Ann Coulter enthusiastic about Domestic Terrorism

Posted by Bruce Wilson at 1:16 PM on March 8, 2007.

"Reclaiming America For Christ", one bullet at a Time? That seems to be the message of Ann Coulter's March 3rd. rhetorical salvo fired off at D. James Kennedy's Reclaiming America for Christ conference hosted in Fort Lauderdale this year by Kennedy's "Center For Reclaimimg America". Journalist Frederick Clarkson, who has written extensively on the violent US antiabortion movement, places Coulter's enthusiasm for the assassination of abortion clinic workers into historical context in Ann Coulter Says She Can "Understand" Domestic Terrorism: "In demagogic fashion, Coulter first presented the shocking view -- and then wink, wink -- said she didn't really mean it; but in doing so, still held fast to the argument that leaders of the underground Army of God have used for years to justify the murder of abortion providers -- which she calls "a procedure with a rifle." ".

The assassinations and hundreds of bombings and attempted bombings during the 1990's, after a long period in which the US media and even the FBI ignored pervasive Antiabortion movement violence, will finally get portrayed in a new video documentary. But Coulter is only one of many on the US right who both advocate or encourage terrorism and indirectly sympathize with violent goals and tactics of terrorist groups, and rhetoric such as Coulter's helps create a cultural atmosphere in which intimidation and death threats against plaintiffs in church/state separation legal cases has become routine in many parts of the United States. Coulter's eliminationalist rhetoric, further, helps to mainstream violent religious extremist views to the point that long time advocates for antiabortion terrorism can become Washington D.C. PR consultants and special prosecutors for the State of Kansas.

Coulter's public speech fits a piece of larger pattern in which eliminationalist rhetoric from the American right targets vast societal groups and leading Christian right cultural warriors advocate, as a foreign policy approach or "pacification" program, the nuclear destruction of entire defenseless civilian populations in the Middle East [see inside].

n a January 2007 appearance on the Colbert Report [for video see PEEK 49601] Dinesh D'Souza, who was on the show to plug his new book blaming the American "cultural left" for the September 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks, started off saying that responsibility for 2001 attacks on NYC and the Pentagon could be attributed "indirectly" to Franklin Delano Roosevelt [ D'Souza may have been consciously pushing buttons ; top Christian right leaders such as Tim LaHaye maintain Roosevelt was installed by Satan as a part of a grand "secular humanist" satanic plot ]. D'Souza, just getting started, then suggested that if the US were to export "traditional American values", such as reduced tolerance for gays, which conservative Amercian Christians share with Conservative Jews and Muslims around the world, that would "undermine Bin Laden's idea that we're all a bunch of atheists". Colbert followed up : "there are some good ideas these guys [ Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda ] have, this is what you're saying, that there are some parts of our culture that are corrosive and you agree with some of the things that they're saying..... you have the courage to say that right, that you agree with some of the things that these radical extremists are against in America ?" When Colbert pressed for a yes or no answer, D'Souza agreed and his stance amounts to a refrain on the American Christian right that gets shouted from innumerable pulpits, broadcast in endless talk radio and televangelist show segments, and churned out in a seemingly endless flood of books - that the US has been in a disastrous moral decline since the early 1960's, allegedly because the Bible was "kicked out of the classroom" and "God got kicked out of the public square" ; and that "Bible Believing" Christians must fight a war to retake America "for Christ" from "liberals and secular humanists". Rhetoric of John Hagee, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and other Christian right leaders is the language of Jihad and a espouses a vast, barely substantiated conspiracy, with deep anti-Semitic undertones [ rooted in a common belief, shared apparently by Bill Donohue of The Catholic League, that liberal Jews are at the center of the plot ], that "secular humanism" is a "Godless", "satanic" crypto-socialist plan to undermine American morality and the collective social fabric and eventually destroy America.

In the end, Dinesh D'Souza may be partly right on one count - despite vehement protestations to the contrary, violent eliminationalist fantasies commonly held and espoused on the American Christian right share a good deal in common with the language of violent religious extremism around the world, and alleged "moralist" Bill Bennet, former Secretary Of Education, makes the point with sledgehammer bluntness.

While leaders such as Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee argue for a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran, to counter an alleged nuclear threat from that country or to initiate the apocalyptic Mideast conflict that many Premillenial dispensationalist Christians yearn for because that will trigger the "Rapture" William Bennet, in a speech given October 2006, dispensed with even the need for allegations of WMD threats : as I wrote last October, from the "2006 Voter Values Summit" put on the the Family Research Council, Bill Bennet advocated incinerating entire Iraqi cities to force submission, by residents of surviving Iraqi urban centers, on pain of fiery nuclear death.

"Recounting the incident that led to a massive US military assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah - and implying that the US response to the deaths of four American private mercenaries working for Blackwater USA was somehow mild, Bennet stated: 'When four Americans are hung and the city cheers, you take out Fallujah. You level the city....' Bennett then cited the example of the destruction of Hiroshima. Bennett's exhortation to mass collective punishment, the slaughter of hundreds or
thousands of innocent civilians perhaps or at least the destruction of their homes and cities, received enthusiastic applause."

Tagged as: coulter, d'souza, bennet, eliminationalist rhetoric

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.