On Wednesday, news analyst Juan Williams found himself without a job after airing his feelings about seeing Muslims on a plane. Yesterday, Williams signed a contract worth $2 million with Fox News cable network.
All’s well that ends well? Not exactly.
Williams is still fuming that National Public Radio (NPR) fired him in the first place for simply expressing his feelings during an appearance on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor on Monday.
He is considering taking legal action against the network, and a prominent Republican is calling for Congress to defund NPR, meaning the network will no longer receive millions in public funding.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also a Fox News contributor, called the firing “an act of total censorship.”
Even Whoopi Goldberg, host of ‘The View’, came out in defense of Williams. “I don’t think he should have been fired, because, in fact … lots of people have this idea,” she said.
Williams, a frequent Fox contributor who has written a book on the civil rights movement, said on Monday:
“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot….But when I get on a 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.”
Bill O’Reilly who had Williams on as a guest again on The O’Reilly Factor last night vigorously defended Williams for expressing his fears — not his opinion — on Muslims.
O’Reilly, who noted NPR only had one black journalist — Williams, said “It’s the end of NPR.”
He also called the CEO of NPR, Vivian Schiller, “a pinhead” for saying Williams should have kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and “his psychiatrist or his publicist.”
Schiller later apologized on the NPR website for expressing her opinions about Williams. Should she be fired next?
What happened to free speech in this country? We are considered racist or bigoted for expressing our feelings now that we have a Muslim president in the White House?
In the 90s, while on board a flight to New York from Miami, I panicked when I saw a middle Eastern man in full Muslim garb get up out of his seat.
All the man did was stand up in the middle of the flight and I nearly had a heart attack. Why? Because Muslims were notorious for hijacking planes way before September 11, 2001.
Was I being racist to feel that way? Is it racist when the American news networks refer to Nigerians and Africans as Internet scammers?
We all know that a great majority of emails coming out of Nigeria today are sent by scammers. If I receive an email from someone with an African sounding name that begins with “Hello dear,” I automatically know what’s coming next.
Does that mean I’m being racist or bigoted against Africans? No. It simply means that we all react emotionally to a situation based on our prior experiences and knowledge of that situation.
