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NPR Fires Juan Williams because of what he said about Muslims.

Williams was on "The O?Reilly Factor":

Mr. O?Reilly said, ?The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.?

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O?Reilly.

He continued: ?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.?

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. ?He said the war with Muslims, America?s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don?t think there?s any way to get away from these facts,? Mr. Williams said.

NPR said in its statement that the remarks ?were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.?

Williams managed to be a commentator on both NPR and Fox for quite a while, but I guess it was just too much to see him feeding red meat to O'Reilly just a few days after O'Reilly enraged Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg over the very same subject. These news media ? Fox and NPR ? want the image they want, and Williams did a great job, fitting into both templates for as long as he did.

The response from lefties and righties is predictable. William Kristol says:

I suspect the powers-that-be at NPR pretty much think what Juan thinks. But the standards of political correctness must be maintained. Pressure groups speaking for allegedly offended Muslims must be propitiated. And so Juan had to go.

Glenn Greenwald says:

Williams' trite attempt to glorify his bigotry as anti-P.C. Speaking of the Truth is inane, as his remarks were suffused with falsehoods...

Whether these latest comments were merely the opportunity they [NPR] were looking for to terminate their relationship with him, or whether it was caused solely by these disgusting comments, is unclear. But what is clear is that the anti-Muslim bigotry he spewed is both the proximate and cited cause....

And so on.

Williams is now free of the need to preserve his relationship with NPR. I'm pretty interested to hear what he'll say now that he's shaken of the chains of PC-radio. Talk to us, Juan!

Full post as published by Althouse on October 21, 2010 (boomark / email).