Hugh Hewitt grilled reporter Soledad O’Brien Monday evening for accepting money from the government of Qatar, which is the top financier of the terror group Hamas and also has provided funds to other Islamist groups.
Hewitt asked O’Brien, who does work for the Qatari government’s Al Jazeera news station, how she justified being paid by a government that supports terrorism.
"Businessweek, has a story on Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera, and the headline calls Qatar a patron of Islamists," Hewitt said on his radio program. "It says that Qatar funds and arms Islamists fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad and bankrolling Hamas in the Gaza Strip. So here’s an honest question. How can you take money from them?"
O’Brien struggled to evade the crux of the question and accused the United States of being similar to Qatar.
"You know, I think that there is a couple of different issues there, and I think you could look at similar issues of what is funded in the United States," she said. "To me, at the end of the day, we take a look at the journalism that is done. To me, I look at what the opportunities are and what is happening at Al Jazeera America, and the kinds of stories that they want to tell, and I don’t think anybody has said anything about their journalism at all. In fact, they’ve gotten incredibly high marks for their reporting."
Al Jazeera has not received "high marks" from mainstream journalists due mainly to its biased reporting and attempts to fabricate the news. Al Jazeera reporters have been caught creating mock death scenes in Egypt in a bid to delegitimize the secular government.
O’Brien said she would not stop taking money from Qatar, even if it proved to be funding Iraqi terrorists.
"It’s just that Qatar owns it and on CNN tonight, they’re running this helicopter footage which is so, you know, the people that Qatar funds are engaged in genocide against these Kurdistan, against the Yazidis," Hewitt said. "And I know that the journalism can be good, but if the funding for the journalism comes from a regime that is funding ISIS, does it creep you out?"
"Well you know, I think again, at the end of the day, the thing that I think about is the journalism" O’Brien responded. "And I think those are very complicated issues. They’re not as straightforward as that."
"Is there anything that would cause you to say if Qatar was shown to be funding ISIS, would you quit Al Jazeera?" Hewitt pressed.
"No, very rarely do I operate in hypotheticals. I certainly would take it under considerations, absolutely, as I take anything under consideration."