“(Mr. Williams) remarks…were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices,” the statement said, “and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

I don’t know the heart of Juan Williams. Neither do I know whether NPR fired him because he said on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday that seeing people on planes in traditional Muslim garb makes him nervous, or because of an accumulation of immoderate things he has said in the past on the Fox News Channel.

But NPR made a mistake either way.

It was wrong to fire Williams for giving voice to fears that many other Americans, on both the left and the right, share.

Note what Williams was expressing. It was not a belief or even an opinion. He was not saying, as the Reverend Franklin Graham has said, that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion.” He was expressing a feeling, a fear.
“I get worried,” he said. “I get nervous.”

Williams also took pains to tell O’Reilly not to blame all Muslims for the actions of a few “extremists,” any more than he would blame all Christians for the actions of extremists like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh…

In this case, however, NPR is undermining its own claims to be fair and balanced, prompting, for example, a statement by the former Arkansas governor (and Fox talk show host) Mike Huckabee, calling for federal funding cuts at NPR.

Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of “God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World,” is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.
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