Ann Coulter: The "irreligious" are "trying to stir up trouble with the religious"

On the October 30 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Alan Colmes said to his guest, conservative author and pundit Ann Coulter: "I haven't spoken to you since you made your infamous comment saying that people like me need to be 'perfected,' " adding, "So how about embracing one of the great Christian virtues, as Jesus discussed, humility, and apologizing to all those people you offended by that comment?" Colmes was referring to Coulter's statement, documented by Media Matters for America, on the October 8 edition of CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch that "we" Christians "just want Jews to be perfected." Responding to Colmes, Coulter stated: "[I]f you're going to go around citing all the people I have offended, Alan, I have 1,000 Orthodox rabbis supporting me." Later, Colmes asserted: "You claim 1,000 Orthodox rabbis support you. I don't know who they are, but I can tell you, you know the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and many others have condemned you for that. Do you care?" Coulter responded: "I wear it as a badge of honor. It's like citing the National Organization of Women to tell me how all women feel. The point is: This is the same old fight we see all the time with the irreligious trying to stir up trouble with the religious."

Coulter's response on Hannity & Colmes echoes remarks she made on the October 15 broadcast of Townhall Radio's The Michael Medved Show, where -- as Media Matters documented -- she claimed: "This is just the irreligious against the religious," while responding to criticism surrounding her comments on The Big Story. Coulter made a similar statement later that same evening on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, as Media Matters also documented.

Coulter's assertion that "I have 1,000 Orthodox Jews supporting me" is an apparent reference to an October 15 article published on LifeSiteNews.com -- a "non-profit Internet service dedicated to issues of culture, life, and family" that "emphasizes the social worth of traditional Judeo-Christian principles" -- which quoted Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance for America and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, saying: "She said nothing that in any way indicates anti-Semitism." The article characterized Levin as a "spokesman for some 1000 orthodox rabbis" and also quoted him as saying: "It is a fact that millions of Christians believe in evangelizing and preaching the gospel and it is their belief for a Jew to accept the tenets of Christianity and accept the divinity somehow completes them and brings them to perfection," and noted that "Levin stressed, 'That's obviously not our belief, that's not the traditional Jewish belief at all.'"

During the show, following Colmes' assertion that Coulter "doesn't want to own up to" her October 8 statement, Coulter said: "I gave a beautiful description of the Old Testament and the New Testament, but it's very frightening to secularists."