hiredgun

After reading that exchange, the thing that most pops out for me is that O'Reilly claims that the "whole nations" of (let's focus on) Afghanistan and Pakistan are essentially terrorist. A curious point of view when you consider that a hundred times more Pakistanis and Afghans have been killed by Islamic fundamentalists in recent years than non-Muslims who have been killed by them.

On-topic, I actually am a little surprised at NPR's reaction. I will go out on a limb and say it was an overreaction. Look at what Williams actually says in this interview. First, he actually lays out two points of view - first he seems to argue that there is a war on Islam, but then he counters O'Reilly by making the common analogy to Timothy McVeigh.

Second, look at the content of his statement. He isn't really saying that he's scared of Muslims (he goes on to point out that there are good Muslims - not exactly a mind-blowing realization, but hey). He says he worries when he sees people riding airplanes 'who choose to identify first and foremost as Muslims' even on airplanes. I disagree with his assessment but in the scheme of things, this is actually not far out there in unreasonable-land.

So I'm not sure whether the reason I react this way is because of where Williams sits in the _spectrum_ - that is to say, normalizing for American public opinion, he is actually on the liberal side, even if that says more about our politics than it does about Williams - or maybe because I just don't see the public good in marginalizing 'centrist' voices when there are so many crazies out there commanding huge audiences. Don't we need every voice we can get?

No, I don't see it as a free speech issue.