Metro

NPR, a media terrorist for hijacking free speech

Clean up potties, not free speech.

The United States’ most basic constitutional right is in danger of being dumped down the toilet because some people cannot handle the truth.

Award-winning National Public Radio journalist Juan Williams paid a hefty price last week when the taxpayer-funded station booted him for saying he was unnerved by Muslims. Anyone familiar with Williams’ work — he is a former editorial writer, op-ed columnist, White House and national correspondent at The Washington Post, and an ardent chronicler of civil rights — knows him to be an analyst who defers to caution. It is time to sit up and take notice when the likes of him state, “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 are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.” That’s true of many folk these days.

Williams’ concerns were ratified on Nov. 20, 2006, when six Muslim clerics were kicked off a U.S. Airways flight for acting suspiciously, including praying loudly in Arabic, refusing to sit in their assigned seats, spreading out in pairs throughout the cabin, ordering unnecessary seat-belt extenders and talking loudly about al-Qaeda.

Mohammed Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a former U.S. Navy officer, later wrote in the Middle East Quarterly: “The airport episode appeared pre-planned, the American equivalent of the manufactured Danish cartoon controversy, in which Danish Islamists, who hoped to benefit from polarization, exaggerated victimization and sought a pretext for crisis.”

Where there are extremists, there are problems: Last week, more than 10 Kenyan Muslims were nabbed and hauled off to neighboring Uganda to face charges in the Kampala bombings which killed more than 70 people watching this summer’s World Cup, Yemeni security authorities arrested five Pakistanis involved in spreading poisonous jihadist ideology and inciting Yemenis to kill non-Muslims, and Muslim convert Zachary Chesser of Virginia pleaded guilty in federal court to supporting an al-Qaeda-linked terror group in Somalia, plus threatening the creators of the animated television series, “South Park,” for their depiction of Mohammad.

The United States is an open society of free thought and expression, not an Islamic one of barbaric suppression and public executions. As such, Americans are meant to possess the greatest civil right of all: Saying what they mean without fear of reprisal.

Tough times call for tough public debate, else we doom ourselves to the type of sniveling subservience this nation’s founding fathers revolted against in 1776. No matter how much National Public Radio wants to scrub the important events of the day, there is no escaping the fact that Allah-thumping Muslims are the face of Islam which, in turn, has become the countenance of dangerous and destructive behavior around the world.

Don’t blame Juan Williams for stepping over the blurry line between principle and paranoia. That was formed when mainstream Muslims showed that they weren’t nearly as disgusted about radical Islam as they ought to be — raising the disturbing possibility that the two had more in common than not.

sabruzzo@cnglocal.com

sabruzzo@CNGlocal.com