Curt Schilling posted a meme about Muslims and Nazis. It was a very bad meme.
Not only was it factually inaccurate -- even though he wrote "the math is staggering when you get to true numbers," he claimed seven percent of Germans were Nazis in 1940, when in fact over 40 percent voted for the Nazi party in 1933 -- it didn't really make any logical sense (does he want us to invade ... Muslims?). Oh, of course, it was bad because it basically said Muslims were bad.
Because the meme was so bad, ESPN suspended Schilling, saying that "Curt's tweet was completely unacceptable." Schilling himself issued an apology, saying it was a "bad decision." But the thing is, Curt Schilling says and does things like this ALL THE TIME.
I'm not talking about Schilling's passion for posting memes on his Facebook page. The majority of the memes he posts are harmless. Schilling doesn't like Barack Obama, there is nothing wrong with disliking Barack Obama. Curt Schilling loves the troops -- we should all love the troops!
But Schilling also really likes posting about how he thinks Muslims are bad. He does it all the time.
This is a video of somebody wearing a scarf pulling up to a cafe next to a baby in a Volkswagen and detonating a suicide bomb with the caption, "Muslim culture meets German engineering." Schilling's response was, "Ok, awesome."
This is a joke about replacing prayer mats with bombs to kill Muslims:
This is a cartoon Schilling shared saying the Western media is responsible for hiding the fact that Islam is just about war:
And finally, this comparison of one of the most peaceful quotes in the New Testament to a quote that is not actually in the Quran. (I'm not a Quranic expert, but googling this phrase mainly leads to message boards run by Christians about how Muslims are bad. At any rate, Ibn Ishaq, the source being cited, was a biographer who lived 150 years after Muhammad, and his works are not considered part of the Quran.)
If the reason for suspending Schilling was not the anti-Muslim rhetoric, but specifically trivializing the Holocaust and saying some non-Holocaust thing in our modern society will lead to the Holocaust, well, he's done that, too, on several occasions.
ESPN suspended Schilling and he apologized as if he made a single mistake, accidentally having an aberrant thought and transmitting it to the world in a moment of failure. That's not the case! "Muslims = murder" is a part of Schilling's worldview and he likes telling us about it all the time. If ESPN thinks that a single instance of that line of thinking is worthy of a suspension, Schilling has already gone down that road enough times to get fired.