Earlier this week, Bill O’Reilly appeared on The View to promote his new book “Pinheads and Patriots“. While on the show, O’Reilly got into a heated argument with hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg.
O’Reilly cited a CNN/Opinion Research poll that showed that roughly 68% of Americans opposed the building of an Islamic Community Center a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. Although that number seems awfully high — hence Behar’s surprised reaction in the video clip above — the findings are consistent with a separate poll conducted by Time Magazine in the same month, which reported roughly 60% of Americans oppose the building plans.
The topic arose when O’Reilly criticized President Obama for defending the Muslim community’s Constitutional right to practice their beliefs by building a mosque; O’Reilly asserted that this was evidence that Obama was “out of touch” with the average American population.
You know what? O’Reilly is right. Throughout the summer, there were a lot of Americans — a lot of Americans — who took to the streets to spout some racist hate-speech against Muslims over the “Ground Zero Mosque”. There were a lot of Americans who wanted to deny Muslim-Americans in NYC their Constitutional rights to freely worship, based solely on the fact that these peaceful, law-abiding Muslim happen to share the same colour and religion as the 9/11 terrorists. There were a lot of Americans who likened Islam to Nazism or terrorism. There were a lot of Americans who advocated domestic terrorism against Muslims, and their mosques, as a public display of intolerance, xenophobia and hatred.
There are a lot of Americanswho agree with how Bill O’Reilly characterizes 9/11 — as a day when “Muslims killed us”. Not “terrorists”. Not “extremists”. “Muslims”.
Bill O’Reilly is wrong when it comes to most of what he says — but he is right about one thing: President Obama is completely “out of touch” with this brand of American vitriol. As the president; as a liberal Democrat; as a person of colour; as merely an intelligent, tolerant and reasonable man — President Obama is “out of touch” with this kind of racist, fear-mongering, reflexive, noxious, and hysterical hatred.
And thank God for that.
History has shown us that the opinions shared by the mainstream aren’t always the opinions shared by the moral. On the O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly defended his statements on The View by saying: “Did we say, in World War II, ‘We were attacked by “Japanese extremists”? […] No: we said we were attacked by ‘Japanese.’”
Again, O’Reilly is right — after Pearl Harbour, we did say that the “Japanese” attacked us.
Then, we rounded Japanese-Americans up — men, women and children alike — and forcibly imprisoned them in internment camps.
Many times in American (and global) history, public sentiment has directly contradicted our fundamental understandings of human rights by supporting the harassment, detention, oppression, and even outright genocide of a minority. This country was founded upon the principle of “manifest destiny” which rationalized the genocide of countless First Nation peoples. An entire war was fought over the supposed “right” of Southern plantation owners to own and purchase other human beings. For generations, most Americans favoured denying anybody but White males the right to vote, own land, or testify in court. Most Americans supported Jim Crow and vehemently opposed Brown v. Board of Education. In the very same CNN poll above, roughly half of all Americans still oppose the right for LGBT Americans to marry.
Just because a bunch of people believe something, doesn’t make their belief just, ethical, reasonable, or anything less than hatespeech — and it is the President’s moral obligation to speak out against that hatespeech when it threatens to infringe upon the Constitutional rights of others. In fact, the wonderful thing about the American Constitution (and more specifically the Bill of Rights) is precisely how it is designed to protect the rights of subjugated and oppressed people who otherwise face the vitriol and hatred of the American mainstream. No matter how much they hate you, the Constitution outlines and protects several of your basic rights including the right to practice your religion openly and freely. In very few other countries will the government go against public opinion, and defend the rights of the few against the hatred of the many — and those countries are better for it.
Bravo to Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar for calling Bill O’Reilly on the “bullshit” that he spouts, and for walking out on his race-baiting, obnoxious ass.
