In a typical fair and balanced panel, Fox News warned on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is set to “infiltrate” the United States amid dire warnings about “sleeper cells” in the Muslim suburbs of Detroit.

Host Megyn Kelly began a segment about Al Jazeera’s expansion into the American television market by raising questions about the network’s “real anti-American bias.” Contributor Lisa Daftari agreed, veering into blatant Islamophobic fear-mongering in the process:

DAFTARI: The point is they want to differentiate themselves from their sister network, but at the same time, it’s the same thing. They’re having the same type of coverage. They’re apparently expanding to eight cities, including Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, Michigan is a large ex-pat community of Muslim-Americans and sleeper cells have been detected. You can Google this, you can find out all this information. So if you’re trying to set yourself apart the Qatari petro-dollars are backing this, you’re still developing in this area where the sleeper cells have been detected. They’re going to have do do much more to prove to me that they’re different from their sister network.

Watch it:

Daftari was referring to the suburbs of Detroit — like Dearborn, MI and others — which have high populations of refugees and immigrants from Muslim-majority nations like Lebanon. Dearborn has been the target of hate speech and protests against Muslims for years now. As for the specific “sleeper cells” she was referring to, in 2008 a former Dearborn resident was convicted of “providing material support” to Hezbollah — hardly the makings of a widespread support for terrorism.

Conservatives have been concerned about the purchase of former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV by Qatar-based Al Jazeera since the deal was announced in January. Fox’s points about the difference in coverage between Al Jazeera English — which currently airs in millions of homes in the United States — and Al Jazeera Arabic — the original channel, which was the chosen distributor of Osama bin Laden’s video messages — would be accurate if they weren’t so hyperbolic and fearful of the encroaching Muslim threat. Also, Fox News’ concern about the presence of Middle Eastern oil money in U.S. media does not extend to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s deals with Saudi Arabia.

A journalist with the New York Daily News has come forward as the unintentional source for a rumor that Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel was receiving funding from the non-existent “Friends of Hamas” group.

Hagel has faced an uphill battle towards confirmation since his nomination in January, a battle aided by the unprecedented amount of falsehoods surrounding Hagel’s record and finances. One of those rumors, that Hagel was hiding funding from groups with anti-Israeli ties called the “Friends of Hamas.” Dan Friedman of the New York Daily News believes that he first coined the name, when asking a Republican Congressional aide about potentially controversial groups that Hagel had addressed previously addressed and from whom he had received speaking fees:

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them. [...]

The aide promised to get back to me. I followed up with an e-mail, as a reminder: “Did he get $25K speaking fee from Friends of Hamas?” I asked.

Unfortunately, what was supposed to be a confidential question soon escaped into the right-wing ether. The name “Friends of Hamas” was picked up by members of the right-wing blogosphere — starting with Breitbart News on Feb. 7 — and expanded outward rapidly. Appearing on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show, National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy brought up the mythical group as an example of what might be lurking in Hagel’s history.

The name continued to circulate until Slate’s Dave Weigel published a piece firmly establishing that the group doesn’t exist last week. If the rumor-mongering was limited to conservative blogs, it wouldn’t be as worrisome. Unfortunately, prominent Republicans have been all too keen to go along with the line of questioning started by Breitbart.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was strongly rebuked by his Senate colleagues for his lobbing claims — completely void of evidence — that Hagel had received money from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and North Korea that he was hiding from the Senate Armed Services Committee. While visiting Israel, former Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that if Hagel’s ties to “Friends of Hamas” proved true, it would “disqualify” Hagel from being Secretary of Defense. Likewise, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in a radio interview indicated that the “Friends of Hamas” was just part of a string of new information that was “more and more concerning.”

All of this has yet to prevent Hagel from having locked-up the majority vote necessary to be confirmed when the Senate returns next week — as soon as the Republicans drop the filibuster they started to prevent such an up-or-down vote from occurring.