Short of coming out and saying, “So what?” Megyn Kelly could not have been more contemptuous to the plight of her Arab guest who said his group has seen a big increase in hate mail and threats from people who have seen American Sniper.
Kelly’s disdain was evident right in her introduction when she mistakenly identified her guest’s group as a “Muslim civil rights group” when it’s an Arab civil rights group.
Guest Samer Khalaf, of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, corrected her, noting, “We’re secular, in fact I myself am an Arab Christian.”
Rather than apologize for wrongly assuming that Arabs must be Muslims, Kelly sounded defensive as she said, “You call yourself an Arab civil rights organization.” As if that implied “Muslim.”
Khalaf said he had noticed “a tripling” of “hate-type mail,” some if it threatening violence and others “just your usual hate.”
Kelly immediately suggested that Khalaf was overblowing the threats: “When you say it’s tripled, I mean, just give us a feel. Do you normally get, you know, three a month and now you have nine or are we talking about dozens?”
“It’s much more than that,” Khalaf said. He estimated they normally get 15-20 a month and they are probably getting three or four times that now.
Khalaf started to say that his group had asked others to forward hate mail they were getting but before he could reveal those results, Kelly interrupted to ask impatiently “OK, but what specifically does the movie do in your view to negatively portray Muslims and Arabs?”
Khalaf said he hasn’t seen the film but his group has been getting death threats with such comments as, “Just saw the movie American Sniper. Now I want to go kill some ragheads.”
Kelly seemed not in the least interested. “But that doesn’t mean that the movie has done anything wrong for which the actor or the director need to come out and speak. …Not every lunatic and their rhetoric can be controlled,” she said unsympathetically.
“It only takes one person to go into an Arab church or a mosque to start shooting and that’s what we want to prevent,” Khalaf tried to explain. All his group wants, Khalaf said, is for Eastwood and Cooper to publicly say, “this is wrong.”
Again, Kelly interrupted to argue. “We’ve also seen radical Islamists go murder a dozen people over the Charlie Hebdo caricatures in France. So it’s – the uptick in rhetoric against Muslims in that case could be directly related to something else that has nothing to do with American Sniper.”
As if Khalaf needed to prove his case beyond a shadow of a doubt before a statement condemning violence was deserved.
Khalaf reiterated: all he wanted was for Cooper and Eastwood to say, “That’s not what we’re about, that’s not what this country’s about. This is wrong, you shouldn’t be threatening violence against somebody just because they happen to be of a certain ethnicity or a certain race.”
But Kelly seemed determined to belittle Khalaf and his concerns. “Do you agree that Bradley Cooper and Clint Eastwood have done nothing wrong?” she asked accusingly. “Do you agree that the film American Sniper has done nothing wrong?”
As Khalaf started to explain yet again that all he wanted was for Cooper and Eastman to condemn the violent rhetoric, Kelly snapped, “It’s going to be an uphill battle if you want to shut down all hateful speech. Trust me.”
“We’re not trying to shut it down,” Khalaf replied.
“I got it,” Kelly said dismissively.
We got it, too, Megyn. We got exactly what you are about.
Watch it below, from last night’s The Kelly File.
Dear Lauren: Mark my words:
YOU’VE GOT PLENTY OF COMPANY (including me)!
Just FYI, I make sure my apartment is WELL-STOCKED WITH PLENTY OF PEPTO-BISMOL AT ALL TIMES (I usually buy it in bulk at the local BJ’s Warehouse Club) !
;^)
I’ve got another one coming up tomorrow. :)