The decisive argument against Spencer’s former idea of screening out jihadist immigrants, made by Spencer himself

Last June 9, when I reported that Robert Spencer had given up his jihadist-screening idea (which had been long criticized by me) and was now saying that we should cease allowing any Muslim immigration from Muslim countries, I didn’t mention, probably because I had forgotten it, an article of mine that had been posted less than two months earlier, on April 15, entitled “Spencer’s Islam contradiction, boiled down to its essentials.” In that piece, I decisively refuted Spencer’s screening idea based on Spencer’s own concise account of jihad in his Jihad Watch mission statement. Re-reading my article now, I can’t help but suspect that Spencer himself read it and finally realized that his screening proposal was indefensible in terms of his own understanding of the nature of Islam. Here’s the key passage in my article:

The basic premise underlying the [screening] proposal is that Muslims are not the problem for the U.S., jihadists are the problem. Yet according to Spencer’s own mission statement, (1) Islamic jihadists are in a war to destroy the West, (2) jihad is a “central duty of every Muslim,” and, (3) “No major Muslim group has ever repudiated the doctrines of armed jihad.” What then is the use of screening out individual Muslim immigration applicants who have an explicit jihadist background, and letting the rest in, when every Muslim is at least a potential jihadist? Since Islamic jihadists are in a war to the death with us, and since all Muslims are enjoined to wage jihad (whether they do it actively or not), and since there is no authoritative non-jihadist Islam to forbid Muslims from waging jihad, it is a no-brainer that all mass Islamic immigration must cease, period.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 15, 2007 09:24 AM | Send