RE: Outrage over NPR's firing of Juan Williams
October 27, 2010 at 3:27 pm
(This post was last modified: October 27, 2010 at 3:37 pm by orogenicman.)
(October 27, 2010 at 2:20 pm)Tiberius Wrote: How was it bigoted? He said he felt nervous; that is hardly his fault...we can't control how we feel about some things. He then went on to say that Americans should "get over it" (I'm assuming he already has, by the fact he is recommending it).
Now a bigot is "a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion" [1]. Is he being utterly intolerant of Muslims? No. In fact, he's being quite the opposite, saying that Americans should *get over* any nervous feelings they might have about Muslims on planes.
Juan Williams is a black man. If I said that I felt nervous and scared to see him or any other black man board an airplane, I would think that no one here who is not bigoted against blacks would be defending my position. So to say that he gets nervous when he boards a plane and there are Muslims on it is no different. And recall, he specifically mentioned how they dress. May I remind everyone that those who attacked us on 9/11 weren't dressed like Muslims normally dress. They were dressed in western attire, were clean shaven, and most spoke English. I live in an area of my city where there are a lot of foreigners, including Muslims. I've never had a single problem with any of them. My structural geology professor was an Iranian shiite. One of the nicest guys I've ever met, in fact. The surgeon who operated on my shoulder two weeks ago is an Arab American, born and raised here. And yet, if you were to put him in a line up with the terrorists who attacked us, I doubt that you or I could tell the diffewrence. And my surgeon, believe me, speaks perfect english, better than I do, in fact, and is a fine man. If Juan Willians is afraid when he sees Muslims dressed in traditional attire board a plane that he is on, then his fear is entirely based on ignorance. And discrimination based on fear and ignorance is the very definition of bigotry.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
