Guest Note: When it comes to Islam, the double standard persists. No amount of criticism or questioning is tolerated, but "tolerance" is demanded by them as to any action they may take. If they do not receive it, they threaten and take action in the form of violence. The far left comes close to this practice and has demonstrated it with the firing of Juan Williams. He expressed a fear, based on facts; he did not express an opinion. And for that, he was punished for exercising free speech, which our Constitution demands as does NPR. But like Islam, NPR has demonstrated that free speech is only for those who follow NPR's views. To do otherwise is to merit punishment. Is this not the ultimate form of censorship? Aggie
All Americans, particularly those of Arab or Muslim descent, should protest the firing of Juan Williams
By EMILIO KARIM DABUL
NPR's firing of commentator Juan Williams this week is one of the worst examples of rush to judgment since 9/11.
Mr. Williams, whether one tends to agree with him or not, is immensely respected by his fellow journalists and viewers alike for his ability to conduct himself with dignity and respect in a field where extremes of opinion and low-ball tactics have become all too common. He's mostly a moderate liberal who is able to hear other points of view with respect, and he can be nuanced in his own views. In these times, Mr. Williams's instinct for finding both middle and common ground is no small feat.
And for what offense has he been pilloried by the censorship squad of NPR? For saying out loud what many Americans think—that he gets nervous when he's on a plane and sees people dressed in traditional Muslim garb.
As an Arab-American of Muslim descent, I am not offended by this because in all honesty I have had the same reaction in similar circumstances. In Berlin a couple of years ago, my flight was delayed because, we were told, one of the passengers, who was in a wheelchair, needed extra assistance. When she finally was brought into the waiting area, she was covered from head to toe in traditional Muslim dress and only her eyes were visible. What happened? I grew nervous. I got on the plane just the same, but with trepidation.
Was my response rational? Yes and no.
It was not Muslims in traditional garb who hijacked those planes on 9/11, and it certainly was not Muslim women in veils and wheelchairs. If anything, an Islamist terrorist wants to blend in, not stand out.
However, it was not a traditional sort of terrorist attack I feared in this case, but perhaps something unexpected: a traditional Muslim woman in a veil, confined to a wheelchair, who was loaded with explosives.
That may make me guilty of an overactive imagination, but perhaps not. Not that many years later, a young Muslim on an international flight into Detroit tried to light explosives in his underwear.
I mention all this for one main reason. I grew up surrounded by Islamic culture, went to Islamic events, and was used to seeing women in traditional Muslim clothing, and yet when that woman appeared at the Berlin airport, I was scared.
That's all Mr. Williams was saying. He didn't say that they should be removed from the plane, treated differently, or anything close to that. He simply said he got nervous. And for that, he was fired.
The reality is that when Muslims cease to be the main perpetrators of terrorism in the world, such fears about traditional garb are bound to vanish. Until such time, the anxiety will remain. In the long run, it's what we do with such fears that matters, not that we have them.
But regarding what happened to Mr. Williams, no one should tolerate such intolerant behavior on the part of NPR. This broadcast network is paid for by the American taxpayers, and as such we all have a stake in its decisions.
Anyone who cares about freedom of speech should protest what has been done to this decent and fair man. And even if that were not the case, even if Mr. Williams' views made him a detestable ogre to most, he still has the right to voice them. For many Americans, NPR's consistent tilt to the left has caused them to reject it as a viable source of news.
NPR often embodies the very things it claims to stand against: unfairness, narrow-mindedness and reactionary policies.
I ask all Americans of conscience, most particularly those of Arab and/or Muslim descent, to protest the firing of Juan Williams and to demand that public funding to NPR cease until Mr. Williams's good name has been cleared and he has been rehired (if he still wants to work for this network).
We deserve better from a public radio network funded by taxpayer money.
Mr. Dabul is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/21/AR2010102105937.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
Juan Williams, the truthful dissident
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
Friday, October 22, 2010; A27
Did journalist Juan Williams, who was fired Wednesday by NPR, show unacceptable insensitivity or unforgiveable stupidity when he expressed anxiety about Muslim airplane passengers during an interview with conservative TV host Bill O'Reilly? Free speech shouldn't guarantee immunity from the standards of basic decency, but Williams's comments were hardly a firing offense. We would all be better off -- Muslim Americans first and foremost -- if we could have a more open discussion about Islam, Islamic militancy and what Muslims, here and abroad, think it means to be Muslim.
Williams told O'Reilly: "Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."
I bet that every business executive, producer and talk-show host at NPR felt some rise in attentiveness after Sept. 11, 2001, when he or she spotted a Muslim waiting for a flight. That simply means that NPR employees, like almost everyone else, process information much as the counterterrorism officers at the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security do; security officials worry constantly about blond, blue-eyed converts to Islam blowing up aircraft but scrutinize Scandinavian types a lot less than they do those of swarthier complexion.
Williams was wrong about the likelihood of a Muslim in traditional garb being a terrorist -- Muslims who wear Western clothing and speak English with Marxist-Islamist vocabulary are vastly more likely to be suicide bombers in the West than a devout Muslim in an abaya or thobe or Pakistani shalwar qameez. But while his manner may have been clumsy, Williams was right to suggest that there is a troubling nexus between the modern Islamic identity and the embrace of terrorism as a holy act.
The would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal M. Hasan saw their Islamic identities both as paramount and at war with the United States. Muslim fundamentalist literature is monomaniacal in underscoring the need for Muslims to see themselves, above all else, as a religious community that transcends national borders. In this perspective, they are under siege by the culture of non-believers. Fundamentalists emphasize the inner spiritual jihad -- an idea rooted in the Koran -- as essential to combat moral turpitude. The distance between the inner spiritual jihad and the external violent one regrettably has been covered by many Muslims -- far too many to call radical Islam a fringe movement. Violent militants have locked on to the age-old Islamic legal tenet dividing the world between the "House of Islam" and the "House of War," where infidels rule, and often turned it into an offensive weapon -- such as turning wives, sisters and daughters, whose honor men have lived to protect, into suicide bombers -- that runs roughshod over other traditional Islamic teachings.
