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that night and guest-hosted it the following night. Bill really went to bat for me, for whichI am grateful. He called for an immediate suspension of all public money to NPR and correctly pointed out that liberal billionaire George Soros had donated $1.8 million to NPR the week before. Soros had also given money to Media Matters in the past.
    Conservatives like Brit Hume and Bill Kristol, whom I had debated ferociously over the years on
Fox News Sunday
, stuck up for me and blasted NPR. Even more heartening was the support I received from fellow Fox commentators whom I had criticized when they were in positions of political power. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and Rick Santorum all defended my right to free speech and called out NPR for its hypocrisy.
    Sarah Palin surprised me most of all. Ever since she was picked by John McCain to be his vice presidential running mate in the 2008 campaign, I have questioned her qualifications and her command of the issues facing the country. I was especially tough on her for quitting her job as governor of Alaska less than two years into her term. Yet Palin wrote on her Facebook page: “I don’t expect Juan Williams to support me (he’s said some tough things about me in the past)—but I will always support his right and the right of all Americans to speak honestly about the threats this country faces. And for Juan, speaking honestly about these issues isn’t just his right, it’s his job. Up until yesterday, he was doing that job at NPR. Firing him is their loss.”
    A wave of phone calls and e-mails to NPR complained about my firing. The ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, said the day after my firing was “a day like none I’ve experienced since coming to NPR” three years earlier. I was told the phones“rang like an alarm bell with no off button.” NPR got “more than 8,000 e-mails, a record with nothing a close second.” She said most of the callers wanted NPR to hire me back immediately. So many people tried to use the “Contact Us” form on NPR’s Web site that it crashed. One posting on the Web site, described as typical by the
Los Angeles Times
, read: “In one arrogant move the NPR exposed itself for the leftist thought police they really are.”
    Apparently NPR did not agree. The day after my firing, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller told an audience at the Atlanta Press Club that I should have kept my feelings about Muslims between me and my “psychiatrist or [my] publicist—take your pick.” The videotape of her comment, complete with the look of pure contempt on her face as she spoke, appeared across the country on news shows throughout the day. She was criticized for her personal attacks on me by NPR’s own ombudsman. Schiller later issued a statement of public apology for her words on the NPR Web site, although she never gave me the courtesy of a personal call. A week later she sent a FedEx envelope to my house with a letter saying she was very busy, she did not know how to reach me, and I needed to contact her secretary to set up a time to talk with her. I wrote back that since she had had no time to talk to me before firing me I saw no need to talk to her now.
    In the media, Schiller tried to justify the firing by saying that my defenders failed to appreciate that “news analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that is what’s happened in this situation.”
    Some leading liberals rallied to Schiller’s side. AndrewSullivan said my admission of nervousness around people in Muslim garb at airports amounted to a “working definition of bigotry.” Playing on the fact that I am black, Sullivan asked if a white person who feared being mugged by a black man dressed in “classic thug get-up” wouldn’t be guilty of bigotry. Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com wrote that my comments amounted to “giving cover to incendiary right-wing attacks” on Muslims. Keith Olbermann, on