4Pool, I have gone back and read the transcript of the whole interview again and again and I am flummoxed that you are choosing to defend Bill O'Reilly on this occasion. I don't care about Fox News and if the Americans want to watch it then fair play to them. But to argue this was anything other than a media mugging is preposterous. Your argument appears to be, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Jeremy Glick has no right signing this poster because it is unlikely his father would support his views. And that Bill O'Reilly, despite having no proof to the contrary, has every right denounce him on air because of that. Eh?
Jeremy Glick has every right to sign that advertisement. His father could have thought Genghis Khan was a Commie c*nt and he would still have been well within his rights to lend his name to it. It's what he believes, misguided or not. Had he said 'Let's go and kick some fucking raghead ass,' and signed an advertisment saying 'Dubya, when you find Osama let me rip out his still beating heart with my bare hands,' would O'Reilly and Fox News called him on the fact that, hang on, his father never voted for Bush, harboured doubts about American foreign policy so therefore what he was doing was in some way traducing his memory? Didn't think so. The other news channels didn't challenge him on it, they let him say his stuff and, here's the novel thing, they let the viewers make their mind up themselves. I don't know, but I bet the majority of Americans given the political culture there and the time, where dissenting arguments were rather frowned upon, in my experience, thought he was a whackjob.
If you don't like what he's saying, then don't put him on your show. Certainly don't invite him on and then reveal yourself to be a witless prick who believes 'the Afghan People' were behind 9/11. Yeah right Bill. Every single one of them, guilty as charged, because that's where al-Qaeda trained people. Uh huh. And don't invite him on and then claim to know the mind of his dead father. Did Bill have a quick go on a ouija board beforehand? No, sorry, he spoke to his work colleagues. Would any of us trust our fucking work colleagues to represent our views after our deaths rather than our families? I don't know. But then I'm freelance so I'm stuck with blood. And if i got killed in an event like this, and they truly believed that it was as a conseqence of some failing by an authority that had a duty to protect, a wrong decision, or the victim of some incompetence, then they would have my celestial blessing to shout it from the rooftops and do what they felt was right. Not that I'm claiming this for Glick, but history is littered with inconvenient truths uncovered by grieving relatives who refused to accept the official version or lie down in the face of authority in the quest to find the truth. Don't tell people how to grieve, don't evoke the memory of their dead, people who you never even met, and don't tell them what they can or can't say or do. Bollocks to what else he's done, I don't care: on this occasion O'Reilly sounds like a bully and he should hang his head in shame.