Williams’ firing is a clarifying moment in media mores. You can be Islamophobic, in the form of refusing to run the most innocuous imaginable political cartoons out of a broad-brush fear of Muslims, but you can’t admit it, even when the fear is expressed as a personal feeling and not a group description, winnowed down to the very specific and nightmare-exhuming act of riding on an airplane, and uttered in a context of otherwise repudiating collective guilt and overbroad fearmongering.

I think Williams’ worried/nervous comments were much too broad–I see zero reason to ever feel anxiety if a 100-year-old woman in traditional Islamic headdress is sitting next to me on a plane–and it’s been a long time since I recall the heart rate quickening at the sight of a bearded and nervous young man in Islamic garb standing in front of me in an airport security line. But I have felt that heightened sense of anxiety in the past, and if it wasn’t a common enough sensation you probably wouldn’t see satire like this…