Coulter’s War

[Jewish Nationalist]

Her work epitomizes the strengths and the weakness of contemporary conservatism.

Coulter’s War



The last column on the Inverted World argued that liberal opposition to the War on Terror was rooted in the “whites as cancer” myth. Liberals’ inflated, and often groundless, attacks on the military and Bush administration demonstrate that they view America as a country that persecutes minorities, represses freedom of expression, and treats non-whites abroad with the callous cruelty of a master race.

Such a perverse portrait of a country that is, in fact, dangerously and shamefully indulgent towards non-whites has led to a conservative uprising. Conservatives who defend the War on Terror have failed to recognize the racial basis of the liberal attack; rather, they accuse liberals of bias against America or Christianity or capitalism, rather than whites. Nevertheless, mainstream conservative writers have been very effective at criticizing the effects of the “whites as cancer” myth, if they have not yet seen the cause. Their work is a powerful, but incomplete, exposure of the Inverted World.

Perhaps the best example of such a writer is Ann Coulter. While she has never adopted a thorough-going race realist philosophy, she has been devastatingly effective in exposing liberal bias on racial issues among Democratic politicians, journalists, and celebrities, among others. She has taken on racial correctness in the coverage of crime, IQ, and immigration. But it is in her writings on the War on Terror that Coulter has best captured liberals’ obsessive need to cast white racism as the ultimate source of evil in the world. In case after case, she reveals that liberals believe American whites are a greater danger to the world than Muslims, and her scorching prose gives voice to the American public’s indignation at such an outrageous judgment.

In her 2003 book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and in one of her columns, Coulter trained her sights on Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s campaign against racial profiling after 9/11. It is clear that Mineta viewed racist treatment of Muslims as a graver threat than further terrorist attacks. As Coulter puts it:

On September 21, as the remains of thousands of Americans lay smoldering at Ground Zero, Mineta fired off a letter to all U.S. airlines forbidding them from implementing the one security measure that would have prevented 9/11: subjecting Middle Eastern passengers to an added degree of preflight scrutiny.

When Mineta discovered “to his horror” that airlines “were using logic and deductive reasoning to safeguard their passengers,” Mineta promptly sued them and forced the airlines to pay hefty settlements.

Instead of devoting extra scrutiny to Arabs, airlines were forced to inconvenience everyone. After she notes that Al Gore was subjected to an airport search, Coulter captures the absurdly dogmatic nature of such proceedings:

There’s a lot not to like about Gore, but he’s not a terrorist. Gore said he was glad he was searched. Why? To spare a terrorist the trouble? … Searching Al Gore is a purely religious act. It is a purposeless, fetishistic performance of ritual in accordance with the civic religion of liberalism.1

As Coulter documents, it is the specter of white racism that drives liberals to such irrationality. Mineta justified his campaign against racial profiling by appeal to his own boyhood experience of being carted off to a relocation camp for the Japanese during World War II.2 Unpleasant as this experience must have been for him, there is no comparison between treating Muslim airplane passengers with special caution and relocating whole populations. Senator Dick Durbin, always good for a hysterical outburst, compared supporters of racial profiling to extremists “crawling on [their] bell[ies] in the mud at a right-wing militia training camp in Idaho.”3

The same specter distorted liberals’ perspective on the investigations and prosecutions of terror suspects under Attorney General John Ashcroft. Sen. John Kerry said in 2003, “When I am president of the United States, there will be no John Ashcroft trampling on the Bill of Rights.” Sen. John Edwards chimed in: “We must not allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights and our freedoms.”

Coulter reveals how unfounded such rhetoric about a civil rights crisis was.

In the months following the most devastating attack in world history …, John Ashcroft detained 766 non-citizens, many on immigration violations. Eighteen months later, more than 100 of them had been convicted or pled guilty to terrorism-related offenses and another 489 had been deported or left the United States willingly.4

Ashcroft was detaining suspects on perfectly legal grounds, and many of them were genuinely dangerous.

