Posts Tagged ‘muslims’

Prominent Muslims fear NPR analyst’s firing may fan hostility

Posted in Entertainment, Islam, News, economy on October 22nd, 2010 by admin – Comments Off

Reporting from Washington —

NPR’s decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams for remarks he made about Muslims on airliners was not only roundly criticized by conservatives Thursday, but also was viewed with alarm by some Muslim American activists and scholars.

Williams said Monday on Fox News‘ “The O’Reilly Factor” that he worries when he sees Muslims in traditional garb on airplanes. NPR fired Williams on Wednesday, saying that his comment violated the news organization’s ethics guidelines and undermined his credibility.

Some prominent Muslims expressed concern Thursday that his firing would widen a gulf between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States.

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“The greater American public remains unsure about Islam and very often hostile about Islam,” said Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University, who examines the divide in his new film and book, “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.”

Ahmed said he was disappointed by Williams’ comments. But he added that NPR’s abrupt firing “does not bring the temperature down against Muslims…. Now the debate is, are we being oversensitive to Muslims?”

The flap over Williams’ remarks is the latest example of how the topic of Islam has become a political live wire in this midterm election year.

An emotional fight over the construction of an Islamic community center blocks from the site of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York erupted into a national controversy this summer and became fodder for campaign ads that have aired in Iowa and North Carolina.

At the same time, a threat by a Florida pastor to burn copies of the Koran swelled into an international issue, drawing condemnation from leaders, including President Obama.

The latest furor began last week when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on ABC’s “The View” and declared, “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” That prompted co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar to walk off the stage.

That was the incident O’Reilly and Williams were discussing Monday night when Williams said, “I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.” He also noted that it was not fair to cast all Muslims as extremists.

“We as a country are engaged in a very wild and wooly conversation about Islam and Muslim Americans,” said Suhail Khan, a conservative activist who is a Muslim American, noting that minorities such as Catholics, Jews and Japanese Americans have faced similar hostility throughout U.S. history. “Sometimes the conversation is thoughtful and sometimes it’s ugly.”

But Khan said NPR overreacted in letting Williams go. “While Juan’s comments may have been a little rough around the edges, he was voicing an honest opinion and trying to articulate his personal questions and struggles with perceptions in regards to Muslims,” he said.

The decision drew an avalanche of complaints against the media organization. By Thursday evening, more than 5,400 comments had been posted on NPR.org, many of them angrily accusing the organization of political correctness. Conservative leaders such as Newt Gingrich and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called for cuts to NPR’s funding.

NPR receives no direct federal money for its operations, but between 1% and 3% of its $160 million budget comes from competitive grants awarded by publicly funded entities such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts

Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president for communications, said that Williams had been warned several times in the past for comments that violated ethics guidelines that prohibit NPR journalists from participating in programs “that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis.”

“We felt we really didn’t have an alternative,” she said. “And it was not without regret and it was not a decision that was made lightly by any means.”

In a piece for FoxNews.com, Williams called his firing “an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff.” He said his discussion with O’Reilly included “no support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind.”

Fox News moved aggressively to turn the controversy to its advantage, signing Williams to an expanded role at the cable news network.

matea.gold@latimes.com
Prominent Muslims fear NPR analyst’s firing may fan hostility

MSM tries to create fake controversy over a cross on a T-shirt

Posted in News, religion on October 27th, 2009 by admin – Comments Off

A T-shirt design that was intended to foster school spirit on the campus of Penn State University has become a center of media-brewed controversy that will likely fizzle out before ever catching fire.

penn-state

The design, which was selected this year by Penn State students out of about two dozen entries, was created as part of an annual Penn State tradition, during which students don white clothing for a designated football game and fill their 107,282-seat stadium to capacity, thus “whiting out” supporters of the opposing team.

Made by Penn State senior Emily Sabolsky, this year’s winning design appeared on the official 2009 “White Out” shirts, which hit the shelves of the university’s bookstore ahead of this year’s “White Out” game against the University of Iowa.

Though the two-side design looks innocent enough, to some, the combination of the vertical blue stripe running down the center of the shirt’s front side along with the words “Penn State” cutting across the vertical beam appeared reminiscent of a cross.

And to a handful of students, the seemingly religious imagery on the shirt was reason enough to file complaints with the university and even to organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which in turn contacted Penn State officials.

According to Bill Mahon, vice president of university relations, six people have voiced their objections to Penn State over the shirt design while around 30,000 shirts have so far been sold.

Despite the small number of complaints, the school’s newspaper and even Fox News picked up on the story and brought the alleged controversy into light to the surprise of many Penn State students.

In the responses that followed, a vast majority of students who weighed in on the issue were either supportive or indifferent of the shirt design, including the president of the Penn State Hillel, who told the student-run Collegian newspaper that her group of Jewish students was not going to complain.

“I don’t think we have a right to say what [the university] should or shouldn’t be doing,” Berns said, though she confessed that she does believe the shirt design does look like a cross.

In three letters that appeared in the Collegian on Monday, students further expressed how laughable the current controversy is and how it’s been blown out of proportion.

“While driving through Centre County, I saw power poles shaped like crosses. Advice to Allegheny Power: You’d better change your design before someone is offended,” wrote Penn State alumnus David Dimmick.

Recent graduate Steve Edling also mocked the current controversy, suggesting sarcastically that it was time to protest that all lowercase t’s be immediately stricken from campus as well.

“From this day forth, the words ‘Penn State’ shall be in all caps or never written at all, because crosses belong at Notre Dame and nowhere else,” he wrote.

Current Penn State student Nick Mangus, meanwhile, stated that one of the reasons why he left his home state of Virginia was “to distance myself from sheer amount of politically-correct shenanigans.”

“Seriously, grow up. Quit making yourselves look like loud-mouthed extremists,” he wrote.

Despite having received complaints, Penn State spokesman Mahon told Fox News that the 2009 “White Out” T-shirts will not be pulled from store shelves and that six complaints “is not a controversy.”

Penn State student Devon Edwards, who blogs on nittanywhiteout.com, also noted how the “issue” is actually a non-issue that it wasn’t an issue until last week.

“I don’t know a single person, Jewish, Christian, atheist, or anything, who objected to this shirt on religious or moral principles, or who took offense to it,” the student blogger wrote Monday.

“Honestly, I think it’s basically people just trying to stir up controversy over something that’s ridiculous,” he added, quoting the letter written by Mangus to the Collegian.

As Edwards noted, there are around 40,000 students at Penn State, an alumni association with close to 150,000 members, as well as countless other Penn State fans scattered across the country.

Penn State’s stadium, Beaver Stadium, is largest in the United States, the largest in North America, and the third largest in the world.

On the less controversial side of this year’s “White Out” T-shirt, it states “Don’t be intimidated … It’s just me and 110,000 of my friends.”