Juan Williams, longtime NPR contributor who moonlit as a token liberal for Fox News, finally got himself canned after years of flaunting NPR’s policy on their people appearing on punditry shows, for a comment (appropriately enough) he made on Bill-O-the-Clown’s show.
Principled Conservative E.D. Kain said no, Williams shouldn’t have been canned, because while he admitted to being prejudiced, he argued against implementing that prejudice as government policy:
If you look at the entire conversation between O’Reilly and Williams – and not just the out-of-context video clip that Think Progress supplied us with – it becomes pretty obvious that he’s talking about an irrational fear he experiences and the need to protect the rights of all Americans including Muslim Americans against the sort of things that this kind of fear might lead to at a political level. He also talks about the consequences of broadly painting all Muslims as enemies, and how pundits have a responsibility to resist this impulse.
Longtime BJer DougJ responded that this firing was a long time coming, and this wasn’t an isolated instance of him pissing off NPR over one comment… which ignores the problem Kain asks about, namely, whether or not what Williams said works even as a pretext to fire him.
So who’s right? Well, first of all, I will hate Kain for years for getting me to watch several minutes of the O’Reilly Factor. Juan Williams’ bigotry may be somewhat congenial, but Bill O’Reilly’s absolutely isn’t. Listening to this asshat bellow and gesticulate about how ‘whole nations’ of Muslims are at war with us, and how the anti-immigrant movement in Europe against Muslims justify his own hate.
Remarkable. Arguing that Germany, I repeat, GERMANY having a strained relationship with an ethnic or religious minority automatically is the minority’s fault? Is there any possible way Bill-O can learn less from history?
Yes, as Kain says, Juan Williams does argue against casting all Muslims as evil or violent or as terrorists, or discriminating against an entire religion for the violence of some of its members.
He also agrees with Bill-O that there was no backlash against Muslims in America after 9/11.
What the fuck?
Williams’ position in this area is incoherent, his sucking up to O’Reilly, an outright hatemonger, is intolerable, and his appearance on the show itself should never have been allowed, according to NPR’s own standards. He’s also wrong on the facts, and remarkably ignorant, if he doesn’t know about the anti-Muslim backlash America went through over 9/11. Personal anecdote: In the student housing where I lived some clown tried to put a brick through the glass door that week because they thought we were the dorm full of Muslim international students (which was actually the one across the way – silly bigots). More broadly here in America, there were beatings, there were attacks and there were mass detentions by Ashcroft, on and on. Civil liberties were trampled in the immediate hysteria.
So Kain is right that Williams tries to moderate O’Reilly’s overt bigotry in favor of his own milder prejudices. He’s wrong that this means that he should be retained by NPR. Williams’ putting his bigotry out there in public might be commendable if he in fact recognized it and dealt with it; he does not. By painting a rosy, ahistorical picture of America’s relationship with Islam post 9/11, he demonstrates his severe myopia, always a fatal flaw for ‘journalists’, and by appearing on a punditry show he violates NPR policies, which were constructed precisely to avoid this occurrence tainting their straight news focus!
DougJ is wrong if he thinks that this episode in a vacuum wouldn’t justify firing Williams (though that’s not clear from his post). Being this ignorant of events that happened so recently, and going on a talking head show to publicly proclaim your ignorance while agreeing more often than not with a fiery bigot? That’s not journalism, and a journalist should get canned for it.
Meanwhile Juan Cole over at Informed Comment employs the No True Scotsman fallacy in his piece comparing European separatist attacks to Islamic ones (which I’m not sure was the focus of the O’Reilly piece, which covered immigration in Europe but not terrorism against Europeans per se):
A Europol report on terrorist attacks in Europe in 2009 [pdf] says that out of hundreds of terrorist attacks iin Europe in 2009, most were the work of ethnic separatists. About 40 were carried out by members of the extreme left. A handful by the European far right. See also this analysis.
One by persons of Muslim heritage (I do not say ‘by a Muslim’ because terrorism is forbidden in Islamic law).
Ooh yes, the consistency and objective reliability of a definition based on ‘Islamic law’. Give me a break. If someone considers themselves a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Christian, then, well, they are. If there was a standard for religious hypocrisy or ignoring the plain text of your religious teachings then most religious people would have been booted into agnosticism a long time ago. Religious affiliation is an entirely subjective standard, short of those religions that double as exclusive clubs with a fixed membership and hierarchy.
What’s next, saying that all adulterers can’t be Christians? What about murderers? Pretty sure that’s in the old Ten Commandments, right?
This is an extremely common argument by religion defenders. Whenever a religious whackaloon goes nuts, there’s inevitably a backlash against blaming religion, in any way, for causing the problem, because buried somewhere in a particular holy book full of violence and slaughter, there was a passage, or two, or more even, saying that violence is bad in some way.
That isn’t an argument that religion doesn’t contribute to and justify violence, it’s just good evidence that religion generally is self-contradictory and subjective, a spectacular failure at investigating truth and finding facts.