Coulter explores in detail some of the accusations against Ashcroft, including the controversy surrounding the FBI investigation and prosecution of an al-Qaeda cell in Lackawanna, New York in 2002. The suspects, who were of Yemeni descent, traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 to visit al-Qaeda training camps where they encountered Osama bin Laden and received training in explosives and other weapons. Once they returned to Lackwanna, they never wanted for money to buy luxury items, despite the fact that they were unemployed or had menial jobs. The FBI found a cache of weapons in one suspect’s home and an Islamic pamphlet on “martyrdom operations” in another’s. The men were sentenced to prison in 2003.5

However strong the evidence, the media suggested racist bullying was the FBI’s motive. In 2002, the New York Times published an article that highlighted interviews with tearful Yemenis swearing that the men had been cast as criminals solely because of their religion. Along with the story, the paper ran a photo of a six-year-old white boy pointing a gun at a store saying “Arabian Foods.” The Times later admitted the photo had been staged. This photo was, Coulter remarks, “the only provable hate crime [committed] in Lackawanna.” Newsweek magazine suggested absurdly that the men were being prosecuted merely because they had wanted to learn more about Islam.6

As we saw in the case of Eason Jordan in the last column, journalists’ obsession with white racism makes them prone to believe any tale of wrong-doing by the US military, no matter how improbable. Another example is Newsweek’s 2005 report that troops at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Koran down a toilet in order to humiliate Muslim prisoners. The week after the story appeared, Newsweek was compelled to admit it was unfounded.

It is astonishing that Newsweek gave the story any credence whatever given how little evidence there was behind it. The source was an unconfirmed report by an unnamed “senior U. S. government official.” Newsweek’s Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas also gave as a justification that similar stories, based on the tales of released detainees, had run in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera.

False though it was, Muslims took the story in deadly earnest. Anti-American riots broke out throughout the Muslim world, from Malaysia to Egypt. In Afghanistan, 16 died.

Coulter lambasted Newsweek for such irresponsibility in her column.

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion … How about that for a Newsweek for a cover story, Evan? You’re covered—al Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Coulter was quick to point out the media’s double standards:

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for “trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs.” But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there’s no time for fact-checking.

The recent Baghdad Diarist scandal has given Coulter occasion for similar reflections.

Coulter blamed liberal bias on hostility towards Christianity in her article on Newsweek, and she has made this the theme of her most recent book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. (This book’s robust endorsement of creationism is naturally dismaying to a Darwinist like myself, but that is a subject for another time.) Sometimes, Coulter suggests the cause of liberal bias is hatred of America or civilization as a whole. She concludes Treason with a statement of this last theory: “liberals always take the side of savages against civilization.”7 However, her examples constantly suggest that the deepest motive of liberals is fear of white racism. Most of the topics where Coulter perceives the strongest liberal bias—the War on Terror, the Central Park wilding, or the IQ debate—concern race.

Coulter does occasionally make cursory references to liberal hostility towards whites. An example is her statement above that the staged photo in the New York Times was a “hate crime.” Elsewhere, she has complained that an anti-racism campaign by an educational group was “calculatedly inciting hatred toward white American boys.” However, she has never devoted any extended discussion to the place of anti-white bias within liberalism.

The strengths and the weakness of Coulter’s work, then, epitomize those of contemporary conservatism: a powerful rage against the effects of the “whites as cancer” myth, combined with an unwillingness to recognize their source. It is only once they realize what lies behind liberal hostility to America, Christianity, capitalism, and so forth that conservatives will find their true cause.

[MassuhDGoodName]

That's not Ann Coulter!

That's a drag queen wearing falsies.

[Ultra Requete]

That's not Ann Coulter!

That's a drag queen wearing falsies.

I Just noticed the adam's apple; it's sick.

[Barach Velvel ben Lazer Eliazer]

Ann Coulter is a true American hero, and the only true conservative author in the country. She writes and says things others don't dare to, besides JTF. Ann's views best reflect our own. We need more Ann Coulters in the world.