In Defense of Ann Coulter

TruthNews Commentary, October 12, 2001

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, nationally syndicated columnist Ann Coulter wrote a controversial editorial that conclude with the now infamous statement:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Coulter's column roundly condemned by liberals and dropped by the National Review Online, possibly the premiere conservative website (second only to TruthNews, of course). Many publications said that the National Review had "fired" Coulter, but in fact, Coulter was never employed by the National Review, but rather they paid to carry her syndicated column and decided to discontinue it. Coulter's column is still widely carried by many conservative publications and can be found on the web on Jewish World Review, World Net Daily, Frontpage, and Townhall, as well as Yahoo, among others.

Now that the war on Afghanistan is underway, let's revisit the issue and look at exactly why the Coulter column was objectionable. Was it because she called on the U.S. to invade the terrorist countries? No, because we did that, and no one has objected, not even the Afghanis. Was it because she said we should kill their leaders? No, because we're trying to do that, and everyone in America hopes we succeed. Was it because she said that a few civilians might be killed? No, because that has happened, and people have accepted it as a fact of war.

Then, what was objectionable about the column? Was it because Coulter said that we should "convert them to Christianity"? Shack, as they say in the Air Force when the bomb is on target. In fact, Frontpage Magazine editor David Horowitz admitted as much when he explained his decision to begin carrying the Coulter column:

As a Jew, I could be uneasy at Ann's suggestion that mass conversion to Christianity should be wielded as a tool of foreign policy were it not so obvious that her comment was hyperbolic, tongue firmly in cheek.

In fact, many of Coulter's columns are tongue-in-cheek, and in reading the column, it appears that this is a ready explanation. However, I want to ask the question, why is converting Muslims (or members of any other religion) to Christianity objectionable?

Before we go any further, let me state here and now that we believe firmly in religious freedom. However, that's precisely the point. Religious freedom means having the freedom to believe what you want. If you aren't allowed access to the ideas of other religions, you're being denied the right to believe in them. In Afghanistan and most of the rest of the Muslim world, there is no religious freedom. The Taliban recently imprisoned 23 Christians and threatened them with the death penalty on charges of preaching Christianity. A recent study concluded that 75 percent of the world's population lives in countries without religious freedom.

In most of the Muslim-ruled countries of the world, the population was forcibly converted to Islam when those areas were overrun by Muslim conquerors (mostly between the time of Mohammed and the Renaissance). Today's Muslims are descendants of those who were forcibly converted and have never been allowed to hear anything else. It's true that Christianity was also often spread by the sword. But all Christian countries today have freedom of religion. Muslims can and do preach their faith in countries like Britain, France, and America.

Coulter's column did not call for forced conversion, which we would oppose and which would be meaningless anyway. But the fact is, it's not "converting them to Christianity" that's objectionable to many Americans, but Christianity itself. When the Taliban destroyed Buddhist idols and forced Afghani women to wear burkhas, that was big news. When the Taliban imprisoned Christians on charges of preaching Christianity and threatened to put them to death, the world was silent. Many Americans insist on freedom of religion because

What we should do, once this war is ended, is to insist on freedom of religion for Afghanistan so that the missionaries can go to work. Missionaries went to Japan after World War II, and many Japanese converted to Christianity, including the man who led the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor. My own father was a missionary in post-war Germany (contrary to the opinion of many, there's no such thing as a bad Christian but only non-Christians who claim they are Christian).

The fact that of the 23 Christians imprisoned by the Taliban, 16 were native Afghanis, willing to risk their lives for their faith, speaks volumes about the potential receptivity of these people to the Gospel of Christ.

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