Offense and Defense - Ann Coulter and Richard Dawkins

In the world where unimportant things are considered important, Ann Coulter's comments about Jews are eliciting heaps of outrage from Liberal Jews. The very same people who can barely be bothered to yawn when Iran plots genocide and Hamas continues its terror, are deeply upset because a pundit expressed what a great many Christians believe, both Republican and Democrat. I'm not defending Ann Coulter's words or beliefs, but if all Muslims did was made snide remarks about the inferiority of Judaism on television, that would be a vast improvement. If Islam made that same improvement, we wouldn't be looking at cemeteries filled with dead Jewish children.

What I find far more offensive than Ann Coulter are those liberal Jews who couldn't care less when rockets rain down on Sderot who suddenly become "Jews' when it's time to play their role as token minorities for the Democratic party. Be offended by Obama's racist church? Never. Be offended by Al Sharpton's participation in the 2004 Democratic Presidential debates? Also never. Be offended by Jimmy Carter's campaign against Jews fueled by his own religious beliefs? Forget about it. That's the role Uncle Tom Jews play in the modern Democratic party. Their role is to be offended as "Jews' by things Republicans say and my sincerest wish is that they stop pretending to be outraged Jews and go back to being outraged Liberals. The role doesn't suit them.

But if Christians have a right to find it offensive when someone puts down Christianity on television, Jews have the right to be offended when someone puts down Judaism on television. Even if that person is a prominent conservative commentator, just as Christians have the right to be offended when Christopher Hitchens or Andrew Sullivan put down Christianity. It's a little condescending to be promptly lectured on overreacting. If declaring there's a war on Christmas because the sales staff at Target are saying Happy Holidays isn't an overreaction, I don't think it's an overreaction when Jews find someone declaring on television that they all need to jettison their religion and joins hers offensive

Meanwhile Richard Dawkins, the Moses of Atheism, demonstrated again that being a rational secular humanist doesn't mean you can't still be a bigot. Of course all the Little Dawkinses, the cult of early twenty somethings who worship Dawkins rushed off to say that Dawkins was only criticizing Israel. But Dawkins never talked about the "Israel Lobby" Mearsheimer style, instead he talked about the "Jewish Lobby." Now the enlightened progressive camp is usually sure to try and maintain that dubious distinction between bashing the Jewish homeland and bashing Jews. Dawkins erred by not bothering to go along with the fiction because he didn't mean a pro-Israel lobby, he meant just plain Jews. He was speaking religiously not nationalistically.

But the very same people offended by Ann Coulter could rarely make time to be offended by Richard Dawkins and the very same people offended by Dawkins could rarely make time to be offended by Ann Coulter. Ultimately far too many Jews are captive to the right or to the left and criticizing Dawkins means defending Coulter and vice versa. I don't defend either one of them. I don't believe either of them are Anti-Semites in the grand sense. I simply suspect that they are uncomfortable with and dislike Jews. But they are in the end unimportant. The bigger issues are not which public figure said something offensive about Jews. We had the luxury to discuss such things a decade ago. Today the issue is not what is offensive but what is dangerous to our short term survival.