My final word(s) re Spencer

I tried to post one more comment at Robert Spencer’s site, but the blog was closed to further comments. Below is the note I sent to Spencer asking him to open up the thread to my comment, followed by his reply, followed by the unposted comment.

LA to Robert Spencer:

I had another comment to post (see below), but was blocked; it said no more comments were allowed. I hope you will open up the blog thread to one more comment by me.

Spencer wrote back:

Larry,

You called me a liar and buttressed your case by flagrantly misrepresenting what I wrote.

You are shamelessly misrepresenting my positions on a large variety of issues.

Your capacity for projection is apparently inexhaustible.

I remember that when I posted an article of yours, favorably, you asked me to take it down. [LA note: I don’t know what Spencer is referring to.]

Now you’re whining because I didn’t put any more up? I am not one who keeps repeating mistakes.

You have attacked me repeatedly and misrepresented my views—whether out of ignorance or malice I don’t know—at your site. I never mentioned you at all on mine until I decided to honor the requests by several people that I respond to you. You should be glad of that instead of whining that I don’t post about you, when you didn’t like it when I did do so.

I am astonished at your apparent lack of interest in representing my views fairly or accurately.

Accordingly, I am through. Go play in your own sandbox. Smear me all you like. You make yourself more contemptible by the minute.

Cordially

Robert Spencer

Here’s the comment I was unable to post at Spencer’s site:

One more comment: Notwithstanding Robert Spencer’s obnoxious and insulting conduct toward me, I will continue, as I have done in the past, to quote and discuss him favorably at my website when he says worthwhile things about Islam. This is, by the way, a compliment that he has never extended to me. Even when I published my huge two-part article at FrontPage Magazine, “The Search for Moderate Islam,” in which I demonstrated at length the falsity and self-contradictions in Daniel Pipes’s promotion of “moderate” Islam, and proposed a radically different strategy toward Islam, Mr. Spencer dismissed it all with the single remark that it had all been said before. So, who is the narrow sectarian here, who would divide the anti-jihadist side or exclude anti-jihadist allies? It is not I, but Spencer, who is incapable of being intellectually fair to someone he personally dislikes.

An afterthought on my exchange with Spencer

Spencer’s main complaint with me was that I was egregiously misrepresenting his position by saying that he does not believe in Western civilization; and his conviction that I was viciously or recklessly lying about him was what justified in his mind his continued insulting attacks on me. But, as I strove over and over to make clear to him, I was not saying that he is not defending Western civilization. I said that his definition of the Western civilization he is defending is largely or exclusively liberal. And that of course is the key to neoconservatism as I understand it. I do not define neoconservatism as “support for the war in Iraq,” as one of the commenters at Spencer’s site defined it; neoconservatism existed for 30 years before the Iraq war, for heaven’s sake. I define neoconservatism as a belief system that seems conservative, because it speaks of defending America and the West, but that in fact gives America and the West purely liberal universalist content. Spencer was unable to grasp this distinction. He simply heard me saying that he does not believe in America and the West, which he took as a horrible and unfair attack.

However, given the extreme personal terms with which he responded to apparently any comment by me, no matter how impersonal I attempted to keep the exchange, I doubt that I would have been able to ‘splain this idea adequately to him, even if I had tried for a year. Spencer, while bright, is not reflective and is not a thinker. He is a liberal who knows a lot about about Islam and opposes Islam, without ever having re-examined his received liberal assumptions.

Shrewsbury writes:

Robert Spencer, especially in his final e-mail to you, really sounds like some kind of crank, and you’d think a man of the world would have learned to do a better job of restraining himself. But it is always astonishing how quickly apparently sane and high-functioning human beings will fall into a pattern of intense personal abuse in this computer medium—how exquisitely touchy they are, so that the slightest pinprick elicits frantic yelps and curses. The impersonal medium seems to render them into pure egos, no longer social beings but sociopaths, and it reminds you of how dehumanized people become whenever they drive motor vehicles, especially on the interstates—the Information Superhighway indeed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 28, 2006 05:15 PM | Send