Juan Williams all but told Sean Hannity that he was deliberately race baiting Thursday night (4/12/12) when Hannity yet again fixated on comments that the black fringe group, the New Black Panther Party, has made regarding the Trayvon Martin shooting. Williams said, “To me, the attention you’re giving this group is playing to a stereotype. This is like a minstrel show about ignorant, angry, threatening black people.”

The segment began with Hannity playing another clip from the NBPP and then making a show of concern about the “incendiary rhetoric.” As if Hannity hasn’t made an entire career out of his own incendiary, often racialized rhetoric.

He then used his “concern” as an excuse to paint Attorney General Eric Holder as somehow soft on black crime.

Williams told Hannity, “I find this sort of like a comic book that I’m locked in. That New Black Panther Party, they are infinitesimally small. They’re not worthy of your attention. The only reason they exist is to get in front of a TV camera, even the real Black Panthers want no part of them.”

His voice dripping with sanctimony, or what I like to call “Hanctimony,” Hannity said, “This is too important a question. They have been out publicly… They have said they put a bounty, ‘wanted dead or alive,’ on the head of George Zimmerman. They’ve talked about race wars, they’ve used racial slurs, and racial language and anti-Semitic language, and you’re saying to me that this should all be ignored and that the Attorney General should just allow people to put bounties on people’s head? …You believe that’s acceptable?”

Williams said there are more right-wing Nazi groups “hiding in the woods of Idaho, with automatic weapons, by tens and thousands (Hannity started to interrupt) than there are New Black Panthers.”

Williams didn’t come right out and ask Hannity why he obsesses on the New Black Panthers while ignoring the Nazi groups but the question was implicit. Instead, Williams added, “They are just full of bluster and talk and nonsense and…”

Hannity interrupted, with even more Hanctimony. “And what if you’re wrong? …If you put a bounty on somebody’s head, you should be arrested!”

In fact, the NBPP member who put that bounty on the head of Zimmerman HAS been arrested. It happened in late March. But it’s a testament to Hannity’s lack of interest in anything other than promoting his racialized agenda against Holder (and President Obama) that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

Williams shot back, “To me, the attention you’re giving this group is playing to a stereotype. This is like a minstrel show about ignorant, angry, threatening black people and it doesn’t excuse any of the racism that’s…”

Hannity turned to his designated African American black-attacker for the segment, Niger Innis. Sure enough, Innis took the bait. “It is a very sensitive situation down there and the Attorney General should send a signal that neither extremist element is welcome, that the wheels of justice are turning… I’m sick and tired of these political hacks and these racial racketeers who are targeting the National Rifle Association and doing it using the gravestone of Trayvon Martin.”

It's a testament to Innis' complicity with Hannity that he didn't notice or care about how Hannity has been using the case.

By the way, as the conversation proceeded, check out “Hannity for the defense” (who never completed college) declaring that an eyewitness' claim Trayvon Martin had beaten George Zimmerman was “consistent with the injuries that were incurred.”

Also, I’ve taken to noting how Hannity loves to show off his elitism at the same time that he pretends to be a regular guy. In this case, he drops into the discussion, apropos of nothing, that he interviewed George Zimmerman’s father.