Recently on Fox Business (8/30/11; cite by Think Progress, 8/31/11), host Eric Bolling tried to discredit the Center for American Progress's excellent new report on Islamophobia with this colossal falsehood:

I need to point this out--I'm reading directly from this report: "The Obama-allied Center for American Progress has released a report that blames Islamophobia in America on a small group of Jews and Israel supporters in America, whose views are being backed by millions of dollars."

You would have to be an idiot to read those words and not realize that they weren't CAP's. In fact, Bolling was quoting from a column on the far-right American Thinker website, attacking CAP and its report.

But the damage was done: The rest of the segment--Bolling's questions and his guests' answers--all swirled around the subject of CAP's anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing. "For the Center of American Progress to say there is a grand conspiracy undermines their credibility and is laughable," said lobbyist David Rehr, comparing CAP to "the left John Birch Society" (not to be confused with the original JBS, which was prominently featured on Glenn Beck's now defunct Fox News show).

Last night's broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor (5/19/11) provided ample evidence--if more were needed--of Bill O'Reilly's bigotry.

He started by trying to explain why Barack Obama is unpopular in Muslim countries:

The answer is complicated but does reflect my opinion that there is a Muslim problem in the world. The United States and the West are largely secular societies that do believe in human rights. The Muslim world is centered on religion and may Muslims believe if you don't worship Allah you are an infidel and therefore you don't deserve human rights. In fact, in certain parts of the Muslim world if you are not the proper sect of Islam, you can be persecute and even killed.

It's quite odd for O'Reilly, who has loudly complained that the "traditions of Christmas are under fire by committed secularists, people who do not want any public demonstration of spirituality" (Extra!, 5-6/05), to assert that the difference between the United States and Muslim countries is that one is secular and the other religion-centered. He went on to elaborate:

In addition, you have the Jewish situation. Because the USA supports Israel and many Muslims hate Jews, we are tarred by that hatred. It's centuries old, it's not going away any time soon. The USA has poured trillions of dollars into the Muslim world. Fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan designed to liberate those people from tyrannical governments. But apparently vast majority of Muslims are not grateful.

It's hard to know which part of that is most offensive--that Muslims are anti-Semites, or they haven't thanked us for the Iraq War.

He closed the interview segment with this:

For every Muslim in the world that wants democracy and wants human rights, there is one who doesn't. And the one who doesn't,  doesn't have any rules. And it will blow the hell out of the one that does.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial (3/11/11) defended the Peter King hearings on Islamist terrorism against "our friends on the left [who] are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one."

The editors argued that in fact, the focus on Muslims is justified based on the facts:

Since 9/11, there have been more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil. These include plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline. Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan's November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.

In a useful report published by the Rand Corporation last year, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins notes that the plotters were a "diverse group" that included Caucasians, African-Americans and Hispanics as well as immigrants (or their children) from about 20 countries. Yet all but two of the plotters were Muslim, and those two sought to offer their services to al Qaeda.

So much, then, for the notion that it is bigoted for Mr. King to focus on Muslim radicalization. This is where the current threat lies.

This is a complete misrepresentation of the Rand report. The report is exclusively about Muslim radicalization and jihadism, not about domestic terrorism in general, as the WSJ would lead you to believe--if anything, it's surprising that there are any non-Muslim jihadist plotters. (The exceptions were two men who agreed for their own secular purposes to collaborate with undercover FBI informants purporting to work for al Qaeda.)

The vast majority of "homegrown" terrorist attackers--those of all ideologies who successfully carry out an attack--are not Muslim, the report finds: Of the "83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three...were clearly connected with the jihadist cause." The other jihadist plots referred to by both the report and the WSJ were disrupted by authorities--quite often because those authorities themselves helped generate them.

One key point of the report, in fact, is to say that homegrown jihadism is not nearly as big a threat as it's made out to be--exactly the opposite of the argument that the WSJ is trying to make.

"Americans are entitled to an assessment of how serious a threat this is," wrote the WSJ editors. I agree: It's about time they and the rest of the King hearing supporters (that includes you, Bill O'Reilly) stop unjustly demonizing American Muslims and present the facts.

If you own a television or read a newspaper, you may have heard by now that a pastor in Florida plans to burn copies of the Quran on Saturday. The only reason you know anything about this is because the national media have decided, for reasons that are entirely unclear, to give this guy a platform. As Michael Calderone noted at Yahoo!, this pastor appeared on the front page of over 50 different newspapers...on Wednesday.  As Calderone pointed out, he doesn't even have that many members of his church.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas put the blame where it mostly belongs--on the media:

I ask you: If a sad little man burns some Qurans in the woods, and the media aren't there to film it, is it news?

Now, predictably enough, we are in the next cycle of coverage, with TV shows booking their "Should We Even Be Covering This Story?" segments. I know this because we've been called to appear on such programs. The funny thing is when you tell a producer that your comment on this story is that it isn't worth talking about, the response is inevitably something along the lines of, "Well come on and say that!"

Fox News Channel continues to mislead viewers about the "Ground Zero Mosque."  On the August 18 broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly countered the argument that there would be no controversy over a Jewish or Christian house of worship by saying this:

 Nobody would be complaining because Christians and Jews weren't involved in the 9/11 attack. Radical Muslims were. And you may remember the Muslim world largely did not condemn the al Qaeda action, while most Christians and Jews did.

Some opponents of the Park51 development like to argue that they have no problem with Islam per se. O'Reilly seems to go the other direction; since we "may remember" that Muslims were silent after 9/11, there's something troubling about "the Muslim world."

That memory is false, though. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has catalogued numerous examples of Muslim groups immediately condemning the 9/11 attacks.

And this is an old O'Reilly line, anyway;  as I wrote in my book The Oh Really? Factor:

O'REILLY: "The telling event here is that faced with a violent faction using the name of Allah to kill civilians, Muslims the world over did little.  There were no mass demonstrations against terrorism, no peace vigils and no organized condemnation of the al-Qaida criminals.  In fact, many Muslim countries actually condoned the attacks on Sept. 11 or blamed them on 'the Jews.'" (column, 8/1/02)

 OH REALLY: There was a candlelight vigil in Iran shortly after the attacks, attended by "more than 3,000 mostly young people" (New York Times, 9/21/01).  A few days earlier (9/15/01), the Times reported that "thousands of people attending a World Cup qualifying match between Bahrain and Iran observed a moment of silence."  Palestinians gathered for a candlelight vigil in Jerusalem (Baltimore Sun, 9/15/01)  As NPR reported, "Most Arab leaders were quick to denounce the attacks. Jordan's King Hussein, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri sent their condolences.  Officials in Syria, Kuwait and other Gulf nations expressed sympathy for the American people and the families of the victims.  Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said his country was ready to send aid to the United States." (9/12/01)