Anti-semitism for Me, but not for Thee
posted by Susan Stark
Ann Coulter has done it again. She has said some politically incorrect thing Ted Rall-style.
But the difference between her and Ted is that she is, for some reason, treated like a serious, major political thinker, while Ted is marginalized in comparison.
Ms. Coulter recently made an anti-semitic statement, claiming that Jews can only have their spirituality “perfected” if they become Christians. This is classical anti-semitism at it’s finest.
Now imagine if Ted or anyone else on the left made such a statement. They would be pushing brooms and mops faster than you can say “Torquemada”.
Now, will Missy Coulter be pushing a mop? Not according to NBC spokesperson Allison Gollust:
“The decision to put someone like Ann Coulter on our air is not one we would ever take lightly,” said NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust. “However, when you talk about banning someone from the airwaves because of their views…you are getting into dangerous territory.”
Oh, golly gee, such concern for free speech! Does this mean that Noam Chomsky, an intellectual with harsh criticism for Israel, will get equal blab-time with Coulter? Or what about Norman Finklestein, who wrote the The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering? Will he be invited on TV without being shouted down by the host?
And if Ahmedinejad is “evil” for denying Israel’s legitimacy, then Coulter is twice as “evil” for denying Judaism’s legitimacy. By that token, Ahmedinejad should be a regular staple on all of the news channels. That would be in keeping with Ms. Gollust’s assertion of not “banning someone from the airwaves because of their views”.
Or what about Hezbollah? There is a ban on their satellite channel in the United States. What’s the big deal about that considering what Ann Coulter just said is right up their alley? (In my opinion, we should be able to watch Hezbollah here in the US if we choose to. The ban is stupid and infantile.)
Alas, Ms. Coulter will continue to be given the royal treatment in pundit-land, despite her remark. And her books have and will continue to be “best-sellers”.
But, I have my own conspiracy theory as to why there won’t be any fallout for her latest remark. As much as the Anti-Defamation League and the National Jewish Democratic Council publicly claim to decry her words, they secretly benefit from those words. Many Jews have fallen away from supporting Israel, and some prominent Jews are questioning whether Israel should even exist anymore. There’s nothing like a good, anti-Semitic remark blurted out by a public person like Ann Coulter to scare the Jews back into compliance again.
6 Comments.
What are you talking about? Ann Coulter has always been a friend of the Jews. In fact she never even made such comments. It was all staged by terrorists, communists, abortionists, and perverts who are trying to discredit the people who want to protect America! You're a thought criminal! Everybody knows that it's the LEFT WING who hates the Jews! They're all self deprecating, hateful Hollywood liberals who want to see Israel wiped off the map! There's no such thing as Yale educated, George Bush type, members of country clubs that exclude Jews!
Sorry… I'm re-reading "Nine-Teen eighty Four". It's astounding the parallels that can be drawn between modern America and Orwell's finest work.
In all seriousness, are we supposed to believe the right wing assertion that liberal bias is rampant in the media? Why is Coulter not being lambasted relentlessly if there is?
The driving force in this is not so much the "Jewish Lobby", but rather the "Christian Zionist" force which Dubya and NeoCons use for a lot of free campaign work and their few legitimate votes. Oh, and a lot of them share this view.
Now, even the worst things said about Islam, about Osama and the Taliban… They look sane in comparison to the "Christian Zionist" movement. The CZ wants the state of Israel for this reason; The Rapture. According to popular ("Left Behind", etc.) interpretation of King James's edit of the Roman Catholic edit of a bunch of texts most written centuries after Jesus, the "Rapture" occurs between the re-formation of Israel and its destruction.
They supported (yes, after WWII using inflated Holocaust guilt as much as any Jew) the formation of the state of Israel for that reason, its eventual destruction. They thought the Communists, whoops now the Arabs, would wipe out Israel and they'd get to laugh at the Jews burning in Hell from Heaven. They are so eager for the Rapture, they literally are setting in motion the "Battle of Armageddon". They probably want the Jews to burn far more than Hitler ever did…
Except they want someone else to have soot on their hands when the one Jew they care about, Jesus, meets them.
Thanks. Excellent delivery of sting in a well-developed response to a vapid provocation from the the Vapid Provocatrix.
Thanks.
Actually, it's not "classic anti-semitism", it's a belief shared by many Christian denominations, although probably none but the most conservative ones would publicize the belief.
The explanation is really, really, simple.
The coming of Christ, the Messiah, is viewed by these Christians as being the summit and fulfillment of Jewish history and of the Jewish prophetic tradition. So by adopting Christianity their Judaism would be "completed" or "perfected".
This, by the way, is the way that Bob Dylan's conversion to (fundamentalist) Christianity was facilitated, exactly in those terms if you read….I can't remember the name of the biography right now.
It's surely offensive to say that America is a Christian country and that people who aren't Christian, Jews in particular, could benefit by converting to Christianity, thereby making the country more homogenous, but the actual phrase "perfected" is sort of a weasel word used by Coulter to avoid charges of outright anti-semitism.
Surely if she had just said that America would be better if everyone was Christian and just said "Including Jews", it would have had an impact infinitely worse than what she's experiencing already for her statement.
to paraphrase Stephen Fry, the word 'Countryside' should be redefined to mean "The murder of Ann Coulter."
–Occam's Electric Razor
Susan,
There's a very simple reason that Coulter can get away with saying this but Rall's position on Israel draws fire.
Coulter is talking about eschatology, and people are strangely willing to bet that their eschatology is right and the other's is wrong. So to a faithful Jew who believes in the coming of the messiah, her words are meaningless because, because he knows that once the messiah comes, Coulter will realize that worshipping Jesus all that time was heresy, and she will acknowledge the sovereignty of the Holy Blessed One.
Rall, however, by objecting to the security barrieris proposing concrete changes (pun intended) that would expose Jews to a threat that has largely been mitigated.
But that's not all – the hypothetical Jew mentioned above, who is, incidentally a Right Wing Jew (Foxman, and pretty much all of AIPAC) shares a goal in common with Coulter – immanentizing the eschaton. If a Putsch for the Biblical Borders is what it takes to bring messiah, then that's the goal.
Most Jews in the US, and indeed most Israelis DON'T want this. But the wingnuts got power while the rest of us were marching for workers/civil/gay rights.
Most Jews want an Israel secure in its borders and at peace with its neighbors. Rall would deny us the first, Coulter the second.