Posted on 09/16/2001 11:53:34 AM PDT by TLBSHOW
In a country full of people eager for vengeance and with an ample supply of commentators, Ann Coulter can safely take the prize for the most hateful reaction to appear in print. Her column, which appeared on the right-wing National Review Online, ostensibly is a tribute to her friend Barbara Olson -- another frequent on-air commentator and writer who died in one of the hijacked airplanes on Tuesday -- but quickly devolves into something more akin to a call for a Crusade (or is that jihad?). We know who the homicidal maniacs are, she wrote referring to the Muslim states suspected of harboring those responsible for the attacks. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
And as inflammatory and outrageous as these sentiments certainly are, the National Review's editor said he was more or less OK with what she had to say.
The column was obviously written with some degree of anger, rage, and grief and she probably went a little far on certain things but the essential point I think is accurate that the most drastic possible measures are called for, says Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review. What Ann is expressing is something a lot of Americans feel in such situations which is ... once the country is aroused were in for the full pound.
Such extreme sentiments, like Coulters, are hardly in short supply. Thursday's New York Post offered this assessment: "This is war. It needs to be prosecuted as such. The men behind the men who rained havoc on New York and Washington need to be called to account. The heavens need to fall on their heads. They need to bleed. Not next month. Not next week. Now. Who are they? Who cares? Cast a wide enough net, and youll catch the fish that need catching."
2 wrongs do not make a right. We can not FORCE conversion of christianity on anybody!!
Like many here on Free Republic, they see themselves as enlightened and thoughtful.
In this war, these people will be useless.
Go ahead, excommunicate her from the Church of Political Correctness. Like, who cares?
Ann is pissed off like the rest of us Patriotic Americans!
Ann Coulter is being forgivably excited here. But what I don't understand is how you can pretend that Islam is a superior religion. While it is perfectly acceptable to worship Allah or a tree, both of these forms of worship are meaningless if the christian God exists. And even if the christians are wrong, at least their worship and civilization recognizes god-given human rights for all, unlike Islam which still practices slavery and oppresses women.
I never said that. In Ezekiel, God makes his name holy again against Islam.
Its interesting that one can get away with calling for a western version of a Jihad (precisely the sort of thing we're fighting against) and pass it off as "go ahead, call me un-PC". It seems as if the anti-PC movement has adopted some of the PC tactics in defending what any rational person would deem idiotic statements.
September 14, 2001
This is war
Barbara Olson kept her cool. In the hysteria and terror of hijackers herding passengers to the rear of the plane, she retrieved her cell phone and called her husband, Ted, the solicitor general of the United States. She informed him that he had better call the FBI -- the plane had been hijacked. According to reports, Barbara was still on the phone with Ted when her plane plunged in a fiery explosion directly into the Pentagon.
Barbara risked having her neck slit to warn the country of a terrorist attack. She was a patriot to the very end.
This is not to engage in the media's typical hallucinatory overstatement about anyone who is the victim of a horrible tragedy. The furtive cell phone call was an act of incredible daring and panache. If it were not, we'd be hearing reports of a hundred more cell phone calls. (Even people who swear to hate cell phones carry them for commercial air travel.)
The last time I saw Barbara in person was about three weeks ago. She generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud to her over breakfast.
I mention that to say three things about Barbara. First, she was really nice. A lot of people on TV seem nice, but aren't. (And some who don't seem nice, are.) But Barbara was always her charming, graceful, ebullient self. "Nice" is an amazingly rare quality among writers. In the opinion business, bitter, jealous hatred is the norm. Barbara had reason to be secure.
Second, it was actually easy to imagine Ted reading political columns aloud to Barbara at the breakfast table. Theirs was a relationship that could only be cheaply imitated by Bill and Hillary -- the latter being a subject of Barbara's appropriately biting best seller, "Hell to Pay."
Hillary claimed preposterously in the Talk magazine interview that she discussed policy with Bill while cutting his grapefruit in the morning. Ted and Barbara really did talk politics -- and really did have breakfast together.
