MR In USC Paper's Not Entirely Unbiased Report On Coulter's Campus Speech
They're trying. They really are. But four things about this article in USC's student newspaper:
Some members of the Muslim community say [Islamofascism] affixes a negative connotation to the Islamic faith as a whole. "Fascism is a national movement while Islamic extremism is a fragmented one," said Wais Hassan, a graduate student studying public administration at USC Sacramento, who was not at the event. "When you use fascism, you assume there is a united front trying to start World War III."... When asked by a Daily Trojan reporter to define fascism, Coulter said the reporter should look it up in a dictionary...."It's mind-boggling that more people are not marching in the streets protesting women being third-class citizens, the absent freedom of the press and other injustices," said Omri Ceren, a doctoral candidate in communication. "In the classroom, it's difficult to bring the subject up."
Others confirmed the need for debate and dialogue on Islamic extremism, but questioned the choice of Coulter as the event's speaker... Though organizers praised Coulter for her brash personality and bold, attention-grabbing statements, some critics say these characteristics are a detriment to promoting thoughtful discourse on controversial issues. "I think she was a bad figure to pick," Hassan said. "She is not going to convince liberals because of her past. I'm not sure if she is an expert on the Middle East or was picked to get attention and press." Coulter has recently been in the press for comments on converting Jews to Christianity that many interpreted as anti-Semitic. Coulter told CNBC anchor Donny Deutsche that Jews need to be "perfected" by becoming Christian.
Some attendees said Coulter's polemic remarks are appropriate for a political pundit. "She's not a centrist," Ceren said. "Her job is not to persuade; it is to speak to the faithful ... Her job is to express a conservative viewpoint."
(1) They actually had to go to someone who goes to a different school and wasn't there to get an anti-Coulter quote? Really? How hard did they have to work to find this guy? Sweetness and Light has him pegged as an old school Berkeley Muslim student activist. They do a really good job up there.
Three more comments, including a discussion of our quotes and the phrase misleading enough to qualify as dishonest", after the jump
(2) That second part about Coulter telling the reporter to look up "fascism" is misleading enough to qualify as dishonest. She actually went through an extensive discussion of the similarities between classical fascism and contemporary Islamofascism. But the planted reporter wouldn't sit down, and wouldn't accept anything but a literal definition. So she told him to look it up. We actually have audio on this part of the talk. But there's a very particular meme trying to be established about how Coulter ignored students who asked hard questions because she couldn't answer them (because she's a blond Republican bimbo, right - the kind of bimbo who was editor of the Michigan Law Review). That meme is a lie.
(3) As far as our first quote goes - it's a meaningless point of pride, but they pretty much brutalized what we said. "The absent freedom of the press." Are you kidding? That's barely English. We also described Saudi women as effectively "chattel slaves" and talked about the persecution of sexual minorities in Iran. That got clumped into the phrase "and other injustices", which we're also pretty sure we didn't lean particularly heavily on.
(4) The way that second quote gets dropped in is a little more serious. We don't have a problem with the quote itself, although we remember talking about "rallying the faithful" and "preaching to the choir." But the basic point is the same: going to a Coulter event as a liberal and complaining that she didn't reach out to you is like going to a dinosaur museum and complaining that the music wasn't very good. That's just not what the show's about.
But we are a little peeved about the way the quote got dropped right after the allusion to Donny Deutsch's hissy fit of feigned outrage. The way it reads, it might look like we're saying that the justification for the "perfected Jews" comment was that she's a conservative, not a centrist. That's obviously stupid. The justification for her Deutsch quotes is that she was making uncontroversial points with genuine earnest and he took intentional offense. The "she's a conservative" quote is about why it's silly to expect her to reach out to centrists - again, that's just not what her job is.
But we got an email this morning sarcastically asking if we were going to convert to Christianity because we had equated conservativism with the position that Jews are imperfect (?!?!) For the record: no, we didn't say that. Also for the record: we did give the DT some quotes about the "perfected Jews" controversy, but those quotes didn't make it into the article. Nor did any other explanation or contextualization of Coulter's comments. Which is probably also something the DT should consider.
References:
* Ann Coulter comes to campus, criticizes liberal politics [Daily Trojan]
* The Daily Trojan’s Take On Coulter’s USC Visit [Sweetness and Light]
* Academics Connected To Pro-AQ UCLA Paper Lying About It, Giving Quotes To the NYT [MR]
Manufactured Scandal Of The Week: Media Matters Accuses Coulter Of Wanting To Wipe Out American Jews, Action Alerts To Pull Her Off The Air Immediately Follow [MR]
Previously:
* How Hate Starts On College Campuses
* USC Muslim Student Union Slips Into Open Anti-Semitism
* Fun with Student Groups: 9/11 Conspiracy Group at USC
