It’s now a fireable offense to fear a Mus lim terror attack — or it is, at least, if you work at National Public Radio.
Juan Williams found that out the hard way.
A 10-year analyst at NPR, Williams was summarily dismissed Wednesday after saying on Fox News that he gets nervous when people in “Muslim garb” board planes.
“If I see people who are in Muslim garb,” he told host Bill O’Reilly, “and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Who can blame him?
In an age when Muslim jihadists are flying with bombs in their underpants, what reasonable person doesn’t worry about such things?
Not many, we’d bet.
And don’t forget that 19 jihadis pulled off the worst attack ever on US soil.
New York certainly hasn’t forgotten the threat from Islamists. A Muslim bomber tried to blow up Times Square just last May.
And, as Williams noted, that bomber — Faisal Shahzad — warns that “the war with Muslims . . . is just beginning,” calling himself “the first drop of blood” in the war.
“I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Williams said.
Of course there’s not.
For its part, NPR says Williams got the boot because his comments “were incon-
sistent with our editorial standards and practices.”
This we don’t doubt.
The network leans so far to the left that the center looks radical-right there — and common sense makes no sense at all.
Yesterday, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said Williams, a respected liberal writer, should have kept his views between himself and “his psychiatrist.”
Right. It’s just crazy to worry about Islamist terror in a nation that’s been under jihadi assault for years.
What a foolish, foolish woman.
What’s particularly galling about the firing is that NPR gets tens of millions of taxpayer dollars annually — either directly, in government grants, or indirectly, via the tax-deductiblity of private donations.
NPR stalwart WNYC radio, for example, got $10 million in public funds, almost a fifth of its revenues, for 2008-09.
Speaking of funding, here’s a clue to NPR’s likely real motives in trying to cast Williams as anti-Muslim: It may help drive donations from lefty listeners.
“We’re profoundly sorry that this happened during fund-raising week,” Schiller wrote in a memo about Williams’ firing.
(Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)
Obviously, NPR is free to fire whomever it wants (though all that government cash does raise First Amendment issues).
But if it’s going to suck on the public teat, can’t it show even a little tolerance?
As if.