by STEVE RENDALL
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).