Juan Williams Read online

  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

  Copyright © 2011 by Juan Williams

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Juan.

  Muzzled: the assault on honest debate / Juan Williams.

  p. cm.

  1. Freedom of speech—United States. 2. Political correctness—United States. 3. Williams, Juan—Political and social views. I. Title.

  JC591.W55 2011

  323.44′30973—dc22

  2011016800

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95203-5

  Jacket design by Ben Gibson

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to Crown Books, Fox News, FoxNews.com, The Hill newspaper, thehill.com, and the American Program Bureau—Guiding Lights in the storm—standing tall in the faith that speaking the truth is the heart of great journalism.

  “For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience?”

  —1 CORINTHIANS 10:29

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  I Said What I Meant

  Chapter 2

  Defying the PC Police

  Chapter 3

  Partisan Politics

  Chapter 4

  9/11 and Other Man-Caused Disasters

  Chapter 5

  Tax Cuts, Entitlements, and Health Care

  Chapter 6

  Immigration, Terror Babies, and Virtual Fences

  Chapter 7

  The Abortion Wars

  Chapter 8

  The Provocateurs

  Chapter 9

  The Limits of Free Speech

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  I SAID WHAT I MEANT

  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.

  Mary Katharine joined the debate to say that it is important for everyone to make the distinction between moderate and extreme Islam. She said conservative support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is predicated on the idea that the United States can help build up moderate Islamic elements in those countries and push out the extremists. I agreed with her and later added that we don’t want anyone attacked on American streets because “they heard rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly and they act crazy.” Bill complained that he was tired of “being careful” in talking about radical Muslim terrorists but agreed that the man who slashed the cabby was a “nut” and said the same about the Florida pastor who wanted to burn the Koran.

  My point in recounting the on-air debate blow by blow is to show that it was in keeping with the great American tradition of argument. It was a fair, full-throated, and honest discourse about an important issue facing the country. There was no bigotry expressed, no crude provocation, and no support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind. Just the opposite was true. I left the studio thinking I’d helped to dispel some of the prejudice toward Muslims and moved an important national conversation forward in some modest way.

  The next day I flew to Chicago to give a speech to the leaders of a Catholic health-care system. It was a 7:00 a.m. flight, so the terminal at Reagan National Airport in DC was fairly empty when I arrived at around 6:00 a.m. It was easy for other travelers to pick me out as I waited at the newsstand and while I was in line to buy coffee. Several said they had seen the segment and told me their stories of being nervous on planes and trains when encountering people in Muslim garb. One young woman, who worked for a liberal senator, also thanked me for “manning up”—a hot political term at the end of the midterm campaign that year—about the danger of letting our fears lead us to become “haters.” When I got to Chicago, I heard similar comments from people at the hotel and even during the question-and-answer period following my speech.

  While I was waiting to fly out of Chicago’s jam-packed O’Hare International Airport that evening, a middle-aged man in a business suit made his way through the crowd to get to me. He looked to be of Arab descent and asked, “Are you Juan Williams?” I told him that I was, and we shook hands. He told me that he was a Muslim. He’d apparently watched O’Reilly the previous night. I didn’t know where this was going—what he would say next. Speaking with pride, he confided that he had recently decided to get involved with Muslim political organizations in Washington because he could no longer tolerate negative stereotypes of Muslims as violent and unpatriotic. Then he told me a moving story. He said his son had recently seen him put a letter with Arabic writing in his home office’s paper shredder. The twelve-year-old asked his dad if he was shredding the letter because he didn’t want to put it in the trash and risk having neighbors see it and realize that the family is Muslim. The father explained to his son that he was shredding the letter because it included the name of Allah and it was wrong to throw something sacred in with the garbage.

  What struck him, he said, was that his little boy thought it was shameful to be a Muslim. He said his son’s embarrassment had made him realize he was making a mistake by thinking that just by being a normal suburban
businessman he was creating a positive image of Muslims in America. He said that in light of ongoing controversies, he realized he had to speak out against people who miscast all Muslims as terrorists and to take a stand against Muslim extremists who feed the negative images of Islam.

  The man thanked me for comments made on the O’Reilly show because he feared the kind of anti-Muslim sentiment I was speaking out against.

  One of the nicest things about being a television personality is the fans who approach you in airports and restaurants. Even the most strident conservatives who watch Fox will come up to me and say that while they may disagree with almost everything I say, they enjoy listening to me. Sometimes they will ask me to sign an autograph or pose for a picture, and I’m happy to oblige because I appreciate intellectual honesty. But there are also those rare moments—like when that man came up to me at O’Hare—when people compliment a point you made publicly and appreciate the reasoning behind it. This was one of those moments.

  Little did I know that as I was talking to this man, a well-organized campaign was being waged against me by CAIR and other organizations that claimed to represent him. They set up a Facebook group and circulated a sample letter to be filled out by their members and sent to NPR. Apparently upset that I had offered O’Reilly support for any part of his comments about Muslims on The View, CAIR’s letter quoted only the first part of my comments. This was an unfair distortion, with no hint of the full context. The author attacked me for “irresponsible and inflammatory comments [that] would not be tolerated if they targeted any other racial, ethnic or religious minority” and went on to say that “they should not pass without action by NPR. I respectfully request that your network take appropriate action in response to Mr. Williams’ intolerant comments.”

  Media Matters, the far-left Web site that purports to show daily, if not hourly, instances of conservative bias on Fox, accused me of bigotry and called for me to be fired. Of course, it had been urging NPR to fire me for years because I appear on Fox. Some of my colleagues at Fox have likened Media Matters to a determined stalker and sarcastically thank it on air for contributing to Fox’s high ratings.