Breaking: Juan Williams Fired by NPR [Updates]
By Bronwyn's Harbor on October 21, 2010 at 2:07 PM in Current Affairs
Update #2: Viewing notes … Bret Baier’s doing a big segment on Juan’s firing, and I, for one, cannot wait to hear what Charles Krauthammer has to say on the Special Report panel (6 p.m. ET) … and Juan will be on O’Reilly’s show tonight (8 p.m. ET). [Update #3: See the end of this post, and please don't explode. Update #4: At FoxNews.com, see the just-published "JUAN WILLIAMS: I Was Fired for Telling the Truth," by Juan himself.]
Original Post: Megyn Kelly just announced on her Fox News show that NPR (aka “National Politically-Correct Radio”) has launched a second attack on longtime NPR contributor Juan Williams, whose contract was severed earlier by NPR for remarks he made on the O’Reilly show. (Imho, Williams simply stated what, in his heart, he feels when he’s on an airplane, and I admire him for his honesty.) According to Kelly, NPR stated:
Whatever feelings Williams has about Muslims should be between him and his psychiatrist or his publicist.
WTF? That comment is unspeakably devoid of professionalism. It’s plain nasty. No. Worse, it’s vicious. And what logical comparison is there between a psychiatrist or publicist? That doesn’t make any sense. What has come over NPR? Juan Williams, besides his broadcast career, is the author of several critically-acclaimed books on the civil rights movement, including “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary,” “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (African American History)” (Penguin), “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience” (AARP), and many more thoughtful books on America’s civil rights stories. Further, the hue and cry from bloggers and journalists is huge, and almost all are defending Williams.
UPDATE 1: Well, what’s overcome NPR, in part, is the insidious CAIR, which purports to be an organization devoted to ensuring fair treatment of Muslims in the U.S., but which many suspect is a bit terrorist-friendly and at the least bullies Americans into feeling afraid to speak their minds. Below is a superb description of the REAL CAIR — not the CAIR fondly described by liberal journalists.
From my recent post (“CAIR Not FAIR * Open Thread Too“) about Brad Thor‘s novels, in particular The Last Patriot: A Thriller. The following, after my brief introduction, is straight from the novel because I typed it word for word. Here goes:
Thor’s description of the famous CAIR ( Council on American-Islamic Relations), in his novel renamed as FAIR (Foundation on American Islamic Relations). Being the nosy newsaholics you all are, you’ll recognize the examples below that Thor uses in his novel as TRUE events.
The Saudi-funded Foundation on American Islamic Relations, or FAIR as it was ironically known, was one of the biggest Islamist front organizations in the United States. It had offices across the country with representatives who rushed to the microphones any time a Muslim was accused of anything. They were knee-jerk reactionaries who mitted out the dreaded Islamophobia slur before knowing any of the facts of a case.
Muslims pulled over with pipe bombs in their trunk? Those are just fireworks and the law enforcement officer responsible is nothing more than a bigoted Islamophobe.
Muslim imam airline passengers praying loudly right at the gate, deriding America in Arabic, switching seats to configurations similar to the 9/11 hijackers, and asking for seat belt extenders that could be used as weapons although they are not overweight and simply leaving them at their feet? These poor men are guilty of nothing more than flying while Muslim. And FAIR will help coordinate the imams’ lawsuits against the Islamophobic passengers who were unnecessarily frightened and reported the men’s completely normal activity to the flight crew.
FAIR’s efforts had had a chilling effect across the country. The FBI was openly attacked for publishing pictures of Middle Eastern men wanted in connection with unusual surveillance of ferry boats in Washington state. The cowardly Chico Enterprise Record newspaper refused to publish any descriptions further than the ages of numerous men who were actually surveilling fire stations across northern California with cameras, video cams, and sketch books. When asked by firemen what the hell they were doing, the Middle Eastern men fled in waiting vehicles.
As far as Ozbek was concerned, there was nothing “American” about the Foundation on American Islamic Relations and the word should be stripped from their name. They were an Islamic supremacist organization pure and simple who wanted to see the American government overthrown and replaced with an Islamic one governed by sharia law. They made him, as well as the overwhelming majority of responsible, law-abiding Muslims in America, sick.
What’s more. they were entirely too well connected in Washington. Though Ozbek couldn’t prove it, he was certain that FAIR’s chairman, Abdul Waleed, had been strategic in one of the most egregious scandals to come out of the Pentagon in decades.
The Defense Department’s sole advisor on Islamic law and Islamic extremism had been recently terminated because a high-ranking Pentagon official, who also happened to be Muslim, found his opinions too critical of Islam. It was like firing the government’s only advisor on Nazism right in the middle of World War II, or sacking its lone Communism advisor in the middle of the Cold War, just because a German or Russian staff member was upset that the advisor wouldn’t tone down his opinions of the enemy and what drove them.
Ozbek had seen FAIR’s chairman photographed with the Muslim Pentagon official, Imad Ramadan, too many times not to believe that the pink-slipping of the Islamic law expert didn’t in some dark way bear FAIR’s fingerprints. …
Oh, repeating myself: That Islamic center near Ground Zero? Just one more of the thousand cuts. And people like Mayor Bloomberg? No better than a witless enabler of supremacist Islamists.
END OF UPDATE 1
I’m having a major issue with my computer and can’t load pages with lots of graphics. So I hope you’ll help out and post some of the remarks that others are making at other sites about the firing of Juan Williams.
UPDATE 3: I couldn’t resist checking out Daily Kos to see what those fruitcakes were saying about Juan Williams. There’s a post by the execrable Bob Johnson titled, “I’m scared of coloreds.” (Larry and I have both had run-ins with that odious character. Bob Johnson is a very nasty piece of work.) And here’s what Kos himself wrote on the front page.
From the NPR journalists ethics handbook:
- NPR journalists must get permission from the Vice President for their Division or their designee to appear on TV or other media. It is not necessary to get permission in each instance when the employee is a regular participant on an approved show. Permission for such appearances may be revoked if NPR determines such appearances are harmful to the reputation of NPR or the NPR participant.
- In appearing on TV or other media including electronic Web-based forums, NPR journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist. They should not participate in shows electronic forums, or blogs that encourage punditry and speculation rather than rather than fact-based analysis.
Juan Williams insisted on going on Fox even though NPR’s leadership had expressed very public reservations about it at least once before. I don’t expect NPR reporters to hang out at Daily Kos, and I certainly don’t see them on Countdown or Maddow’s show. They have also been banned from going to the Colbert/Stewart rally as attendees. NPR is obsessed with looking non-partisan, and hanging out at Fox violates those efforts. If Williams got warned, and insisted on going on Fox, then he deserves what he got.
How about them apples.
by Ronald Scott
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