in this investigation, as far as I could tell.
And now, people are saying, “Well, what are you going to do about these young girls? You gotta do something!" And believe me, our heart breaks for all of this horrific violence against religious minorities – Christians, Catholic priests being murdered during the middle of mass, Syrian Christians, Coptic Christians, they’re being decimated… But what do we do at this point? I mean, we’ve sent a message to the world that you can kill a U.S. ambassador and - it looks like - get away with it!
Her other guest, Harris Zafar, added, “To your point, when the extremists have free reign and they don’t feel the proper push back, then they will keep pushing the envelope.” However, he did add that mosques and Muslims and non-Christians have also been victims of radical ideologues.
Jasser, who got way more time than the seemingly more moderate Zafar, got the last word as well as the first. This time, Jasser worked in a swipe at Al Gore. “We aren’t addressing the problem, we keep addressing the symptom. …Where were they (Hollywood activists) when Al Gore …took a half a billion from Qatar because they bought his station? ...We’ve been ignoring the bigger problem (of) Islamism and political Islam. It’s a much bigger tumor, it’s an ideology that we need to confront.”
So let’s see, Fox has used the White House Correspondents Dinner and climate change to talk about Benghazi this week and now this. What do you think is next? The NBA and Donald Sterling? Monica Lewinsky? Share your predictions in our comments section.
The main ethnic group that’s been targeted are the Oromo (who make up about 40% of Ethiopia’s population). The Oromo, as a whole, are largely Muslim but Christians comprise nearly as much of the Oromo population (by some counts, Christians have a slight edge). But even with the Oromo, they’re not completely united in terms of politics—some Oromo were part of the Marxist-era Revolutionary Council while others fought against the Marxist government.
But overall, why would Kerry inject a topic that really doesn’t play a part in the country’s day-to-day reality? There haven’t been any known “Islamic attacks” against Ethiopia (leaving aside the conflicts with the neighboring Muslim states of Eritrea and Somalia), much less any “Islamic-sponsored terrorist” actions. Of course, that’s par for the course for US radical right-wingers: Make everything about “Islamic radicals” and ignore the “Christian radicals” in THIS country.
That was quite a stretch, even for Laura.J
This broad talks about war on women. She should here what conservative men say about her.