The firing of Williams, who is also a paid commentator with Fox News, sparked a heated argument over political correctness -- and calls for the public "defunding" of NPR -- that is, in part, obscuring a more necessary debate: How do you approach the problem of Islamic militancy in the West and in the Middle East? President Obama, who has had innumerable briefings on the threats posed by al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups, has chosen to dial down American rhetoric (it was actually pretty tame under President George W. Bush) in the hope that average Muslims, wherever they may be, will view the United States as more friend than foe, and help Washington combat "violent extremism."
This friendly approach is probably, unfortunately, counterproductive. So far, it's unlikely that Muslim self-criticism -- our ultimate salvation from Islamic holy warriors -- has improved under Obama. Judging by the satellite channel Al-Jazeera, a vibrant hodgepodge of all things Arab, the opposite current, fed by Western self-doubt, appears to be gaining force. By being nice, we suggest that nothing within "Islam" -- by which I mean the 1,400-year-old evolving marriage of faith, culture and politics -- is terribly wrong. By being kind, we fail to provoke controversy among Muslims about why so many Muslims from so many lands have called suicide bombers against Western targets "martyrs" and not monsters. Worst of all, by being considerate we fail to echo the great Muslim dissidents, deeply religious men such as the Iranians Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, who see that something has gone very wrong within their country and their civilization. The president would do well to be more nuanced in his outreach to the Muslim world, giving more sustenance to those who see its systemic problems.
It is not surprising, however, that some Westerners are having a more vivid debate about Islam's travails than most Muslims are having. Williams may not be a student of Islam, but he's got good eyes and a decent heart. Would that the executives at NPR were as perspicacious and liberal.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of the forthcoming book "The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East."
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beware of rastafarians ???? also,there was a headline in one article that muslims feel threatened by a backlash from this firing. there hasn't been an anti-muslim eruption from 9/11-this will not cause even a ripple.
i guess it wasn't npr who said they would give their lives to defend his right to say it (free speech)-unless,of course, the speaker was fervently anti-israel
Jewish World Review Oct. 22, 2010 / 14 Mar-Cheshvan, 5771
The closing of NPR's mind
By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | We should have known about Juan Williams long ago. The signs of a simmering bigotry were always there. The political commentator wrote the book "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965." He followed that up with an admiring biography of Thurgood Marshall. Then, more books on the African-American religious experience, historically black colleges and black farmers.
If there was anyone clearly on the verge of exploding in a venomous rant against a minority group, it was Williams. And then, inevitably, it happened.
At least that's what National Public Radio must believe. The government-funded media outfit fired Williams for comments on the Fox News program "The O'Reilly Factor" that wouldn't even be considered particularly controversial outside the hothouse of NPR.
I know Williams a little from my own commentary gig at Fox, and can say he's exactly what he appears -- a likable, calls-them-as-he-sees-them liberal who, on most things, defends the Obama administration, sometimes passionately, always civilly. If Juan Williams is outside the bounds of polite discourse, then those bounds have collapsed to the point of suffocating constriction.
What Williams said on "The O'Reilly Factor" is that when he gets on a plane, he's worried if he sees people "in Muslim garb" who are "identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims." In this, he was simply acknowledging an anxiety that is felt by millions of Americans who fly.
This may not be entirely rational (the odds of being victimized by terrorism are very small), and Muslim garb is an unlikely marker of a terrorist in a U.S. airport anyway (a terrorist is likelier to try to fit in). But the connection between Muslims and terrorism exists in the public consciousness because Muslim extremists do routinely carry out acts of terror in the name of their religion. This can't be said of Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Jews, Quakers, Confucians, Rastafarians or even worshipers of the Aqua Buddha.
So don't blame Williams for this fear. His comment is the equivalent of Jesse Jackson's famous 1993 statement that, when worried about getting robbed, he always felt relieved to see the other person on the street with him wasn't a black youth. That no more made Jackson anti-black than Williams' remarks make him anti-Muslim.
Williams didn't go on to say that everyone looking Muslim should be rounded up at the airport, or prevented from flying, or anything untoward beyond the mere acknowledgment of his own nervous impulse. This makes him Geert Wilders?
In fact, Williams made it clear that he doesn't think we're involved in a war against Islam, took care to distinguish between Muslims and extremists, insisted that we not paint with too broad a brush when discussing these issues, and condemned anti-Muslim violence and inflammatory statements that might incite it.
None of that was enough for him to escape the blanket of political correctness that is steadily encroaching on anything relating to Islam. NPR deemed Williams' remarks "inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices." The oh-so-thoughtful people at NPR obviously believe there are certain things that can't be thought or expressed, even if those things clearly aren't bigoted and are uttered by someone who clearly isn't a bigot.
In its unwillingness to tolerate Juan Williams, NPR has shown how little regard it has for even the slightest dissent from approved orthodoxies, especially if broadcast on the hated Fox News network. Just because you speak in dulcet tones, it doesn't make you any less close-minded.
I often find NPR informative and enjoy my occasional appearance, but with this decision, it has chipped away at the country's shrinking common ground for discourse. Let the record show that it wasn't Fox News that severed its relationship with Williams because he said unacceptably liberal things, and it wasn't Fox News viewers who agitated to have him dumped over his appearances on NPR. It's the self-consciously tolerant people who behaved illiberally, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
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