It comes as no surprise that National Public Radio (NPR) axed Juan Williams -- a well-known political pundit, newspaper columnist and book author -- after saying on FoxNews' The O’Reilly Factor that he gets nervous when boarding a plane with people dressed in Muslim garb.
In response to Bill O'Reilly's assertion that “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet," Williams agreed with O'Reilly: “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,” Juan Williams responded.
Call it irony or surrealism, but the piece I read just prior to the New York Times article about Williams' firing was a Newsmax report that began:
Billionaire currency titan George Soros, long a patron of liberal political causes in the United States, is giving $1 million to Media Matters in what he says is an attempt to stop the growing popularity of Fox News. But Glenn Beck and other conservatives say it confirms their worst fears: that Soros is out to manipulate public opinion in the same way he steers currency trades.
Draw your own conclusion about whether NPR properly represents all of the taxpayer-granted and private sector-donated interests that support it; whether its PC grandstanding is nothing more than a veil that covers its progressive political activism. Likewise, figure out for yourself whether George Soros has anything to do with NPR's coincidental firing of a staunch liberal whose opinions are more widely exposed to the TV audience of the left-hated FoxNews.
A larger point that you might miss in this Williams/Soros story juxtapositioning is that terrorism, even in its least life-threatening manifestations, always results in some people demonizing an entire class for the perceived misdeeds of a mere handful of the members of that class.
The camp internment, by FDR, of Japanese-Americans after Japan's unprovoked raid on Pearl Harbor is a good, if not extreme, example. A more perfect modern-day example is the portrayal, by the left, of Christians who oppose the encroachment of the federal government as Tim McVeigh-style terrorists.
Americans, even liberal Americans of color like Juan Williams, have become uncomfortable with Muslims in certain settings as a result of jihadists' (large "T") Terrorism. But the mouthed (small "t") terrorism of the largely Soros-funded far left and its sympathetic mainstream media has led to the demonizing of moderate Fox employees like Juan Williams, Mike Huckabee, Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren -- personalities who go out of their way, often to the dismay of right-wingers, to offer a "fair and balanced" portrayal of sociopolitical issues.
Even uber-conservative FoxNews host, Sean Hannity, who minces no words regarding his anti-socialism, often features liberals like Juan Williams, hard-left pundits and outright extremist administration shills in his discussion panels. The same fairness cannot be attributed to MSNBC's unilateral format or to CNN's neutered PC attempt at balance.
Add the honchos at NPR to the list of progressives who are preoccupied with freedom of speech but are lightning quick to silence -- or walk out on -- anyone who refuses to express himself in a PC manner. PC, therefore, now stands for Progressive Censored.
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