9/21 Bryan: Coulter advocates profiling of Arab "aliens," deportation

The last time we heard from Ann Coulter she was arguing that the US should invade countries in which people cheered the recent terrorist attacks and convert them to Christianity, leading to widespread criticism and a public semi-apology from National Review editor Rich Lowry. Now, her latest column advocates disparate treatment of people at airports based on their complexions.

Coulter begins with a legitimate criticism of new security restrictions on air travel, arguing that they will not prevent future hijackings. About two-thirds of the way through, though, she tells us sarcastically that "the rash of hijackings by Connecticut WASP girls surely explains the time-consuming -- but still somehow completely useless -- examination of my personal effects." This begins a racial theme she carries into the column's conclusion, where she makes this suggestion:

We should require passports to fly domestically. Passports can be forged, but they can also be checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males. It will be a minor hassle, but it's better than national ID cards.

Of course, not all terrorists are "swarthy-looking males" - Timothy McVeigh is an obvious counter-example - nor are all swarthy-looking men terrorists. But this doesn't stop Coulter:

All 19 hijackers in last week's attack appear to have been aliens. As far as the Constitution is concerned, visitors to this country are here at the nation's pleasure. Congress could pass a law tomorrow requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries leave. (More on that next week.) Congress could certainly pass a law requiring all aliens to get approval from the INS before boarding an airplane in the United States.

While she attempts to deflect responsibility by framing her policy prescriptions with the slippery construction "Congress could . . ." the implication is clear. Coulter is rhetorically implicating "all aliens from Arabic countries" in the recent tragedies, and suggesting that the same group is likely to strike again, even though the vast majority are peaceful and have no connection to terrorism. Moreover, Coulter's use of the term "aliens" implies an incredibly broad set of people, ranging from legal immigrants to resident aliens to tourists.

Coulter continues to fan the flames of racial animosity, making sweeping statements implicating all Arabs and Arab Americans for the actions of a lunatic few. This sort of attack is not only irresponsible, it is unconscionable.

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Related links:
-Is Rational Discourse Another Casualty of Tuesday's Attacks? (Ben Fritz, 9/17)
-Coulter just won't give up on Clinton-Condit Association (Bryan Keefer, 8/31)
-Ann Coulter: The Jargon Vanguard (Brendan Nyhan, 7/16)

9/21/2001 08:30:21 AM EST |

9/20 Brendan: Andrew Sullivan's "fifth column" rhetoric

Amongst the many commentators attacking leftist opponents of the "war on terrorism", Andrew Sullivan stands out for his attacks on a putative "fifth column".

The conservative pundit first wrote that "[t]he decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column" (part one, part two). Then, he wrote this: "[W]e might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself - a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead."

As Ben noted, this is an irrational suggestion that American leftists will aid terrorists, and a tactical attempt to equate dissent with aid. Sullivan has argued, in fact, that dissent is morally equivalent to aiding terrorists, approvingly citing this George Orwell statement from 1941 yesterday on his website: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis." This functional reasoning is a common jargon tactic, and one that is frequently used to delegitimate dissent in a time of war by linking it to the opponent's cause.

Facing criticism from Timothy Noah of Slate, Sullivan refused to back down yesterday. In two posts on his website, he defended his statements, writing that while he will not use the "shorthand" of "fifth column" again he stands by his words:

I have no reason to believe that even those sharp critics of this war would actually aid and abet the enemy in any more tangible ways than they have done already. And that dissent is part of what we're fighting for. By fifth column, I meant simply their ambivalence about the outcome of a war on which I believe the future of liberty hangs.

This is nonsense on a number of levels. Sullivan is still defining dissent as aiding and abetting "the enemy". But more importantly, saying that he "simply" meant that some leftists feel "ambivalence" about the outcome of the war is a deception of the highest order. Sullivan knows full well that "fifth column" is a term with a specific meaning - domestic action intended to actively aid an external threat. Consider Merriam-Webster Online's definition:

Main Entry: fifth column
Function: noun
Etymology: name applied to rebel sympathizers in Madrid in 1936 when four rebel columns were advancing on the city
Date: 1936
: a group of secret sympathizers or supporters of an enemy that engage in espionage or sabotage within defense lines or national borders

In short, saying that war opponents constitute a "fifth column" is a quite dangerous accusation that crosses a new line in the mainstream post-attack discourse. Such statements can easily lead to anti-democratic suppression of dissent. One can only hope that Sullivan will choose his words more carefully in the future.

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Related links:
-Is Rational Discourse Another Casualty of Tuesday's Attacks? (Ben Fritz, 9/17)
-Complex issue, simple spin - Sullivan on welfare reform (Ben Fritz, 8/14)
-Sullivan slammed unfairly (Brendan Nyhan, 6/19)
-Sullivan says deceive the public (Brendan Nyhan, 5/7)

9/20/2001 05:40:36 AM EST |

9/19 Bryan: Kaminer links attacks, religion and Bush policy

In an American Prospect Online article Monday, Wendy Kaminer draws an unfair parallel between the recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and one of President Bush's domestic initiatives.

Kaminer begins by dissecting the recent statement by Rev. Jerry Falwell blaming the ACLU and other groups for the attacks. While her criticisms of Falwell are justified, Kaminer continues with an all too familiar rhetorical sleight-of-hand, associating one person with an entire group or institution - in this case fundamentalists like Falwell and the presumed terrorists with all of organized religion - and then using that association to attack the larger group:

I'm not blaming religion for all or even most human barbarism . . . Religious belief offers solace and strength to people in the awful aftermath of the attack. But while they gather together to pray and seek comfort, protection, or approval from God, so do the terrorists. Whatever lessons we may take from this dreadful attack, we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative. [emphasis added]

Having sullied all of organized religion based on the action of a few extremists, Kaminer then goes the extra rhetorical mile, attaching all those negative associations to "faith based initiative[s]" - precisely the phrase President Bush has used in advancing his plan to provide more government funding to religious social service programs. Kaminer's piece is a thoroughly disgusting example of how pundits on both sides of the aisle are using this emotionally-charged tragedy to take partisan cheap shots without the benefit of evidence or argument.

