Don Feder doesn't take Ann Coulter seriously "as an evangelist," but "no one can get the left going like Ann." He captures some stunning Coulter-hatred in the media.
The piece de hysteria (believe me, the competition was stiff) was a column by L.A. Times media critic Tim Rutten, who darkly warned that, "The rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week."
Rutten -- who's saying that evangelizing facilitates genocide -- needs to be kept away from a keyboard, for his own safety.
Amen. Here's a larger chunk of Rutten's rails-of-Auschwitz passage, in which, after tying Coulter thoughts to the Holocaust, he actually concludes that we need more civility (Rutten, heal thyself):
As the [Anti-Defamation] 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.
PS: Feder also suggested "Generally, Jews were offended by Coulter in reverse relation to their adherence to normative Judaism." While he laments her "insouciance," he added:
Her penchant for provocation aside, do Coulter's critics know that she's an impassioned defender of Israel who challenges anti-Semitism in academia and the anti-war movement? If they did, would they care?
In her 2003 book "Treason," Coulter wrote: "Upon viewing widespread repression, poverty and violence across the Middle East, liberals turned with a vengeance against Israel, the one small outpost of democracy in the entire region. College protestors began demanding that universities divest from Israel. Anti-war protests bled into anti-Israel protests and sometimes into anti-Semitic hooliganism."
It's highly unlikely that your average liberal would be caught dead reading a Coulter book. They'd have to buy the Susan Estrich book mocking her, and slip that dust cover over it.
