With the economy and other domestic issues dominating the discourse this election cycle, it’s rare to see the Sunday political talk shows focus on foreign policy issues. But the attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions in the Middle East last week and escalating rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear program changed all that on Sunday and the debates that unfolded, particularly regarding discussions on Iran, weren’t pretty.

The amount of misinformation on Iran’s nuclear program on the Sunday talk shows this week was staggering. The worst of which this blog previously highlighted: ABC reporter Brian Ross said that if the Iranians make the decision to build a nuclear weapon, it would take them as little as four weeks to build one bomb.

Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who repeatedly referred to Iran having a “nuclear weapons program” (U.S. and Israeli intelligence and the IAEA do not believe Iran has made the decision to go that far) — appeared to be trying to rev up fears about a potential Iranian nuclear weapon, saying on NBC’s Meet the Press:

NETANYAHU: I think that as they get closer and closer and closer to the achievement of the weapons-grade material, and they’re very close, they’re six months away from being about 90 percent of having the enriched uranium for an atom bomb.

It’s unclear what Netanyahu is saying Iran is six months away from exactly. But whatever he meant, the reality is that, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week, it would take Iran at least a year, probably a bit longer, to obtain a bomb once its leaders made the decision to do so. A new bipartisan expert report from the Iran Project expounds:

Conservatively, it would take Iran a year or more to build a military-grade weapon, with at least two years or more required to create a nuclear warhead that would be reliably deliverable by a missile.

One key point on Iran’s timeline for building a bomb is that the U.S. and its allies would most likely know when the clock starts ticking. As Panetta said last week, “We have pretty good intelligence on them. We know generally what they’re up to. And so we keep a close track on them.”

Yet the Sunday show pundits got this all wrong as well. “President Obama said our intelligence service will give us a pretty long lead time in understanding where Iran is,” George Will said on ABC’s This Week, adding, “I think he may have a faith in the ability of our intelligence services to draw lines and put down markers as to where the Iranian program is that we simply actually don’t have.”

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Anti-Islam rhetoric in the United States has heated up this week in the wake of the violent protests in the Middle East. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough joined in the backlash this morning, saying the entire Muslim world hates the United States “because of their religion.”

Newsweek picked up on this theme, today releasing its new cover story by with the headline “MUSLIM RAGE” and a photo of angry Muslims:

Somali-born Dutch AEI scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the cover story’s author. In the article, Hirsi Ali claims that extremist Muslims “are not a fringe group“:

The Muslim men and women (and yes, there are plenty of women) who support — whether actively or passively — the idea that blasphemers deserve to suffer punishment are not a fringe group. On the contrary, they represent the mainstream of contemporary Islam.

In a speech back in May, Hirsi Ali expressed sympathy for one of the justifications for Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik‘s attacks, explaining that Breivik said “he had no other choice but to use violence” because his fringe views were “censored.” Breivik was convicted of mass murder last month, which he admitted to perpetuating in order to save Europe from a “Muslim takeover.”

As this blog has previously noted, in a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine, Hirsi Ali called for Islam to be “defeated.” The interviewer asked: “Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?” Hirsi Ali replied bluntly: “No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.”

During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) could not explain when President Obama “apologized” for the United States, despite repeatedly claiming that he went on an “apology tour” across the Middle East shortly after becoming president.

Since violence broke out across the region, Republicans have charged that Obama’s “defeatist” policies have caused the unrest and contributed to the death of Libyan ambassador Christopher Stevens. But pressed to detail where Obama has apologized for America by CNN host Soledad O’Brien, King came up short:

O’BRIEN: Never once in that speech, as you know, which I have the speech right here. that was — he never once used the word “apology.” He never once said “I’m sorry.”

KING: Didn’t have to. The logical — any logical reading of that speech or the speech he gave in France where he basically said that the United States can be too aggressive. [...]

O’BRIEN: Everybody keeps talking about this apology tour and apologies from the President. I’m trying to find the words ‘I’m sorry, I apologize’ in any of those speeches. Which I have the text of all those speeches in front of me. None of those speeches at all, if you go to factcheck.org which we check in a lot, they all say the same thing. They fact check this and they say this whole theory of apologies…

KING: I don’t care what fact check says.

O’BRIEN: There are fact checks. You may not care, but they’re a fact checker.

KING: No. Soledad. Any commonsense interpretation of those speeches, the president’s apologizing for the American position. That’s the apology tour. That’s the way it’s interpreted in the Middle East. If I go over and say that the U.S. has violated its principles, that the United States has not shown respect for islam, that’s an apology. How else can it be interpreted?

O’BRIEN: I think plenty of people are interpreting it as a nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it. So I don’t think that everybody agrees it’s apology.

Watch it:

As the Washington Post put it, “the apology tour never happened.” Rather, shortly after becoming president, Obama traveled to the world introducing himself and differentiating his foreign policy from that of President Bush. “This is typical of many new presidents,” including Bush himself, who “quickly broke with Clinton administration policy on dealings with North Korea, the Kyoto climate change treaty and the international criminal court.”

The manufactured attack, which Republicans kicked off in 2009, “feeds into a subterranean narrative that Obama, with his exotic, mixed-race background, is not really American in the first place.”