Muzzled

ALSO BY JUAN WILLIAMS

Enough

Thurgood Marshall

Eyes on the Prize

This Far by Faith

My Soul Looks Back in Wonder

I’ll Find a Way or Make One

Epilogue

I
AM A BIGOT. I hate Muslims. I am a fomenter of hate and intolerance. I am a black guy who makes fun of Muslims for the entertainment of white racists. I am brazen enough to do it on TV before the largest cable news audience in America. And I am such a fraud that while I was spreading hate to a conservative audience at night I delivered a totally different message to a large liberal morning-radio audience. I fooled the radio folks into thinking of me as a veteran Washington correspondent and the author of several acclaimed books celebrating America’s battles against racism.

My animus toward Muslims may be connected to my desire for publicity and the fact that I am mentally unstable. And I am also a fundamentally bad person. I repeatedly ignored warnings to stop violating my company’s standards for news analysis. And I did this after repeated warnings from my patient employer. Therefore, my former employers made the right decision when they fired me. In fact, they should be praised for doing it, and rewarded with taxpayer money. Their only sin was that they didn’t fire me sooner.

This is just a sampling of some of the reaction to National Public Radio’s decision to fire me last year after a ten-year career as a national talk show host, senior correspondent, and senior news analyst. They were not taken from the anonymous comments section of a YouTube page or the reams of hate mail that flooded my in-box in the days before the firing. No, this is the response from the NPR management whom I had served with great success for nearly a decade. It is also the reaction from national advocacy groups like the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose work I had generally admired and occasionally defended over the years. Joining them was a small, knee-jerk mob of liberal commentators, including a
New York Times
editorial writer, who defended NPR as an important news source deserving federal funding even if it meant defaming me—“he made foolish and hurtful remarks about Muslims.” Cable TV star Rachel Maddow, a fervent champion of free speech, agreed that I had a right to say what was on my mind, but in her opinion the comments amounted to bigotry. I had a right to speak but no right to “keep [my] job.” NPR also found support among leftist intellectuals who regularly brag about defending the rights of the little guy but had no problem siding with a big institution over an individual journalist when the journalist was me. One writer said I had long ingratiated myself with conservatives and I had gotten what was coming to me. His conclusion about me: “Sleep with dogs, get fleas.”

What did I do that warranted the firing and the ad hominem attacks that preceded and followed?

I simply told the truth.

Looking back on the torrential media coverage surrounding
my dismissal, I am struck by how little of it tells the full story of what actually happened. Basic facts were distorted, important context was not provided, and personal attacks were treated as truth. The lack of honest reporting about the firing and the events that led up to it was not just unfair—most of it was flat-out lies.

In this first chapter, I will tell you the full story of what happened to me. My purpose in doing this is not to get people to feel sorry for me. The goal of this book is to set the record straight and to use my experience in what amounts to a political and media whacking as the starting point for a much-needed discussion about the current, sad state of political discourse in this country. It is time to end the ongoing assault against honest debate in America.

This story begins with a typical Monday night for me. I went to the Fox News Channel’s bureau in Washington, DC, to do a satellite interview for Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show,
The O’Reilly Factor
. I have appeared on Bill’s show hundreds of times since I joined Fox in 1997. The drama here is watching me, a veteran Washington journalist with centrist liberal credentials, enter the lion’s den to debate the fiery, domineering, right-of-center O’Reilly. When I do the show I am almost always paired with a conservative or Republican guest. My usual jousting partner is Mary Katharine Ham, a conservative writer. This strikes some critics as stacking the deck by having two conservatives take me on. In reality the combination offers viewers a range of opinions, because O’Reilly is unpredictable. He listens and admits when he is wrong. Ham is an honest debate partner who is willing to call them as she sees them and to veer off any conservative party line. If the deck is stacked,
it’s because there can be no doubt that this is Bill’s party and he runs the show. The audience tunes in to see him, and they keep tuning in because they love his cranky but vulnerable personality. He is a star and he can be intimidating, but I see no need to back down in a debate and I genuinely respect him. I think he respects me too. Along with Mary Katharine, Bill and I share a sense that we can disagree without the personal attacks and put-downs. I hear from viewers that the segment is a hit because they learn something from watching people with different political convictions and viewpoints—but also with affection for each other—try to make sense of emotional, political issues. We don’t play the cheap TV debate trick—often used to stoke TV political debate shows and soap operas—of creating false tensions by shouting over each other and calling each other liars. We treat each other as sincere people with integrity and the courage of our convictions. But make no mistake, we are painfully direct with each other. To survive on the show, you’d better know how to think quickly and counter-punch with a fast, pithy point or you’ll be left behind with less time to talk, reduced to what Bill calls a “pinhead.”

