Staff editorial: Juan Williams and the drowning of Islam in rhetoric

A remark made by Senior News Analyst Juan Williams on “The O’Reilly Factor” has now lead to an increasingly complex controversy.

Williams has been fired from his post at NPR and simultaneously offered a hefty contract of about $2 million  from Fox News.

What did he say that was so controversial?

After being prompted to give his opinion about Bill O’Reilly’s recent run-in with Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar on “The View,” Williams states that he agrees with O’Reilly in that “... political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality.”

Williams then goes on to, now famously, remark, “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. ...but when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, when I see people in Muslim garb, and I think they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Taken in context, it seems that Williams is not so much asserting that such a gut reaction in an airport is appropriate or logical, but that it is a “reality” for himself and others.  

However, regardless of whether or not the quote itself exhibited bigotry, we would have liked to have seen Williams engaged in a dialogue about the rationality of such a gut reaction, rather than ostracized for political incorrectness.

While it was perfectly within NPR’s rights to fire Williams, it was not an appropriate way of dealing with the subject matter.

The unwillingness to face issues that have a subtle smell of prejudice only perpetuates the kinds of gut reactions that we all know are frequent in today’s society to any cultural symbol associated with Islam.

As with the recent dispute on “The View,” in which Goldberg and Behar walked off stage after O’Reilly equated the war against terrorists with a war against Muslims, NPR’s termination of Williams’ contract was representative of a greater problem in today’s society — the inability to talk about Islam in a vocabulary that is not politically charged.

When dialogue about an issue is somehow polarized into those camps of unequivocally for and ethnocentrically against, it should be clear that true dialogue about the issue has ceased.  

Only when people like Williams are allowed to address their reactions to Muslims in airports without being immediately branded as bigots and reacted to on those terms, will any understanding be reached about how and why those reactions are unnecessary.