Michael Coren, Nuke Iran

An inconvenient truth about feet

By Gary Reid

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

There is that business about feet: "Putting your foot in your mouth" and "If the shoe fits, wear it."

Both those things come to mind after reading Toronto Sun columnist Michael Coren's latest attack column (Misplaced outrage, September 9), defending his column of a week earlier calling for the atom bombing of Iran, a piece that could only be described as war mongering.

In case you wonder about the term "war monger", here is one definition that sums him up quite well: "A war monger is a man who is always ready to lay down your life for his country."

He now tells us that he was inundated with e-mails from people repulsed and infuriated by his brutal indifference to the consequences of what he was proposing. This is how he characterized the reaction:

The hysterical websites immediately went into action and told their readers to write and complain. I've been warned I could be taken to the Human Rights Commission and the Press Council. A campaign has been launched to pressure hosts of my forthcoming speaking engagements to cancel me and my family has been threatened.

Leaving aside the threats to his family, which are not to be tolerated, I couldn't be more pleased that he is feeling the heat.

A better journalist than Coren would have digested the accusations and considered whether he might have made a mistake. Had he come to the conclusion he erred, then the best course would have been to apologize.

Instead, trying to justify himself to angry Muslims, Coren wrote:

Actually, I've been a strong supporter of justice for Muslims. I wrote a column during the Danish cartoon controversy urging people to understand why Muslims were so angry.

Here is what he wrote during the rampaging over the cartoons:

Three cheers for the Muslim world. Three cheers for people who will not simply fall down and allow their most deeply held religious beliefs to be spat upon and treated as garbage. Three cheers for people who will decry a cartoon whose sole purpose is to abuse and vilify one's faith ä when we are told that Mohammed should not be depicted and should certainly not be depicted in an insulting manner, perhaps we should listen.

The reason Coren is such a cheerleader of the Muslim reaction to the cartoons becomes clearer with this:

One of the most troubling aspects of all this is the reaction of so many Christians. They seem to think that the battle between western values and Islamic sensitivities places observant Catholics and evangelicals on the side of the West.

Not so. The West is no longer Christendom but the heartland of secular humanism and fundamentalist atheism.

If you are not a regular reader of Michael Coren, don't worry, he is a bit like a soap opera, in which you can pick up where you left off, even if there is a large gap in between ≠ he claims to be a devout Roman Catholic and he will frequently go on his soap box to tell us all about the road to Hell passing through the morally decadent and secular West.

He once wrote a strong condemnation of The Da Vinci Code, because it was deceptive and unkind to the Catholic faith, calling it "execrable."

Coren's final take on those who are angry with him is this hilarious justification:

I'm just a newspaper columnist giving an opinion about geo-politics and international peace in what is still, one hopes, a free country.

Coming from anybody else, one would be inclined to say he has a point. But somewhere in the world, there are a handful of Danish cartoonists in hiding, shaking their heads and saying, "That's exactly what we thought, and where was Michael Coren when we needed him."

Is it a peculiar kind of religious advocate, or a typical one, who can foam at the mouth over a work of fiction and side with people who would deny freedom of speech ≠ a freedom he demands for himself and which is provided by secular laws, not religious ones - who does not bother himself, from a Christian perspective, with evaluating the moral issue presented by dropping atom bombs on a nation, whose chief sin is that it is currently ruled by a small number of autocratic clerics?

If The Da Vinci Code is execrable, what word in the English language would be employed to describe the incineration of 70 million souls?

Gary Reid is a freelance writer and a public affairs consultant. Gary Reid, Opinion 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002