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Related links:
-Is Rational Discourse Another Casualty of Tuesday's Attacks? (Ben Fritz, 9/17)

9/18/2001 09:10:04 PM EST |

9/18 Ben: Mark Steyn casts rhetoric at any who dare oppose war

In the wake of last week's terrorist attacks, some of the most irrational, demagogic rhetoric has come from National Review Online, as I argued in my recent column. The conservative opinion site continued that trend yesterday with a number of disturbing articles.

Among them were a piece by Richard Bookhiser arguing that the terrorists were wise to hit New York because its resident liberals would not have been upset if those in the "red states" that went to Bush in the election had been killed; Rich Lowry arguing that liberals who want to form an international alliance against terrorism are guilty of "appeasement"; and Laurie Mylroie blaming Iraq and President Clinton's allegedly light treatment of Saddam Hussein for the terrorist attacks, without any direct evidence linking the two.

Perhaps the most egregious spin, however, came from guest columnist Mark Steyn, who goes to extreme rhetorical lengths to stigmatize anyone he sees as opposing the U.S., from European nations to an individual letter writer in New Hampshire.

Steyn claims that despite the NATO agreement to work against terrorism, a "big chunk" of our 18 allies have been backsliding. The "big chunk" consists of Germany, Italy and Norway, all of which have said they do not expect to take part in military action, and Belgium, which declined to use the term "war". Instead of rational responses to these four nations' positions, Steyn's only comment is to point out that Belgium recently apologized for "slavery, colonialism, etc." at what he labels "the U.N. Conference Against Whitey, Hymie, and Capitalism" (actually the U.N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa). He also irrationally casts aspersions on all non-English speaking countries as having only "belatedly caught up to" the concepts of law and individual liberty, a gross oversimplification of European history.

Steyn then moves on to what he calls the "more slippery variety" of "anti-Americanism" here in the U.S. Amongst his examples is a letter to the editor in a small-town New Hampshire newspaper. The writer, Robert Daubenspeck, suggests that the U.S. should not retaliate militarily, but respond with love. Steyn's response to this at worst naïve sentiment is chilling: "It would be mean-spirited to regret that Mr. Daubenspeck was not given the opportunity to test his thesis with one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11." Like many who engage in spin, Steyn qualifies his attack by saying "It would be mean spirited to." These words, however, do not excuse such gratuitous and unfounded accusations.

We have truly reached a scary point in American political discourse when writers in respected publications hint at regret that those they disagree with did not die in a terrorist attack.

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9/18/2001 12:43:18 AM EST |

9/17 Brendan: The Taliban aid trope re-emerges

Don’t believe the hype about Bush administration aid to the Taliban. Back in June, I showed how Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer deceptively portrayed Bush administration food aid to starving Afghanis as a "gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan" to reward them for acting against drug production. While the aid was partially motivated by the Taliban’s crackdown on opium production, CNN and others have reported that it was intended to avert a looming famine exacerbated by a ban on growing opium. Moreover, the aid consisted not of cash, but $28 million in surplus wheat, $5 million in food commodities and $10 million in "livelihood and food security," a fact never acknowledged by Scheer, and was distributed through international agencies of the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations instead of the Taliban itself.

Nonetheless, in the wake of the attacks and the likely responsibility of Osama Bin Laden, who has been provided refuge by the Taliban, Scheer’s trope has re-emerged. Gerry Kamiya's September 13 Salon.com story on Bin Laden calls recent US aid to Afghanistan a "reward" for "condemning opium growing as anti-Islamic", implies that the aid was distributed as cash and links to the deceptive Scheer column. Filmmaker Michael Moore then repeated this claim the next day, inflating the $43 million figure cited by Scheer into $48 million.

Scheer repeats the trope in a somewhat more limited form today: "Call it what you will, even humanitarian aid, and funnel it through the United Nations, but the effect is the same: to send to the Taliban a signal that its support of Bin Laden has been somehow acceptable." Of course, back in June, Scheer did not call it humanitarian aid or acknowledge that it was not given directly to the Taliban.

In general, it’s fine to criticize the aid, as Michelle Malkin does, for indirectly helping the Taliban regime. But readers deserve to know that it was food aid to starving people rather than a cash gift to a pariah government harboring a known terrorist.

Update 9/18 5:30 PM EST: An alert reader pointed out that the current version of Michael Moore's column linked above now cites the correct figure of $43 million in emergency aid rather than the $48 million figure given in the original version of the column emailed to Moore's list last Friday. I was also not sufficiently clear in noting that the $43 million was in addition to previously allocated aid, bringing the total for the year to over $100 million. And finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I neglected to note that Ben Fritz and I helped bring Moore to speak at Swarthmore College when we were students there. Moore was paid a fee by the college for his speech, which he said he would donate to charity.

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9/17/2001 11:55:24 AM EST |

9/17 column: Is Rational Discourse Another Casualty of Tuesday's Attacks?

By Ben Fritz

In the wake of last Tuesday's tragedy, America needs rational political discourse more than ever. Disurbingly, however, pundits such as Ann Coulter and Andrew Sullivan and the editorial boards of papers including the Philadelphia Daily News have been using extremely inflammatory, irrational, and divisive rhetoric - a frightening precedent as the country potentially moves toward war.(read the whole column)

9/16/2001 11:18:48 PM EST |

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