“I mean, look, 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 are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.
NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”
Anytime anyone starts with "I'm not a bigot" you know proof of the opposite is almost certainly coming. The Wingers are screaming about free speech and hypocrisy, to which I'd kindly have six words for them:
Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Octavia Nasr.
It's about time somebody in the Village actually lost their job for treating Muslims like criminals for the crime of being Muslim.
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2 comments:
Three raging anti-Semites does not equal one person being "nervous" around Muslims.
Only a crackpot liberal would ever equate the two. You are just too stupid for words.
We should be able to be truthful. Not all feelings are politically correct, and that should be okay, even protected. What matters is how we act in the face of those fears. Williams was being honest about what he felt, and he was not acting in an unethical way as a result of those feelings. He simply felt a certain way, and that is human and fair. As long as his actions remained within the boundaries of decency (and the best I can tell, in this case they did) I have no problem with that.
Like Zandar says, he has had his moments. This was not one of them. I had 90 minutes to kill at the Denver airport, staring at the people ahead of me in line, and had those same thoughts. I didn't act on them, and I'm not ashamed that in the privacy of my own mind, I had a dialogue where I weighed my fears against common sense. I'm not a bigot, nor am I an uninformed sheep who is under the spell of the media. But I get nervous,too.
NPR overreacted in my opinion. A public correction or clarification would have made their point. This reeks of throwing him under the bus as a sacrifice to the shrieking stupidity that was to come. We need to give our journalists more freedom and respect than that.
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