- Watters condemned Arab-Americans who tore down posters of hostages in Gaza
- “Someone’s going to get punched in the face,” he told Fox News
- The White House said Fox News must apologize for a ‘sickening attack’
The White House denounced Fox News Jesse Waters presented Thursday after he appeared to advocate violence against Arab-Americans during a tirade about people removing posters of Jewish or American hostages in Gaza.
It comes amid heightened concerns about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as the Middle East reels in the aftermath of the Hamas attack that killed 1,400 people in Israel.
On Wednesday night, he appeared on the Fox News program The Five and said, “If you’re an Arab American in this country, and you’re tearing up posters of Jewish hostages, American hostages, no, no, no, no.
“Someone gets punched in the face.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates condemned the comments, which came on the same day officials launched an anti-Islamophobia campaign.
The White House excoriated Fox News host Jesse Waters on Thursday after he appeared to advocate violence against Arab-Americans during a tirade about people removing posters of Jewish or American hostages in Gaza.
“Fox News owes every viewer an apology for this sickening attack on the rights and dignity of their fellow Americans,” he said.
“President Biden will always stand up against Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and all forms of hatred. Fox News should learn from his example.”
He added that Watters made the comments not long after a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was stabbed to death in Michigan, in what the local sheriff said was an attack fueled by Islamophobia.
Tensions have increased since Hamas terrorists left the Gaza Strip and killed 1,400 people in Israel. They returned to the Palestinian enclave with at least 200 hostages.
Israel responded by closing Gaza and launching a four-week military bombardment.
Since then, posters of the hostages have appeared around the world as their relatives campaigned for their release.
And since then, people have been caught tearing it down on American college campuses and in cities around the world.
One video shows a woman at Boston University removing signs.
“Why are you filming this?” she asks the man with the camera, pointing out that he knows she is Jewish too. ‘What is your point?’
He responds, “To show where the hate on this campus comes from.”
A George Mason student was caught on camera removing a poster calling for the release of a Thai man kidnapped by Hamas. She said the poster was “propaganda.”
Posters of the hostages have appeared around the world as their relatives campaigned for their release. But at the same time, people have torn them down to make a point
Watters prefaced his remarks by attacking the entire “Muslim world.”
“I want to say something about Arab-Americans and about the Muslim world,” he said.
‘We – and when I say we I mean the West and Western technology – created the Middle East.
‘We made them rich. We got that oil out of the ground, our military protects all these oil shipments flying all over the world, making them rich. We finance their army.
‘We respect their kings. We kill their terrorists. OK?
‘But we’ve had it. We’ve had it with them.’