The Friends of Juan Williams: Ibrahim Hooper, Vivian Schiller… and Rupert Murdoch
L’affare Juan Williams provided some refreshing clarity regarding the totalitarianism and shameless lying of the socialist mainstream media (SMSM). A spokesman for an Arab Moslem terrorist front demands and gets on a platter the head of a liberal media pundit who had accidentally spoken the truth. Meanwhile, the brazen leftwinger—whom even the Moslem identifies as “liberal”—who gladly served up that head, denies that she has any political bias!
“Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.”
Juan Williams, on The O’Reilly Factor, January 26, 2009.
By now everybody — at least on this side of the Atlantic — has heard what happened to Juan Williams today. He’s a victim of what you might call the New Improved Canadian Free Speech Guidelines, which have recently been imported into the USA. I expect that we will be hearing more and more stories like this. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, just because police in the USA rarely arrest people for speaking out doesn’t mean that Americans actually enjoy freedom of speech.
I’ve been following the career of Juan Williams on and off for more than twenty years, usually in The Washington Post. His op-eds have never interested me very much, but I’ve read enough of his topic sentences to know he’s reliably liberal on virtually any issue. If you wear a progressive wristwatch, you can set it by Juan Williams.
“Juan feels the way he feels, that is not for me to ju-to pass judgment on, that is really his feelings that he expressed on Fox News are really between him and his, you know, psychiatrist, or his publicist, or take your pick, but it is not compatible with a news analyst on, with the role of a news analyst, on NPR’s air.”
NPR President & CEO Vivian Schiller, on October 27, 2010.
Actually, this sort of witch hunt by the Left goes back at least to the early 1990s in the MSM, when affirmative action hires got liberal New York Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin suspended, and sought to get liberal Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko fired. Note that Breslin was then the most popular columnist in New York, while Royko was not only Chicago’s most popular columnist, but the greatest newsman in the history of Chicago and, many newsaholics argue, in the history of America. Indeed, affirmative action hires went after Breslin and Royko because of their stature, in order to make a name for themselves for having scalped a famous white man.
The difference now is in the Left’s periodic upping of the ante, such that now even a black liberal is fair game. This also tells you of the high esteem in which the leftwing MSM holds Moslem terrorists.
Ibrahim Hooper, of terrorist front CAIR, who demanded and got Williams’ head on a platter. Right after Vivian Schiller, NPR’s president and CEO, fired Williams, Hooper appeared on Fox, and tried to get Megan Kelly fired, the way he’d gotten NPR to sack Juan Williams.
Note that in Hooper’s confrontation with Kelly, he indirectly admitted that he was “pleased” with NPR’s firing of Williams. But the chilling aspect of the video is the way Hooper baited Kelly, in seeking to either intimidate her into denouncing Williams (‘Oh, no, I don’t feel that way at all’), or provoke her into standing with Williams, so that he could demand that she be fired, as well! Fortunately, Kelly refused to be intimidated, and reminded Hooper that it was her show, and that she got to ask the questions. That’s one tough dame.
Actually, NPR had been looking for a pretext to fire Williams for a couple of years, now. It was just the sort of eruptions of humanity like his wonderful “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress” description of Michelle “Obama,” and his revealing of his feelings about Moslem airline passengers that made him more than just another leftwing talking points bot to the audience, and made his “liberalism” less offensive to millions of people who are both anti-communist and anti-socialist.
A year or so ago, in a fit of pique, NPR had demanded that Fox News stop identifying Williams as an NPR correspondent. Fox refused.
Williams’ NPR boss CEO Vivian Schiller told a bald-faced lie when she claimed that Williams had crossed a line in offering commentary, instead of “objective” analysis. First of all, news analysis is always normative; it always involves editorializing. If you doubt me, take a look at a New York Times “news analysis.” It’s an editorial. Second, NPR “reporter” Nina Totenberg has been crudely editorializing on-air for years. Neither Schiller nor anyone else at NPR has shown any displeasure with Totenberg.
Schiller also denied that Williams was an employee of NPR. So, how can you fire someone who doesn’t work for you? Meanwhile, out of the other side of her mouth, Schiller said she fired Williams for not letting NPR completely control what he said in his job at Fox News. That meant that Williams was not only an NPR employee at NPR, but had to submit to NPR, when he was at Fox. Schiller sounds like the leader of a cult.
Trying to get a straight answer out of a lefty like Vivian Schiller is like trying to talk to a Moslem… or a black. Each group has their own version of “taqqiya.”
Speaking of the Devil—and of liars—readers will not be surprised to learn that Schiller denies that NPR has a leftwing bias. Even Ibrahim Hooper acknowledges that NPR is “liberal”!
Prior to l’affare Williams, the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Friedman interviewed Schiller for a story that the newspaper published on its Web site on October 20. That was the day on which Schiller fired Williams for his October 18 comments on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, in which he revealed that seeing Moslems in traditional Islamic attire on jetliners caused him to fear for his safety.
Don’t bother telling Vivian Schiller, the president and chief executive of NPR, that the media entity has a liberal bias — or any kind political beliefs. She has heard the argument before.
“No, we don’t have a particular political persuasion,” Schiller said during a recent episode of “Media Matters with Jon Friedman” on The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.
I suggested that a lot of people would disagree with her assertion.
“That’s absolutely true, and I get many, many letters and I get many emails a week from the left and the right accusing us of bias in the opposite direction,” Schiller said. “It speaks to the popularity of media that takes a particular point of view…and we don’t do that, and that upsets some people and that’s fine. They don’t have to listen if they don’t want to.”
Does the foregoing mean that Vivian Schiller is an even bigger liar than the spokesman for a Moslem terrorist front?
The Left uses many code words for “socialism”: “Social,” “social responsibility,” “conscience” (“I can’t help it, if I have a conscience”—Susan Sarandon), “socialization,” etc. In the case of “National Public Radio,” “Public” is such a code term. Whenever you hear or read “National Public Radio” or “NPR,” think, “National Socialist Radio.”
Less than 24 hours after Schiller fired Williams, Fox News turned her partisan bloodletting into a propaganda victory, signing Williams to a three-year contract for almost $2 million. But this is no “rightwing” organization. Owner Rupert Murdoch caved into black supremacist Al Sharpton’s chimp hoax last year, and gave him power at the New York Post, which had already long been a haven for homosexual activists. It remains to be seen whether Williams will cause his new friends at Fox to cave in even more to the Left, or whether loyalty to them, and bitterness at Schiller and all the leftists who celebrated his firing at NPR will cause him to lean more to the Right.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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