In “Hannity confronts Ground Zero mosqueteer” in WND today, Pamela Geller discusses the Ground Zero Mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s rocky appearance on the Sean Hannity Show, after Bill O’Reilly fawned all over Rauf the week before:
Ground Zero mosqueteer Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is pushing a whole new narrative on his deception book tour. So it was particularly delicious to watch Sean Hannity interview, or interrogate, the sly imam on his show last week. The imam Rauf has almost never been challenged by a fawning, complicit media, and he was visibly taken aback as Hannity courageously pressed him on his dishonesty and anti-Americanism.
Sean pressed Rauf on his most disgusting and outrageous statements, like “United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened” on 9/11, and that “in fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.” Hannity also asked Rauf about a story I broke involving statements the sneaky Rauf made in Australia: “We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims. You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children.”
The slippery imam apologized to Hannity repeatedly for these statements. That was news in itself, as Rauf had never apologized for his statements before, although he claimed to Hannity that he had done so in order to advance his new narrative. Rauf kept insisting to Hannity that the problem isn’t Islamic jihad. The problem, he said repeatedly, is the extremists on both sides. By this Rauf meant Robert Spencer and me on one side, and Osama bin Laden on the other. Rauf considers my work in defense of freedom “extreme” — as if truth in the extreme were a bad thing, or defense of freedom in the extreme were a bad thing. But Sean was having none of it. He was brilliant, and he was relentless.
Still, Rauf kept on slipping in his lies. He said that the need for women to produce four male witnesses to prove rape was “cultural.” He was lying. In fact it is specified in the Quran (24:4 and 24:13). He also said that no Muslims want to bring Shariah courts to the U.S., contradicting his own words in previous books about how Shariah is one unified whole and cannot be separated into parts, and clearly suggesting that it is something that ought to come to the U.S. He listed six things Shariah is designed to safeguard, including life, liberty and dignity — but these are only safeguarded for Muslim men; Muslim women and non-Muslims are deprived of basic rights under Shariah.
Hannity did what TV pundits and journalists are supposed to do. They”re not supposed to be the PR arm or delivery service for subversives” press releases. But that’s just what Hannity”s counterpart on Fox, Bill O”Reilly, was for Rauf last week….