Flipping like Cheetah over Ann Coulter & David Horowitz
Ann Coulter, ringmistress of controversy, again has liberals flipping like Cheetah the Chimp by writing on her website: "Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president."
Curmugeonly liberal journalist Thomas is of Lebanese ancestry but was born in 1920 in Kentucky and grew up in Detroit. Coulter should have described Thomas an Arab-American.
[But isn't it odd that Thomas has opposed President George W. Bush's liberation of millions of Arabs in Iraq and has not supported the president's current effort to free Thomas's family homeland Lebanon from foreign occupation? Apparently Thomas prefers domination by Ba'athists (i.e., socialists) Saddam Hussein and the Syrian regime, for the same reason she favors socialist Democratic Party rule in the U.S. Why else would Thomas be more supportive of these foreign Arab tyrants than of her own American president?]
The Arab News lashed out Tuesday at "loudmouthed, mean-spirited" Coulter, accusing her of "Arab bashing."
But the Arab News then quoted Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott as writing that if he described Norman Podhoretz as an "old Jew" or Lucianne Goldberg as "that old Jewess," authors such as "Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz would blow their respective lids...."
"Arabs of course are fair game on talk radio and the trash punditry, of which Ann Coulter is stringbean queen," wrote Wolcott, according to the Arab News.
Pipes and Horowitz would certainly be right to blow their lids at Wolcott's incipient anti-Semitism, which has a far longer, uglier and more lethal pedigree than any Western cultural bias against Arabs.
With breathtaking insensitivity, Wolcott ridiculed Jews and others offended by his thoughts, writing that such critics might demand "that I be fired, or, for penance, be forced to tour Auschwitz with Prince Harry," the spare heir to the British Crown who thought it fashionable (as in Europe's revanchist left anti-Semitism it now is) to wear an SS Swastika armband to a party.
In fairness to David Horowitz, only days after 9/11 his webzine frontpagemagazine.com featured a column reminding readers of the enormous contributions to the U.S. by Arab-Americans. These dedicated Americans, his webzine noted, cross the political spectrum from Ralph Nader, George Mitchell and Donna Shalala to John Sununu, fils and pere, Spencer Abraham, and Congressman Darrell Issa. They include stars of sports and entertainment such as NFL quarterback Doug Flutie, Danny and Marlo Thomas, Paul Anka, Paula Abdul (now of American Idol), Frank Zappa, and surf guitarist Dick Dale. And, noted the column, they include journalists, ranging from Joseph Farah on the right to Helen Thomas on the left.
When others amid the shock and horror of 9-11 were riven by fear and anger that in a few cases spilled over into discrimination against innocent Arab-Americans (and even in one moron's shooting of an India-born, turban-wearing Sikh, apparently mistaken for an Arab), David Horowitz's webzine courageously reminded us that we needed "to keep terrorists from dividing us." His webzine named these and many other well-known, widely-respected Arab-Americans, Helen Thomas among them.
It's unjust, therefore, to imply in any way that David Horowitz harbors a double standard here, as Wolcott and the Arab News did. If anyone has been a pillar of fair, honest, clear-minded thinking on such issues, that person is David Horowitz. His outspoken honesty has made Horowitz a target for less-than-honest left critics who used to keep their swastikas and hammer-and-sickle armbands hidden.
13 Comments:
less-than-honest left critics who used to keep their swastikas and hammer-and-sickle armbands hidden.World War II just cannot possibly make sense to you guys.
Sense? What is this "sense" you speak of?
These guys write about Horowitz the way the Revolutionary Communist Party androids used to write about Bob Avakian.
Ann Coulter is offensive. I don't like her style, and I don't find it amusing. But she's absolutely correct in her negative opinion of Helen Thomas. Call me conflicted here.
He makes some good points, but at the same time, if you did transplant the word, "Jew" with "Arab" it'd be offensive. This is the standard we conservatives hold to people who say things about whites that would be considered racist if said about blacks. The fact that we don't like Wolcott doesn't make his criticism any less strident.
Good lord, now we can't call Arabs Arabs?
What's next, Shaquille O'Neal joining the Hibernian Order?
I think Coulter is sort of a natural response to the decades of condescending arrogance of leftist media. Having little but substance-less fraud, the left drops into insult and mockery mode rather quickly, and sometimes to the exclusion of all other forms of "persuasion". Coulters whole career seems to be a reaction to this, and maybe sometimes an over reaction. Since leftist distortions have been, in my opinion, at least partially responsible for many deaths, I think they are going to have to endure a few insults. It could be worse.
