NPR's Wake Up Call

For all the latte-sipping, earnest, semi-holy, above-the-fray intellectuals known as NPR listeners, the NPR decision to fire Juan Williams for remarks made on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News program ought to be a slap-in-the-face wake up call. Political correctness of the NPR variety is going to get us all killed.

Let’s skip over the faux sophisticated analysis of NPR editorial policies and ‘ethics codes’ and the assorted elitist nonsense that will be rolled out in defense of the firing so that the little people with the small minds can understand the wisdom of NPR. Let’s just keep it simple.

Juan Williams said: "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."

Later, commenting on the firing at the Atlanta Press Club, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said Williams’ thoughts about Muslims should be kept between himself and "his psychiatrist or his publicist."

This is a magnificent display of the absolute evil that is liberal groupthink—a/k/a political correctness on steroids—that seeks to silence, censor and otherwise label as a psychiatric disorder any view that differs from what they determine is the correct way to think.

Consider:

What Juan Williams said about his fears about getting on a plane where Muslims are on board and are going out of their way to identify themselves as Muslims is shared by 100% of American airline passengers. That’s right, every single American airline passenger with a pulse is made uncomfortable by the presence of Muslims on board with them, and any passenger who says otherwise is lying. There is nothing remotely bigoted or hateful about their discomfort. It is nothing more than common sense in an era where no one other than Muslims have hijacked planes, murdered pilots and flight attendants, and flown planes into buildings; and no one other than Muslims have plotted to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day and plotted to blow up multiple airliners over the Atlantic and attempted to blow up an airliner with a shoe bomb.

Here’s another fact: the airline passengers most deeply afraid of Muslims are the very liberals who so publicly decry this fear as a psychiatric disorder. Give them a safe public venue to spout correct attitudes, and they will go on ad nauseam in their delusional belief that by standing up for Islam they are somehow buying their safety. But in the privacy of their own thinking, they desperately hope there is a US Air Marshal on board to blow these people away if they try anything.

Last, let’s deal with the real substance of the issue that Bill O’Reilly has been raising, and from which Americans are coming to realize there is simply no escape. NPR’s glib CEO can place concerns about Islam into a psychiatric disorder category almost certainly because God and theology and faith are topics she left behind a long time ago. The people for whom such topics matter—whether Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu or something else—may as well be Martians to her. The “God stuff” is for ignorant, ‘bitter clingers’, and the world would be much less stressful if we could just get rid of all this religious nonsense.

If you think that characterization of Schiller’s thinking is a stretch, it is precisely what George Soros thinks and has been propagating through his ‘open society’ ‘open society’ institute. And consider—George Soros funds Media Matters, and Media Matters provides major funding to NPR.

But back to the issue that can’t be escaped: Islam and Judeo-Christian America can’t be reconciled. Theology matters. These are conclusions no one wants to accept, especially godless liberals who are scared out of their wits over that which they do not understand. Even many Christians want desperately to believe there is some vague shared monotheism that can make all this conflict go away; that convening a bunch of kumbaya inter-faith councils will solve it.

Well, we share humanity’s desire for peace and reconciliation, and we never subscribe to a ‘war is inevitable’ prognosis. But we believe the mandatory prerequisite to peace is to be accurately informed and knowledgeable about just what is in conflict. Engaging in surface-level happy talk about the ‘religion of peace’ will move humanity in a very dangerous direction.

We don’t need any more non-Muslims like Vivian Schiller telling us our completely rational discomfort is a psychiatric disorder. What the world could really use are some visible Muslims telling us why our discomfort is unwarranted; telling us they do not accept the literal violence-condoning words of the Koran; telling us they do not want sharia law to prevail in America. The reason our discomfort is rising is that there are for all practical purposes no such Muslims, and every other western country in which Muslims have immigrated in large numbers have been disasters of non-assimilation, where the actions of Muslims have been exactly opposite to what we wish they would tell us about their faith.

Even NPR listeners may be awakened by the Williams episode, and start checking themselves into a political correctness ‘detox’ program. At least the ones who fly on planes.

Paul Gable

October 21, 2010