Fox’s Discredited Anti-Israel Guest Michael Scheuer

For the 12-month period ending May 13, 2013, anti-Israel Middle East commentator and former CIA staffer Michael Scheuer made a total of nine appearances on live national TV. All of the appearances were on Fox News Channel or its sister network, Fox Business Network.

Scheuer invariably includes Israel when listing his villains – as he did on Fox’s “Happening Now” on April 24, 2013 in providing his analysis of the April 15th Boston Marathon bombing:

… the young men who bombed Boston… their activities are a response to our support for the Saudi tyranny, our invasion of Iraq, our support for the Israelis [emphasis added]. Most recently Mr. Obama has invaded two Muslim countries, Mali and Libya.

Never one to be burdened by factual evidence, Scheuer is not reliable here either. The older of the two Chechnyan-American brothers who perpetrated the Boston bombing, openly disdained what he labeled the immorality of American society. News reports so far do not cite Tamerlan Tsarnaev ever mentioning Israel. They do suggest that he seemed to have been influenced by a Sunni Islamic radicalism which emphasizes the requirement for a world-controlling Islamic caliphate. The other major strain of Islamic radicalism is Iran’s Shi’ite version requiring actions to hasten, including by acts of destruction and chaos, the coming of the mahdi, Shiite Islam’s messiah (the 12th Imam.)

Scheuer earned a Ph.D. in British Empire-U.S.-Canada-U.K. relations from the University of Manitoba. His credentials as an expert on the Middle East were examined by The Weekly Standard:

In any event, given the wholly irrelevant nature of Scheuer’s doctoral research — his dissertation traced the comings and goings of an obscure Canadian diplomat in the years before World War II — assigning him to run the [CIA] bin Laden section [1996 to 1999] … can be taken as a symbol of the entrenched neglect of Islamic terrorism within the agency.

Scheuer’s bin Laden unit had utterly failed to find, kill, capture or stop bin Laden from attacking the United States. In 2004 he left the agency after writing the book “Imperial Hubris,” first published anonymously. As historian and syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson wrote,

Once Scheuer was publicly identified, the world could examine what he had to say on various topics. People weren’t impressed — especially by Scheuer’s assertions in interviews that Osama bin laden shouldn’t be identified as a terrorist, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington was a means to make Americans feel guilty about the Holocaust.

Scheuer has been out of government nine years. He has written or said little in that time to burnish what were previously thin credentials as a Middle East expert, his CIA posting notwithstanding. He also seems to be obsessed negatively with the Jewish state and its supporters, repeatedly making false generalizations. Why is Fox so hospitable to Scheuer when he has so thoroughly discredited himself by his antisemitic bias and loony Middle East comments on TV and in other venues?

It’s time for the network to upgrade in this regard. The less Scheuer, the more informative the conversation.