Peter Smith

Fired for truth telling

Juan Williams, a black American liberal broadcaster for (the partially publicly-funded) National Public Radio in the United States, has just been sacked. He had worked for NPR for 10 years. He is also a regular commentator on Fox News, usually espousing views at odds with conservative commentators. I have watched him often. I seldom agreed with him but he handles himself well and puts his views in a considered way. No-one could fault his manner.

It may have irked the left-leaning NPR that he appeared regularly on Fox. At any rate, they seem to have bided their time waiting for a pretext to deliver a coup de grâce. It came when Williams appeared last Monday on the Bill O’Reilly show. He expressed a personal view in passing that he worried when getting onto an aeroplane and saw people ‘dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims’. ‘NPR fired me for telling the truth’, he said. Vivian Schiller, CEO of NPR, said the network’s reporters and analysts should not express opinions. Ibrahim Hooper a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations was reported as saying that Williams was in effect legitimizing the racial profiling of Muslims. ‘That viewpoint expresses intolerance and bigotry.’ Does it? Williams in fact goes out of his way – as US liberals particularly do – to distinguish between extremists among Muslims and the vast majority, as they say, of peace-loving Muslims.

Williams wasn’t giving an opinion about anything. He let slip, if you like, his own personal fears. A lot of us have them. I have to say that I haven’t flown internationally for a few years. I recall however that I was a little nervous when I saw people dressed in Muslim garb at airport terminals, and was relieved if they didn’t board my flight. There was nothing anti- Muslim about this; it was just the welling up of a sense of ignoble self-preservation. Maybe Muslims at airport terminals feel the same way. I wouldn’t be surprised.

My point to this is that if it can happen to a liberal black man it can surely happen to anyone. Political correctness has gone into overdrive when it comes to Muslims. Bill O’Reilly himself, appearing on the show The View, recently raised the ire of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar who walked out him when he said that ‘Muslims’ attacked the US on 9/11. In context, he was explaining why he thought the planned Islamic centre should not be built close to ground zero. According to Whoopi and Joy, he should have been careful to say Muslim ‘terrorists’ or ‘extremists’ to avoid offending sensibilities.

The problem is that Muslim extremists do their dastardly work in the name of their religion. They speak of Muslims rising up and attacking infidels. Hateful speeches abound. There have been numerous attacks by Muslim extremists resulting in many deaths. On a non-violent – but nevertheless threatening – front, extremist sections of Muslim communities living within Western democracies want to introduce sharia law. None of this inspires peace of mind among non-Muslims. Yet apparently we must keep quiet about our fears and concerns lest we upset peace-loving Muslims. Really the onus is on peace-loving Muslims to hurl so much criticism and rancour at extremists that they leave no room, nor need, for us to get a word in.

I was a football supporter in England in the 1960’s. Violence among football supporters was getting out of hand and was to get worse in the 1970’s. ‘Hooligans’, the mischief-makers were called. I was not a hooligan. I admit to being a peace-loving football supporter. Nevertheless, I was targeted and herded along by the police as soon as I stepped off the bus or train in some foreign town. I was treated with suspicion by the residents of whatever town it was. I couldn’t escape the ignominy of association. More policemen helped initially. More importantly, supporters gradually rejected those among them who caused violence. I remember a particular chant at one match which I saw on the tele: ‘we are the best behaved supporters in the land’. Being an English football supporter does not now generally strike fear into the hearts of bystanders. It is up to Muslims to see to it that we are not afraid when they board planes with us. They have to do the heavy lifting, not us.

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