[1]
Hush up, Alan

Hannity and even Colmes (video at [2] Hot Air) try to pin him down about Iraq and about his attendance at pro-Hizballah rallies, but Colmes makes a key mistake when he asks him if he attended such rallies in Washington, when [3] in fact they were in Dearborn. [CORRECTION: A commenter below says that Colmes mentioned Dearborn; sorry I missed it.]

A few quotes I dashed down:

"You talkin' to me?"

"I am generally against any occupation." Hmm. What occupation might he have in mind? "Any evil party. Any occupier occupying innocent people, an innocent land, and suck the wealth of the nation, whether that it is Middle East or somewhere else, generally."

Is Hizballah a terrorist organization? Simple yes or no question. "Hizballah is a Lebanese organization and I got nothing to do with that." Hannity returned to this one and never got a satisfactory answer.

Note the pattern: [4] CAIR officials have danced around similar questions, as has [5] Cat Stevens. This is becoming a handy guide to pseudo-moderation: if someone suddenly finds straight answers hard to come by when asked if he thinks a particular jihad group is a terrorist group, his moderation may not be all it is cracked up to be.

Meanwhile, neither Hannity nor Colmes asked him if he was referring to Israel as an occupier, which he almost certainly was, or made any reference at all to the call to [6] conversion to Islam and implication that Jews and Christians are among those doomed by God.

And Hot Air also links to a story that mentions how Al-Husainy has in the past [7] conferred with the Bush Pentagon -- a stick Alan Colmes tried to beat Steyn with last night. This was no doubt a result of the fact that Shi'ites were initially enthusiastic supporters of the campaign in Iraq, as Al-Husainy makes clear tonight. They saw that with Saddam out of power and the U.S. instituting "democracy," they had the numbers to seize power. Now that the Americans are waking up to the fact that by aiding the Shi'a they have in effect been abetting the creation of a Shi'ite Arab client state of Iran, the ardor for democracy has cooled among the once enthusiastic Shi'ite Jeffersonians.

UPDATE: [8] Debbie Schlussel has a terrific list of questions Hannity and Colmes could have and should have asked Al-Husainy. If they had, the Imam would almost certainly have been contacted by the American Ballet Theatre.