Fox News pundit and resident “liberal” Juan Williams incurred the wrath of both anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller and host Sean Hannity on Thursday night after he called Geller a “pyromaniac” who cared more about “self-promotion” than free speech.
The three met on “Hannity” to discuss an incident on Sunday in Garland, Texas in which two gunmen tried to storm Geller’s cartoon contest displaying caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
“I hope you’re not one of those ‘I support free speech, but’-liberals out there,” Sean Hannity said to Williams. “Where do you stand on this?”
“I’m someone who’s been punished for speaking out,” Williams said, referencing the time he was fired by NPR for saying that seeing Muslims on airplanes made him nervous.
But apparently, Williams did not want to be lumped in with the likes of Geller.
“If we want to have a serious conversation here about Ms. Geller, then she’s like a pyromaniac who goes before the judge and says, ‘Oh yeah, we’re setting those fires to see how fast the fire department would respond,'” Williams said.
Hannity interrupted and said Williams was “blaming the victim,” as if he were criticizing a woman for “dressing provocatively” before a sexual assault.
Williams continued undeterred.
“You think about, like, Salman Rushdie, he was doing literature — Pam Geller was doing nothing but intentionally trying to provoke this reaction,” he added.
Geller called his remarks “ridiculous,” and began talking about the Islamic State and the murder of a Jordanian pilot by the group. Hannity intervened in Geller’s defense and called Williams “naïve.”
Soon all three were talking over each other again.
“I think you are about self-promotion, Pam Geller, you’re not about the real cause of free speech,” Williams said.
Geller responded by comparing herself to Malala, the Nobel Prize recipient and Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban for attempting to get an education in her native country.
She added that Williams was enforcing “Sharia law” by making her “the bad guy.”
Watch the video:
