On Friday night, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum drew attention to the presence of Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin‘s funeral.

MacCallum began by praising the “moving” performances from Jennifer Hudson and Gladys Knight, but admitted to her panel that she kept finding herself “distracted” by the anti-Semite, who she noted was in “every single shot.”

“I’m thinking, ‘What was he doing there?'” MacCallum said.

Kelly Jane Torrance of The Weekly Standard reacted by pointing out various outlets on their websites were “cutting off” Farrakhan from the dais, which was shared with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and former president Bill Clinton, which she thought was “very telling.”

“Why was he so front and center?” MacCallum asked. “It’s something that’s supposed to be about Aretha Franklin became, I thought, in many ways about some of these gentlemen who were right behind.”

Kylie Patterson of the New Leaders Council noted that both Franklin and Farrakhan were part of the liberation movement, insisting that despite his history being “mixed,” she wanted him at her funeral along with Jackson, Sharpton, and Clinton.

“This is her funeral,” Patterson told the Fox News anchor. “I mean, it’s her choice- who she wants there, how she wants people sitting.”

“I just wonder how much jockeying there was for prime position,” MacCallum continued. “I saw that he was kind of pushing his website and all of this on Twitter. And I thought, ‘Gee, that’s kind of a little bit unfortunate’ that it was distracting in that way. He, you know, has said awful things about Jewish people, about white people, about gay people and I thought it was never the message that I heard in Aretha Franklin’s music.”

Watch the clip above, via Fox News.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2N50A0a