NPR has fired Juan Williams for candid comments he made on the Bill O'Reilly program on Monday night. Mara Liasson had better watch out. I'd guess that most people who listen to NPR and most of those who work there despise Fox News and resent the fact that Williams has appeared so frequently on Fox.

I went to NPR's website and found the report of Williams termination. What struck me was that there were nearly 4000 comments and, if the first page is an indication, most of them negative.

It really confirms what I decided about NPR years ago when I quit donating to my local NPR station. They spend as much time on commercials for themselves and begging for donations that they could easily fund themselves by selling that time to sponsors. They also run short spots promoting their sponsors, so the idea that they're somehow unsullied by capitalism is absurd. Where do they think their donors' money came from?

I also got tired of the elitist appeals in their pitches for donations, implying that you should listen because their reports are aimed at smart people, the elites.

I listened to NPR and donated for over 20 years before I quit both. I listen occasionally and the programing is quite interesting. I also got tired of the liberal bias. The firing of Williams was based on complaints from CAIR, an Islamic pressure group for political correctness. I'm watching Megyn Kelly interview Ibrahim Hooper, the CAIR spokesman, and CAIR comes across as a whiny critic who wants to interfere with freedom of speech. He tries to turn the questioning back on Kelly. If this creep is the face of Islam, I don't see a good future for American-Islamic Relations.

If Mr. Hooper wants to improve those relations, he'd spend more time criticizing Muslims who support and participate in terrorism. Nearly every time we hear of a new terrorist attack, it was carried out by Muslims. It's not an issue of Muslim's civil rights that Juan Williams acknowledged the truth of that fact. There have been small, isolated attacks on Muslims, but CAIR's attitude is not going to make them go away. It's more likely to make them worse.

Here's another tip. Teach your fellow Muslims to quit emulating Ayatollah Khomeini in their expressions. When you get on a plane and notice people with angry expressions glaring at everybody, it makes you feel less than safe. That's just a fact of life. Trying to shut down anybody who says so is the action of someone who doesn't believe in free speech for anybody but himself. Until CAIR figures that out, it's only going to hurt the image of Muslims in the country.

Ed Morrissey:

Just the mere utterance of a secular heresy (and on Fox News!) is enough to get the government-funded media outlet’s Bureau of Editorial Inquisition engaged. They didn’t even bother to give Williams the Galileo option of disavowing his public statement first, and instead cast him out lest he taint the True Political Faith.

Just saw a clip of a spokeswoman at NPR saying "His comments and his comments in the past, again, I want to point out this isn't about the one issue, it's about sort of a pattern of issues that are very very controversial. We don't want our reporters and news analysts being the focus of news; we want them to cover the news and when they become too much the story because they're expressing their own views, that undermines our credibility as a news organization."

Isn't that what news analysts do, express their personal views? Are they supposed to tailor their views to be politically correct? If so, what good are they as political analysts.

And, by the way, Juan Williams didn't make himself the story, CAIR, the Huffington Post and NPR did that.

Update: Best comment so far is on Althouse's blog by "Fred4Pres": Apparently all things cannot be considered.