'The View:' Bill O'Reilly Was 'Condescending,' 'Disrespectful'
Oct. 18, 2010 — -- Three days after their blowup with Bill O'Reilly, the women of "The View" reflected on the incident with cooler heads and calmer voices, but made it clear they still aren't fans of the Fox News host.
Today's edition of the ABC daytime talk show began with a re-hashing of what happened Thursday when O'Reilly declared that "Muslims killed us on 9/11," prompting co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the set.
"He started with me as soon as he sat down," Goldberg said. "You can't throw stuff around like that, in my opinion. I'm glad that I left. I'm glad I left because I had reached my threshold."
"View" creator Barbara Walters said that a walk-out was probably what O'Reilly wanted.
"He loves this, this is just what he wants," she said of the controversy. "I think [walking out] was the wrong thing to do. ... You can express yourself, I hope, without adding to the rage and the fury."
Goldberg said, "He came on and he was condescending. I know that if I had stayed here, for me at least, it would have gotten worse. He was so disrespectful just to the five of us that I thought, 'I'm done.'"
Goldberg did offer that O'Reilly's emotions may have gotten the better of him. "I suspect that maybe he said something that he actually didn't mean," she said.
O'Reilly defended his views last week on his prime-time Fox News show.
"How did we get here?" he said on Thursday's edition of "The O'Reilly Factor."
"Were we attacked by Japanese extremists? How did we get to this point? Now the poll I cited was taken by CNN in August. About 70 percent of Americans, as I said, agree with me on the 'ground zero mosque' issue; it's inappropriate.
Watch Bill O'Reilly's Biggest Blowups
"No one I know, no one, wants to insult Muslims," O'Reilly continued. "But almost everybody I know is tired of the political correctness surrounding the 9/11 attack. The truth is that if moderate Muslims all over the world would stand with America against radical Islam, the terrorists couldn't exist. But ,obviously, that is not happening. I am not in the business of sugar-coating harsh realities."
Meanwhile, Behar reasserted that O'Reilly was out of line on Thursday night's edition of "The Joy Behar Show," which airs on the Headline News Network.
"I was really angry," she said. "I thought O'Reilly was saying ... something I construe as hate speech, frankly.
"It upsets me, as you can see. To say Muslims killed us on 9/11, is like ... you could say that about any group, to lump an entire group like that."
While Behar refrained from personal attacks on O'Reilly, one of her guests, former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, didn't hesitate:
"I thought he was a spineless puke," Ventura said.
