Megyn Kelly made a provocative booking on September 11 to have a Florida official with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) attempt to agree with President Obama that Islamic State terrorists have nothing to do with Islam. Hassan Shibly attempted to compare Islamic State to the Westboro Baptist Church (lots of rude signs, but no beheadings) or anti-gay Ugandan Christians (who have suggested homosexuality is a capital crime).
Shibly took this elastic definition game to a new level on Twitter the next day, as Weasel Zippers noticed. Fox News viewers are just like ISIS, he suggested, after some hostile tweets:
#FoxNews and ISIS have something in common: they don't tolerate anything different & their rhetoric invites calls for violence @megynkelly
— Hassan Shibly (@HassanShibly) September 12, 2014
If there's one thing seeing all the hate spewed by some @megynkelly #foxnews viewers taught me, it's that extremists are all the same.
— Hassan Shibly (@HassanShibly) September 12, 2014
#FoxNews claims Islam & Muslims are a threat yet the ones making death threats in America and calling for violence appear to be Fox viewers
— Hassan Shibly (@HassanShibly) September 14, 2014
Kelly was fairly tough on Shibly on the program:
MEGYN KELLY: so, it is true that ISIS -- that Islam is not ISIS. But it is also true that ISIS is Islamic, is it not?
HASSAN SHIBLY, CAIR-FLORIDA: Well, ISIS is no more Islamic than the Westboro Baptist Church or the crusaders are or Anders Breivik or anybody who commits violence in the name of faith. Unfortunately, you know, every single faith has had crazy extremists distort and twist that faith to justify their crazy political ends.
And the reality is Megyn, is that moderate Muslims, Christians and Jews have a lot much more in common with each other than they do with extremists from within their own faith. And actually, extremist Muslims and extremist anti-Muslims have a lot in common, and that is that they both distort the Islamic faith to promote their twisted agenda. Which is rejected by the 1.7 billion Muslims of the world....
KELLY: But it's not just -- but it's not just the extremists. I mean, you look at Egypt, an ally to the United States or at least it was. I mean, the administration's been on the fence about that. But 84 percent there, 84 percent favor the death penalty for leaving Islam. Eighty two percent favor stoning for adultery. It doesn't seem like the most moderate religion when Sharia law comes into the picture. And this group takes that to an extra extreme. To an ultra extreme. And they do it in the name of Islam.
SHIBLY: And we publicly denounce them. So, I'm not familiar with those statistics.
KELLY: It's true. That's from the Pew polling center.
SHIBLY: But I can't comment. Yes, yes, I can't comment.
KELLY: Yes. But you're talking about Sharia even being moderate but I'm telling you, no it isn't.
SHIBLY: Do you know what the goals of Sharia are?
KELLY: I know if you're a woman and you commit adultery under Sharia law they want to stone you. All right. So I know that.
SHIBLY: That's actually found in the Bible. Again, you're taking things out of context.
KELLY: They want to kill you.
SHIBLY: Right. That's actually found within the Bible. Those are the very same sort of things that are found in the Bible.
When’s the last example of a Christian stoning his wife? Maybe we missed that. But the media often skips Muslim wife-beheadings (or fails to report the killer is a Muslim) even when they occur in America.
