What Spencer has told people about me

I had forgotten about this item and just chanced upon it. It appeared in The worst of Steyn, redux, posted in January 2007. I wrote:

By the way, regarding my criticisms of Steyn and others, Robert Spencer wrote to several people yesterday in an e-mail about me:

The bottom line is that this individual is bent on discrediting me, Steyn, Phillips, Pipes, etc. etc.—in short, everyone but himself, so that he will stand as the only trustworthy authority on Islamic and immigration issues. It is an unseemly exercise, embarrassing to watch. I am more interested in making common cause even with those with whom I do not agree on anything. In the larger struggle, we have few enough allies as it is—unless the struggle is to establish Austerism over the West.

Spencer’s mindset is so perfectly liberal. To the liberal mind, there is no truth higher than our individual selves. Therefore if writer X says that writers Y and Z are wrong about something, it’s not because X thinks that Y and Z are saying something that is untrue, or contradictory, or perhaps inadequate to the needs of the time; it’s because X wants to make himself superior to Y and Z, which is a violation of liberal equality.

- end of initial entry -

Adela Gereth writes:

I have read much of your online writing and simply do not recognize your M.O. from Spencer’s description of it. Either he is referring to some other Lawrence Auster or he has mistaken an insistence on logical inference from available facts for rampant narcissism.

Before I ever knew about VFR, I used to read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch daily. He reported on Muslim “hard” aggression (terrorist attacks, threats, etc.) against the West on the former and Muslim incursion into Western society via “soft jihad” on the latter. Given that he self-evidently would like the West to survive as a recognizably Western entity—or else why choose that topic?—it is all the more remarkable that during the time I was a regular reader, he always stopped short of the only logical conclusion, based on the evidence he himself presented.

That is his right to do on his website, of course. But he does not then have the right to attribute weird psychological motives to you, or anyone else, for calling him on such an egregious omission. Indeed, it is because of that omission that I am no longer a regular reader of his. It’s as if he’s leading his readership to water and then telling them not to drink.

I cannot fathom why Spencer has consistently refrained from drawing the only logical conclusion from the copious amount of factual evidence he himself has posted. Or perhaps I didn’t pay sufficient attention to the names of his website and blog. A “watch” can be construed as a comparatively passive activity, as opposed to the more dynamic “alert” or “call to action” or even “warning”.

LA replies:

Yes, it’s like the “terrorist watch lists” we’re always hearing about. The media is always telling us about the government having a terrorist watch list, but they never tell us what this list means or give us any example of what is done as a result of this list. In practice, it seems to mean that you let the terrorists into your country and you don’t do anything about them.

From: Jeff in England (April 28)
Re: OUT HERE STANDS A SUSPECT IN THIS LONELY CROWD,
WHO SWEARS LARRY AUSTER IS TO BLAME

Spencer, Pipes, Melanie and Steyn discredit themselves by not following up their constant warnings about the dangers of Islam and Muslims (extremist or otherwise) with any kind of serious solution to the problem. And if they occasionally casually mention that immigration restriction (Islamic or otherwise) is needed, they quickly put aside that suggestion in subsequent writing and speeches. As if they had never said it.

Larry Auster, by consistently insisting that Islamic immigration must be severely restricted to the West at least attempts to provide an intelligent solution to sort the Muslim problem out.

You’d think the above Suspects would be grateful to Auster for those attempting to deal with the problem. They are too cowardly or too guilt ridden to do so themselves. You think they might just look at his spot on criticism of their lack of logic and think again.

But no, no such luck. Instead, they react by accusing him of discrediting them (which they have done to themselves through their own weak thinking), or by saying he is trying to establish “Austerism” or by simply ignoring him. Anything to avoid the real problem of providing a serious solution.

Simply put, the above Suspects have failed us and failed themselves. And blaming Larry Auster won’t make that failure disappear.

If the Suspects can’t help solve the Muslim problem, they should gracefully withdraw from the public arena. End of story….

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 24, 2008 02:02 PM | Send