Juan Williams, who is some kind of political pundit (and one that I know next to nothing about) just lost his contract at NPR (and got a raise at Fox News!) for something he said about getting nervous any time he's on a plane with people in Muslim garb.
Huh?
I guess it's kind of weird to fire someone for that. But then again, Matt Yglesias made a pretty valid point that he wouldn't have been shocked at all to hear that Juan Williams had been fired for just not having anything interesting to say...so I'm not really outraged that he got fired over something trivial. (It's not like, say, Bill Maher getting fired after 9/11). Mostly though, what is Muslim garb? Is he talking about women with head coverings? Possibly men who stand next to women with head coverings? Cause lets face it, if we're profiling potential terrorists, women don't belong high on the list. Men traveling with women probably don't belong high on the list. Maybe what he's really scared of is Sikhs, in which case he's just ignorant. I guess a lot of people worry about really low probability events while they're on airplanes, like crashes and apparently terrorist attacks...so Juan Williams isn't really taking it that much further by worrying about the very small probability of actually being on the plane that gets attacked by one of the world's comparatively few female terrorists, but it's still weird. The only think about a woman in a hijab that makes me nervous is that I have trouble covering up my tendency to stare at unusual looking people (see also dreadlocks, revealing clothing, and dramatic makeup choices), and I don't want to be rude.
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