Hannity confronts Ground Zero mosqueteer

Pamela Geller cheers Fox host pressing Rauf on Shariah, anti-Americanism

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.

Two weeks ago in my WND column, I excoriated Bill O’Reilly for whitewashing and fawning over Rauf. O’Reilly was either woefully uninformed or complicit. In either case, he did his millions of viewers no service by misleading them about this stealth jihadist. If Rauf is as moderate as O’Reilly would have us believe, why didn’t he sign the Former Muslims United pledge for “religious freedom and safety from harm for former Muslims”? Why didn’t Rauf stand against the Shariah death penalty for apostasy, and for Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who is about to be executed for this in Iran? Why didn’t he mention our AFDI/SIOA Summer Night for Human Rights on June 23, calling for religious liberty and freedom from violent intimidation for Muslim apostates?

It also bears noting that the sales rank at Amazon.com for Rauf’s deceptive and disingenuous new book was well into the thousands after the “Hannity” show – which is unheard of for someone who appeared on both O’Reilly and Hannity. That goes to show you that the American people weren’t buying it, even when Bill O’Reilly was dishing up this mush.

I am sure it was not Sean’s intent to show up Bill O’Reilly, but show him up he did.

And he showed American journalists how they should be challenging the Islamic supremacists that they spend so much time fawning over. I don’t know who is more evil: the Islamic supremacists who think we are clueless and stupid, or the non-Muslims like Bill O’Reilly who heap praise upon those who seek to impose their brutal ideology on Americans, using our freedoms to destroy our freedom.

Rauf is one of the worst of the Islamic supremacists who are lionized by the mainstream media these days. He should be relegated to the very fringe of decent, freedom-loving societies. Instead, he is lauded. That is perverse and morally ill. And so Sean Hannity deserves our congratulations and thanks.

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