The left's hypocritical pretension at caring about people is the most
sickening. I have seen posters all over a major University for a decade complaining about the sanctions against Iraq and how they were causing the death of some 50,000 Iraqi children a year due to Iraq’s inability to purchase food and medicine. We invade and discover that Saddam was rolling in money, and paying off France, Russia, etc., to boot. All the posters come down from the professors and the grad students doors and they are replaced with a "no 'W'" sticker. So they find out that Saddam was starving the children, not the U.S. and this is their sole response. What unbelievable scum these people are. They deserve to be gutted by a Coulter every now and then, and worse.
Horowitz is driving the leftists bloggers crazy. Read some of the blogs they are obsessed.
horowitz is a bore.
I can't quite follow the argument Msr. Ponte is putting forth here. Is it that Ann Coulter said nothing offensive? Or is it that Coulter was offensive, but because James Wolcott, in the process of criticizing her, repeated her offense, they become offsetting penalties and, therefore, neither party was offensive?
Or is it that Helen Thomas is, in fact an old Arab(-American) who deserves to be called out because she was critical of President Bush's war in Iraq, thereby proving that she's a socialist and an islamofascist at heart, and we already really knew that because all journalists are Democrats are liberals are progressives are lefitsts are communists are Nazis?
Or is that David Horowitz is an extraordinarily fair-minded person who publishes a wonderful blog staffed by wonderfully fair-minded and brilliant writers (such as, for instance, Subcommondante Ponte)?
I don't have a good handle on the etiquette of denunciation. Who must one denounce? How often? With how much vehemence? If the right wants the left to denounce Michael Moore (Ward Churchill, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, the guy with the goatee at the copy shop who has an Anarchy patch on his sweatshirt, Helen Thomas, etc.), then does that mean they have to denounce Ann Coulter? Or if not, then why not? Does it have to do with which side presents the greater threat to the health of American democracy, and does that side that's less of a threat have more leeway to indulge its loons for partisan purposes?
Oy. In this instance, can't we just admit that Coulter's a buffoon and be done with it? How many times can you call liberals traitors, or observe that lefty women don't shave their pits, or make Arab-baiting comments, before it stops being funny, or even interesting?
-Dan
I can't quite follow the argument Msr. Ponte is putting forth here. Is it that Ann Coulter said nothing offensive? Or is it that Coulter was offensive, but because James Wolcott, in the process of criticizing her, repeated her offense, they become offsetting penalties and, therefore, neither party was offensive?
Or is it that Helen Thomas is, in fact an old Arab(-American) who deserves to be called out because she was critical of President Bush's war in Iraq, thereby proving that she's a socialist and an islamofascist at heart, and we already really knew that because all journalists are Democrats are liberals are progressives are lefitsts are communists are Nazis?
Or is that David Horowitz is an extraordinarily fair-minded person who publishes a wonderful blog staffed by wonderfully fair-minded and brilliant writers (such as, for instance, Subcommondante Ponte)?
I don't have a good handle on the etiquette of denunciation. Who must one denounce? How often? With how much vehemence? If the right wants the left to denounce Michael Moore (Ward Churchill, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, the guy with the goatee at the copy shop who has an Anarchy patch on his sweatshirt, Helen Thomas, etc.), then does that mean they have to denounce Ann Coulter? Or if not, then why not? Does it have to do with which side presents the greater threat to the health of American democracy, and does that side that's less of a threat have more leeway to indulge its loons for partisan purposes?
Oy. In this instance, can't we just admit that Coulter's a buffoon and be done with it? How many times can you call liberals traitors, or observe that lefty women don't shave their pits, or make Arab-baiting comments, before it stops being funny, or even interesting?
-Dan
Let's cut the crap, and say what needs to be said.
The Arab-American community has made it clear, that for the overwhelming vast part, they oppose "W" and his "War On Terror."
Anne knows this, and therefore, I believe it is why she made the crack.
GOOD ON HER--THERE HAS NOT BEEN ENOUGH OUTRAGE FROM ALL YOU WONDERFUL ARAB-AMERICANS!
P.S. If a bunch of Jewish-fascist would vaporize 3,000 innocents. We would be bombarded day, and night by Jews expressing their sincere outrage!
"Oy. In this instance, can't we just admit that Coulter's a buffoon and be done with it? How many times can you call liberals traitors, or observe that lefty women don't shave their pits, or make Arab-baiting comments, before it stops being funny, or even interesting?"
repeated in full because it needs to be said.
J
I think we should also keep in mind the timing of things,. If I have my timeline right, Horowitz' column that praised Thomas - along with Paula Abdul, Frank Zappa, and any other American of arab descent he could think of - would have come a few days after he ran Coulter's now-infamous "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" column.
So that may have been nothing more than CYA routine, much like his attempts to call Coulter's comments "Satire." ; )
J
Post a Comment
<< Home