It's "Ted and Barbara" just like it's Fred and Ginger, and George and Gracie. They were so perfect together, so obvious, that their friends were as happy they were on their wedding day. This is more than the death of a great person and patriotic American. It's a human amputation.
Third, since Barbara's compliment, I've been writing my columns for Ted and Barbara. I'm always writing to someone in my head. Now I don't know who to write to. Ted and Barbara were a good muse.
Apart from hearing that this beautiful light has been extinguished from the world, only one other news flash broke beyond the numbingly omnipresent horror of the entire day. That evening, CNN reported that bombs were dropping in Afghanistan -- and then updated the report to say they weren't our bombs.
They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson.
We don't need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don't need an "international coalition." We don't need a study on "terrorism." We certainly didn't need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week.
The nation has been invaded by a fanatical, murderous cult. And we welcome them. We are so good and so pure we would never engage in discriminatory racial or "religious" profiling.
People who want our country destroyed live here, work for our airlines, and are submitted to the exact same airport shakedown as a lumberman from Idaho. This would be like having the Wehrmacht immigrate to America and work for our airlines during World War II. Except the Wehrmacht was not so bloodthirsty.
"All of our lives" don't need to change, as they keep prattling on TV. Every single time there is a terrorist attack -- or a plane crashes because of pilot error -- Americans allow their rights to be contracted for no purpose whatsoever.
The airport kabuki theater of magnetometers, asinine questions about whether passengers "packed their own bags," and the hostile, lumpen mesomorphs ripping open our luggage somehow allowed over a dozen armed hijackers to board four American planes almost simultaneously on Bloody Tuesday. (Did those fabulous security procedures stop a single hijacker anyplace in America that day?)
Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.
What is it that makes one society dangerous to another? Quite obviously (except to a cultural relativist), it's that one society's moral views allow it, or encourage it, to indulge in violence against the other. To say that someone is evil is another way of saying that he's a moral deviate.
If we leave aside the Christian mythos -- the mystical aspects of Christian belief -- and concentrate only on the ethos, the moral prescriptions and proscriptions, we find the highest and best moral system yet adopted by anyone anywhere. It's a refinement of the moral system of classical Judaism. It adds to the old Judaic defensive morality -- the "thou shalt nots" of the Commandments -- the positive requirement of charity toward the less fortunate.
I claim this to be the highest known morality for a simple reason: when it's practiced, it works. It results in a society at peace, whose members are clean, self-respecting, and self-reliant, and who do unto one another as they would have one another do unto them. Judeo-Christian morality produced Western Civilization, in particular the uniquely splendid civilization known as the United States of America.
I could wish nothing more for the whole world than that all its peoples learn and practice Christian morality, regardless of whether they adopt the Christian mystical beliefs.
By contrast to the Christian moral system, the dangerous cultures of the world find it acceptable and desirable to bring other peoples down by violence. Classical Islam, as formulated by Mohammed, did not countenance this; the prescription to convert the infidel by the sword and the notion of holy war were added to Islamic belief a couple of centuries after his death. But we're not facing classical Islam any more; we're facing the radical version, animated by an implacable hatred of all things foreign. There is no better demonstration of this than the many televised celebrations that occurred when word of the attack on the World Trade Center reached Iraq and the Palestinian settlements.
Two peoples, one with a morality that not only allows but takes joy in murderous violence against the other, face each other over an unbridgeable gulf. If we want an end to the violence, we must eradicate the moral system -- radical Islam -- that animates and sustains the opponent. Because this system is transmitted and reinforced at gunpoint by the surrounding culture, the culture itself must be atomized. The individuals that make up the culture must be scattered and taught the ethos of the sane civilizations: the Judeo-Christian ethos.
On this point, Ann Coulter has brilliantly and forthrightly faced the essence of the intercultural problem. And nothing anyone screams about "intolerance" or "fascism" will affect this calculation by one jot.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
Finding a new religion at my age would be tough.
If you think holding countries accountable for harboring and training those animals is a "wrong", you might feel more comfortable at www.taliban.com
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.