HYSTERICAL LIBERAL CALLS TO BAN COULTER SOMEWHAT INCONSISTENT WITH THEIR "FREE SPEECH" CELEBRATIONS OF AHMADINEJAD'S COLUMBIA APPEARANCE

As JR said, this Coulter dustup has very little to do with hate speech (although the comparison between evangelicalism and haredi Judaism probably doesn't line up all that well theologically). That said - what if Coulter had really said that she wanted Jews wiped off the planet? She didn't, but what if she had? From Hunter at DKos, unblinking - albeit richly amusing - irony:

So if you can look at that record of bile and bigotry, and still invite her on your show, here's the rule: you own what she says. You don't have to invite her on. Just because she's plugging another book, a thin rewrite of the last four or five similar books about liberals-something-something-traitor-something-something, doesn't mean you're obligated to prop her up in a chair and help her promote it. You choose to put her on the air. You choose to give an audience to her crap.

If you invite David Duke or a Stormfront spokesman on your network to talk about the inferiority of blacks or Jews or Latinos, you have made the choice to give those hatemongers a mountaintop from which to promote their bigotry... Don't give us this crap about pretending to be offended by her bigotry. If you were truly offended by her bigotry, you wouldn't have returned her damn phone calls, much less hitched a microphone to her and placed her in front of a camera. In giving her an audience knowing full well what sorts of things she would say, you own her bigotry.

Done and done. But this nuanced understanding seemed a little lacking during Ahmadinejad's Columbia appearance. Even when they weren't explicitly defending Ahmadinejad himself (money line: "he spoke a lot about his spiritual view and hope for the world... he ain't such a bad man"), they were still defending the visit on free speech grounds. So letting American citizen and best selling author Ann Coulter explain her views - that makes you complicit in bigotry. But letting a genocidal Holocaust denying dictator try to justify himself in the heart of American academia in the greatest city in the US - the freest of free speech.

As it happens, Ahmadinejad actually is a hateful bigot and Coulter is very much not. But even if that wasn't true, wouldn't the hysteria surrounding Ann's remarks prove that "free speech works"? There's something a little familiar - and a lot disturbing - about the left's thuggish stampede to get anything they don't like off the airwaves.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]