The intensity and the variety of views and insights that come from such debate is one of the reasons I enjoy my job at Fox. The news channel looks for the conservative slant in the stories it selects to tell, and its leading personalities in prime time are right-wingers. But you can hear all sides of the debate on Fox.

Our segment led the O’Reilly show that Monday night in late October. The topic for debate was the effect of political correctness on the country’s ability to talk about the threat posed by radical Muslims.

O’Reilly set up the segment by talking about his recent experience on ABC’s daytime program
The View
, where he had discussed the proposal to build an Islamic community center near the site of the September 11 attacks in downtown Manhattan. O’Reilly expressed his agreement with the millions of Americans who felt it was inappropriate. When asked by cohost Whoopi Goldberg why it was inappropriate, O’Reilly said, “Because Muslims killed us on 9/11.” This prompted Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the set in protest. Barbara Walters criticized her cohosts, saying they should not have done that—we should be able to have discussions “without washing our hands, screaming and walking off stage.” They did return after O’Reilly apologized for not being clear that he meant the country was attacked not by all Muslims but by extremist radical Muslims.

The episode got national attention as a celebrity TV mash-up between the conservative, brash, male O’Reilly and two furious, liberal women. But a serious analysis of the heart of the exchange—the truth and the lies—never took place. So O’Reilly took it to the very top of his next show, with me as his guest. At the start of the debate, Bill invited me, indeed challenged me, to tell him where he went wrong in stating the fact that “Muslims killed us there,” in the 9/11 attacks. I accepted Bill’s challenge and began by crafting my argument with a point of agreement—an approach intended to get Bill and Bill’s audience to listen to my concerns about what he had said on
The View
. First, I said he was right on the facts; political correctness can cause people to ignore the facts and become so paralyzed that they don’t deal with reality. And the reality, I said, is that the people who attacked us on 9/11 proudly
identified themselves as devout Muslims and said that they attacked in the name of Allah.

To illustrate my appreciation of the underlying truth of his statement, I then made an admission about my feelings. I said that I worry when I’m getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims. This was not a bigoted statement or a policy position. It was not reasoned opinion. It was simply an honest statement of my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims who professed that killing Americans was part of their religious duty and would earn them the company of virgins in heaven. I don’t think that I’m the only American who feels this way. Anyone who has lived through the last few years of attacks and attempted attacks knows that radical Islam continues to pose a threat to the United States and to much of the world. That threat had been expressed in federal court the very week before the O’Reilly show, when the unsuccessful Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, bragged in court that he was just one of the first to come in a Muslim-inspired fight against the United States. “Brace yourselves,” he said defiantly, “because the war with Muslims has just begun.”

So there is no doubt that there’s a real war being waged and that people are trying to kill us.

Intelligence agencies worldwide, even in countries with a majority of Muslims, agree that Muslim extremists with a murderous jihadist mind-set are recruiting others to carry out the bloodletting against the United States, Western Europe, and their global allies. I wanted Bill and his audience to know that I was not there to play a game of pretending that everyone in the world is a good soul deserving of a hug and a Coke.

Having established agreement with Bill on the underlying facts, I began the next line of reasoning in my argument. I challenged O’Reilly not to make rash judgments about people of any faith. I took the fight to O’Reilly because I felt that he had done exactly that in his comments about Muslims on
The View
. I urged him to choose his words carefully when he talks about the 9/11 attacks, so as not to provoke bigotry against all Muslims, the vast majority of whom are peaceful people with no connection to terrorism. I pointed out that Timothy McVeigh—along with the Atlanta Olympic Park bomber and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals—are Christians, but we journalists rarely identify them by their religion. I made it clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears—such as my own when I see people in Muslim clothes getting on a plane—color our judgment or lead to the violation of another person’s constitutional rights, whether to fly on a plane, to build a mosque, to carry the Koran, or to drive a New York cab without the fear of having their throat slashed—which had happened earlier in 2010.