UPDATED POST: Tree of Life Synagogue Member Says He Wasn’t Maliciously Cut Off by Fox News

EDITOR’S NOTE: After this post was published we changed the headline and added more video. That video was of a second appearance on Fox News Channel by guest Joel Rubin, who stated in response to similar questions on Twitter on Saturday that he was cut off by a commercial break, not for a political reason. He was invited back on the air later in the next hour of the broadcast. Subsequently the headline was changed and this updated added. The original story is included below as a matter of record.

ORIGINAL STORY: Fox News anchor Jon Scott dumped a guest in mid-sentence just seconds after asking him “Why the rise in anti-Semitism?” and just as the guest, a member of the Tree of Life Synagogue that was the site of a terrorist mass murder in October, was going in on Trump’s recent defense of his remarks on Charlottesville.

On Fox Report with Jon Scott this weekend, Scott was interviewing Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Joel Rubin, about the then-unfolding shooting at a synagogue in California. Less than seventy seconds into their interview, Rubin was abruptly dumped for a Salonpas commercial.

Scott began by asking Rubin about the “terrible memories” that this latest shooting must evoke, and Rubin told Scott that “it’s very troubling that, six months after the Tree of Life shooting in my hometown of Pittsburgh… that the lessons have not yet been learned, and that the political rhetoric is rough, and that individual lone actors, gunmen believe they have license to kill, and they should be stopped.”

“Why the rise in anti-Semitism, do you think?” Scott asked.

“We’ve seen a spike, quite frankly, since the election of President Trump,” Rubin said. “and we have seen that largely because there has been a sort of a freedom to say what one wants in public.”

“‘Jews will not replace us’ was the chant in Charlottesville in August 2017,” Rubin continued,” and just the other day the president essentially said that they were fair, and those are the words we have to watch from,” Rubin said.

As soon as Rubin mentioned Trump’s recent defense of his Charlottesville comments, Scott could be heard trying to interrupt, saying “Joel, Joel,” before Rubin was finally cut off by the commercial.

There were three and-a-half minutes left in the hour, and when Scott returned, he did not explain the cutaway. It is possible the 30-plus-year broadcasting veteran just blew the timing of the interview that started only moments before, or that he simply blew the toss to the commercial. But it’s also possible he dumped Rubin because of where he was going with his commentary.

Watch the clip above, via Fox News Channel, and you decide.

UPDATE:
Actually you don’t have to decide, the guest, Joel Rubin, came back on Fox in the hour scheduled for Life, Liberty, and Levin, which was preempted by live coverage anchored by Jon Scott. In response to the questions raised by Media Matters News Director John Whitehouse on Twitter, written about at Raw Story and brought to Rubin’s attention by TPM’s Josh Marhsall, Rubin tweeted last night that he had been brought back on the show. Rubin also included video of that second, later appearance.

It was a legitimate commercial break. They had me on again after the break. https://t.co/2jjoVsELld

— Joel Rubin (@JoelMartinRubin) April 28, 2019

Anchor Scott introduced Rubin, saying he “joined us briefly in our last hour, but we wanted to go a little deeper with him. He is back now.”

“Joel I wanted to challenge you on something. You know, you said that you felt that some of the anti-Semitic rhetoric has ramped up since the Trump Administration arrived in Washington,” said Scott. “But as you well know this is a president whose daughter has converted to Judaism and she, you know, his son-in-law is obviously Jewish. It doesn’t start with president Trump, does it?”

“No, doesn’t it doesn’t John, and I’m glad you point that out, and I’m not saying that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite,’ said Rubin. “What I am saying is the rhetoric, for example in Charlottesville, the Jews will not replace us rhetoric. The president’s response to that equivocated and did not call it out for what it was, and he said these were very fine people.”

“That encouragement, and other language about immigrants and language about people of difference, people of color in many instances, that is the problem,” he said.

from Mediaite http://bit.ly/2XMLg9S