Beck shows “boring, lazy, tired” Jon Stewart how it's done

Written by Jeremy Holden

Published

On his radio show, Glenn Beck said that The Daily Show's Jon Stewart “took me on, on the mosque,” with his band of followers declaring Stewart's effort “boring, lazy, [and] tired.” Not one to take boring, lazy, and tired lying down, the crew proceeded to regurgitate the same falsehoods, innuendo and hypocrisy they used last week to smear Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, head of the effort to build a community center in New York.

After playing Stewart's recent skewering of Beck's hypocrisy for attacking Rauf over comments strikingly similar to comments Beck himself made in April, Beck asked, “Does Jon Stewart not understand the difference between that last statement and the statement from the imam that happened two days after 9-11?” Beck gave no indication what actually distinguished Rauf's comments from Beck's, aside from their temporal proximity to September 11, 2001.

And it truly is difficult to find any difference beyond the semantic.

  • Beck: “When people said they hate us, well, did we deserve 9-11? No. But were we minding our business? No. Were we in bed with dictators and abandoned our values and principles? Yes. That causes problems.”
  • Rauf: “I wouldn't say the United States deserved what happened on 9-11, but the United States' policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

After not explaining the “difference” between his statement and “the statement from the imam” that Beck apparently sill finds appalling, Beck asked, “Does [Stewart] understand that I didn't hire someone to work for me that also went out and made statements like, 'The Jews are responsible,” and 'If the - if Americans knew the Jews, they would do what Hitler tried to do to the Jews?'"

Those comments, which Beck falsely attributed last week to an imam currently working for Rauf, have actually been attributed to Muhammed Gemeaha. Gemeaha reportedly made those comments after resigning from the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of New York City and returning to Egypt in late September 2001. The head of the Islamic center's board reportedly was “outraged” by Gemeaha's comments as they were reported and “expressed his displeasure” in a phone call to Gemeaha. Rauf is a member of the board of trustees of the Islamic Center of New York.

After then recycling the smear that Rauf is insufficiently opposed to Hamas and terrorism, Beck's sidekick Stu Burguiere went on to say that Stewart “has become dull,” and characterized Stewart's criticism as a “boring, lazy, tired effort.”