Ann Coulter: Nuke Them!

by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich - Oct 26, 2007

Although her arrival had been anticipated with mixed emotions on campus, I was surprised that more people did not turn up to protest that USC, a research university, should give platform to Ann Coulter as guest speaker during the ‘Islamo-facism’ awareness week.

Guest of the college Republicans, she walked on stage dressed in a short, black cocktail dress that revealed her mid-rift. Either she had the occasion wrong or the dress; perhaps she had plans after the event. Regardless, on center stage, talking about Islam and fascism among a bunch of university kids in jeans, she looked out of place. Given that she was introduced as being one of the top 100 intellectuals of the country and a few other accompanying remarks, I was surprised to hear her insistence at wanting to divide the country, albeit that the invitation was extended to her on behalf of the Republicans.

I had never heard so much liberal/Democrat bashing. In her eyes, they were on the same footing as the terrorists. Coulter did not believe that the Democrats wanted to defeat the ‘savages’. As with the Bush Administration, she continued to link Iraq to 9/11, glorified the successes, and claimed that the Democrats deliberately wanted to lose to the ‘camel-riding Nomads’ by “rooting against their own country”

She colorfully compared Guantanamo Bay to ‘freshman dorms’ where one eats well and gains 20 pounds, not foregoing the damning reports from the neutral Swiss-based Red Cross, and as her hatred of Muslims spewed out, she exclaimed: “ “they are savage, and I want to kill them.”

It is this hatred, this desire for ‘going for the kill’ that made her give the advice which shocked me. During Q & A, a ‘college Republican’ asked her opinion about what should be done to the ‘Moslems who go around take out their swords and want to kill and convert every one’ (seriously, in the 21st century, do they even make swords any more?) After delivering a few words here and there about pain, Coulter remarked; “We dropped a couple of bombs on Japan and they are as tame as sheep, a few well placed bombs should do it”. My friends gasped. She was inciting genocide on a large scale. The young Republican seemed pleased. I took a mental pause to save my sanity.

Ann Coulter is known for her controversial remarks. She makes her living by being hateful. My apprehension comes from the fact that so many follow her blindly and are in total agreement with her. They buy her books, seek her autograph, and cling to every word, considering her to be an absolute authority. The effect that she has on so many minds is a sad reflection of our society today. Ann Coulter not only influences young minds, but older people are intrigued by her and one man who was recording me hoping to catch me saying something ‘unpatriotic’ as we were discussing Coulter said: “I would like the 14th Amendment repealed”. His wife was standing next to him.

Ann Coulter is their heroin; she is not a heroine by any stretch of the imagination. She is a fix that makes them high so they can feel good about who they are, about themselves and how they really feel, but it is all a temporary illusion, induced. When they come down, they need a stronger fix, and the time will come when such hateful discourse, the fix, will have to turn into action in order for it to be effective. Herein lies the danger, and this is why she is dangerous.

I have always been able to separate the ordinary Americans from the government. This was the first time that the two became inseparable. For the first time in 21 years I witnessed hate in America – and what an ugly spectacle it was. Thankfully, I was rescued by a more familiar America, the one I cherish. As I was leaving, I saw more protestors. I joined them and we started chanting. Rabbis, priests, and practicing Moslems were among many who held signs reading: “Thanks Ann, you have united Moslems, Jews, and Christians”. She had.

Coulter's anti-Semitic comment too dangerous to ignore

The American Jewish community is in an uproar against anti Semitic statements recently made on a talk show by Ann Coulter. Even the ADL issued a statement, a group that has recently dedicated its efforts to fabricating enemies actually found a real one this time. Coulter has always been considered to be in the lunatic camp of the neocons, but her recent remarks have shown who she really is and what she really is.

This is an interesting piece. When Ann Coulter said Christians should invade all Muslim lands and convert all Muslims to Christianity, the Zionist MSM thought it was funny. They would bring her on FOX News and MSNBC among others and try to, if necessary, bait her into saying something provocative about Muslims and Arabs, and more often than not, Coulter would comply. Now, she voices the truth about what every Christian really thinks about Jews, and they call her anti-semitic and mark her up as Hitler. I'm waiting to see if Ann get any support from her fellow Christians - Naw, probably not.

Ann Coulter is buzzing from one talk show to another these days, peddling her new book. Our era values mindless contention as a kind of entertainment, and we don't just reward relentless self-promotion -- we admire it. Thus, Coulter's phenomenal success at marketing distasteful, mean-spirited books -- poorly written and spottily researched -- that otherwise would go all but unremarked upon by everyone except the rhetorical ghouls who haunt the political fringes.

Now, no Coulter promotional campaign would be complete without a calculated outrage -- a call for the forcible conversion of all Muslims, for example, or a demand for revocation of women's suffrage, an insult hurled at gays or the grieving widows of Sept. 11 victims. As more than one political consultant has remarked, the American far right is a carnivorous constituency, and it needs to be regularly thrown red meat. Coulter's singular genius has been to ignite tightly focused and timely controversies, thereby getting her ideological opponents to toss the scraps to her fans.

So if you know what's coming, why play ball and deliver the denunciation that validates the Coulter strategy?

In part, it's because this time Coulter didn't intend to ignite the firestorm that's currently raging around her; in part, it's because the implications of these latest remarks simply are too threatening to be allowed to stand.

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.

Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift.

The National Jewish Democratic Council weighed in with a petition asking other broadcast news organizations not to give Coulter a forum. "While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment," said council Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "Just as media outlets don't invite those who believe that Martians walk the Earth to frequently comment on science stories, it's time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics." (Sadly, too many Americans now believe the only way to confront offensive or dangerous speech is to silence it.)

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that Coulter's "remarks that Jews needed to be perfected and America would be better off if everyone was Christian are deeply offensive and have been the classic language of anti-Semites throughout the millennia. She may have been a guest on CNBC's 'Big Idea,' but what she invoked is the oldest 'Bigoted Idea,' and she should apologize." (Good luck on that one, rabbi.)

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.

It's a scandal that in this pluralist nation it falls to the voices of organized Jewry to make this case, because it is a case whose outcome is of the greatest consequence to us all. For too long we've pretended that the brutal political rhetoric that now characterizes our partisan politics can be quarantined, that it won't inevitably leach over into every other aspect of our lives. In fact, it's doing just that, and soon the coarse and vituperative language of the war between red and blue -- with it's instantaneous imputations of bad-faith and utter disrespect for minimal civility -- will begin to color aspects of our civil society where mutual respect is too crucial and hard won to tolerate this sort of risk.

Here, for example, is what transpired on the airwaves Friday. Deutsch went onto NBC's "Today" show and called it "scary" that, in this instance, Coulter was not being deliberately provocative. "We're playing with dangerous words in our society -- there's no accountability, there's a glibness that we in the media kind of elevate."

Meanwhile, Coulter was on the Kevin McCullough radio talk show, making the utterly absurd case that Deutsch somehow had ambushed her. On his blog later in the day, McCullough agreed. Deutsch, he said, "is an angry anti-Christian bigot, looking to make a name for himself by biting into Christian icons."

How many Americans really want to follow Ann Coulter into this sort of confrontation? Not many, one suspects. But are enough of them willing to give up, once and for all, the sort of dangerous fun she and her rhetorical fellow travelers provide?