A correction on Spencer

In the entry about Ann Barnhardt yesterday, I wrote:

And by the way, will Robert Spencer, Andrew McCarthy and the other respectable Islam critics call Ann Barnhardt a moron and a nut, as they called Jones?

Robert Spencer in an e-mail informs me that he never called Jones a nut or anything else; he has said that he disapproves of book burning, but that Jones has the right to freedom of expression. I will take Spencer’s word for it. I’ve seen the same epithets applied so universally to Jones (and always combined with the caveat that the moron and lunatic Jones had the “right” to burn the Koran) that I had thought, evidently mistakenly, that Spencer had used them as well. I am changing the entry to reflect this.

However, Spencer also complains about another recent statement of mine about him. I wrote:

Consider Robert Spencer. Does Spencer totally reject Islam? Not at all. For all his withering critiques of “supremacist Islam” (rarely or never of Islam itself), his writings assume a future in which Islam is allowed to remain in our society and keeps getting stronger and more numerous among us while we keep reading about it and debating about it and complaining about it and asking rhetorical questions about when it will reform itself.

In an e-mail to his thuggish sidekick Mike Slumber (a.k.a. awake) with a cc to me, Spencer writes:

This is a rather outlandish claim on Auster’s part, but as we have seen in your other recent email to him, he doesn’t hesitate to publish false statements about me, and doesn’t publish corrections even when provided with them.

It is curious behavior, inconsistent with his stated commitment to truth and accuracy.

Well, Spencer will just have to live with the fact that he has never advocated any laws or policies that would reduce the growing population and power of Muslims in America, an issue I have addressed repeatedly and in detail over the years. Most recently, in February 2010, in an analysis of the platform of Spencer’s and Pamela Geller’s then-new organization, the Freedom Defense Initiative, I wrote:

… So, when it comes to actual anti-Islamization activities, there are some good and needed ideas. The idea of an organization exposing and opposing Islamization at the local level and in the federal government is good. But overall it seems to me that FDI’s goals are strikingly limited.

For example, there’s nothing on anti-Islamization measures that conservative Islam critics often mention, such as shutting down radical mosques. Indeed, there is not a single legal or political measure that this new organization proposes vis a vis Islam.

Most significantly and remarkably, notwithstanding the manifesto’s 23 bulleted points, there is no mention of restricting Muslim immigration. Geller and Spencer see Islam as a mortal threat to our freedom Yet they don’t make even a pro forma proposal to reduce, let alone to stop, Muslim immigration, even though Spencer has in the past proposed doing that. This proves what I have said about him all along: that he talks about immigration occasionally (and very briefly), because he feels he has to, but his heart is not in it.

Here I need to point out that Spencer in the past has repeatedly called me a liar for saying (1) that he had not advocated ending Muslim immigration, and (2) that even when he did advocate it (often in the form of a parenthetical aside), he was not consistent and serious on the issue. Yet now he has formed an organization to defend America from Islamic jihad, and the organization is silent about Muslim immigration….

This new organization tacitly accepts both the presence of Islam in America, and the ever-growing presence of Islam in America. It calls for rear guard actions aimed at preventing the power of Islam from increasing, even as it does nothing to stop the actual increase of the Muslim population in America which makes the increase of the power of Islam inevitable. The plan is inadequate at best, self-defeating and absurd at worst.

This is not an organization with a serious set of goals that would add up to saving America from Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 06, 2011 04:19 PM | Send