Jesse Watters -- the Fox News correspondent whose segment "Watters’ World" is featured on Bill O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Factor -- revealed Monday night that despite having a ticket and appropriate press credentials to enter the “Defend the Prophet” conference in Garland, Texas this past weekend, he was immediately “revoked” by members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) once he landed in Dallas.
Though other journalists were allowed to enter ONLY the first 20 minutes of the conference, held at the Curtis Culwell Center, Watters was told by organizers (after hours of standing outside the conference center), that they “specifically barred” The O’Reilly Factor from coming inside.
Ironically, the Curtis Culwell Center’s policies and procedures for events are as stated on page three in the Event Handbook, “"...any Lessee conducting an event open to the public, or for which there is an admission paid, shall not discriminate against any person..."
Not one to be kept from reporting the idiocy of the uninformed, Watters interviewed several people outside the conference:
"Do you think the convention would be better served if it were protesting Islamic Jihad?" he asked one woman, only to be met by a bureaucratic response.
"We have a wide variety of conferences, including but not limited to anti-Jihad conferences," she said.
"The keynote speaker in there is an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing?" Watters said, referring to Bedford-Stuyvesant, N.Y. Imam Siraj Wahhaj.
The woman interrupted, asking that Watters define the 'propaganda'-laced legal term.
She added that the term 'Islamic extremism' gives rise to 'Islamophobia', and would not directly address whether she agreed with the Obama administration's perceived forbidding of the use of the word.
"Islamophobia didn't take down the Trade Center, Islamic Fascists did," Watters said.
It's interesting that the woman never responded to Watters’ mention of the controversial speaker Imam Siraj Wahhai. In addition to being named as an unindicted co-conspirator to the WTC bombings in 1993, he has also been quoted as saying, “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”
Watters also spoke to a self-proclaimed Iraqi War veteran wearing an 'Iraq Veterans against the War' shirt:
"One of the keynote speakers in there wants to replace the Constitution with Sharia," Watters said.
The man seemed taken aback by the development.
"Do you think Islamophobia is a bigger threat to Muslims than Jihadists?" Watters asked.
"I think the biggest threat to the United States is the United-States-of-Americans themselves," he answered.
"Don't you want to fight Jihadists?" Watters asked.
"I want to fight anyone that takes the lives of innocent people, and that includes the United States government," the man said.
"Did the United States military train you to kill civilians?" Watters asked.
As the man began to answer in the affirmative, Watters corrected him: "No," Watters said, "that's what al Qaeda does."
One of the more eyebrow-raising exchanges happened when Watters asked a young man his thoughts on the beheadings, stonings and other severe forms of punishment happening throughout the Muslim world, the young man answered, "Because that's what we believe...It says in the Quran that women shouldn't be able to go out in public in just regular clothes." When Watters asked him if he would like to see Sharia law in America, he answered, "Yes, that'd be nice.”
It turned out Watters wasn’t the only one prohibited from entering the conference. The Washington Free Beacon was barred, as well as Alan Kornman and Damon Rosen with United West, who “said they were ticketed for the event but then barred from entering because they were Jewish."
Tolerance and transparency, alive and well as displayed at the “Defend the Prophet” conference.
