Hugh Hewitt Gets Taken For a Ride

Hugh, my friend, feel thou not slammed. Just a bit of constructive criticism, Froggystyle.

Hosting Hassam Aloush (?) the SoCal head of C A I R for the first two hours of his program today, Hugh unwittingly turned the keys of his radio show over to an organization that has a long track record of apologizing for islamic terror. I’m not sure if Hugh was simply unprepared for the interview, or in his zealousness to deconstruct the Tancredo Option that he decided to swing the conversation in the opposite direction. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter. Toward the end of the first hour he had Duane working the phones desperately to get Frank Gaffney on the show to bail him out. What he got was some guy named Dr. Morey (?) who was as much a moonbat as the CAIR guy.

Throw in a couple of hillbillies getting past the call screener calling for the US to nuke the muslims and you have yourself the show that should never have happened. Look, I’m not a radio talkshow host and I can’t imagine the show prep that goes into this kind of thing (neither did Jeff Goldstein and Bill Ardolino), but it obviously didn’t go the way it was planned. Aloush stonewalled on every point, and gave the impression, like a good little CAIR spokesman, that there really isn’t any terrorism in the world. Hugh pulls out the guy who murdered Van Gogh in Amsterdam, Aloush retorts with Eric Rudolf. He dismissed the Lakawanna Six, the Lodi cell, any acknowledgement of any radical imams in the US, and denied that wahabbi charities had ties to terrorism and were active in the US. He said that “hundreds of fatwas” have been issued AGAINST Usama bin Laden, and offered no substantiation at all. He criticized MEMRI as essentially racist. I can’t remember all the deceptions and outright lies that were told and many of them went unchallenged.

Of course he promised to come back on the show with Frank Gaffney who would have called him out on his many specious claims, but he accomplished his mission and I doubt he answers Duane’s phone calls. Hell, Charles Johnson of LGF would have been just as good. Somehow I don’t think this transcript is going to make it onto Radioblogger.com

Hugh, Aaron has the goods on CAIR

UPDATE: I stand corrected. Hugh got him back... v.s. Frank Gaffney this time. And Duane has the mp3 at Radioblogger.