Another Side of Bob Spencer

In the first part of a 30 minutes interview at FrontPage Magazine which is annoyingly broken up into three parts, Jamie Glazov asks Robert Spencer a series of questions about Islamic culture, both modern and historic. His questions range from night life in the contemporary Islamic world to Muslim inventions to Muslim dissidents. “We materially reward dissidents in the West,” Glazov says, as the screen flashes an image of Noam Chomsky. “Are there similar instances in Islam?” Spencer informs him with a smile that there are not.

In part two of the interview, Spencer makes a fascinating point, that jihad is the most efficacious way for a Muslim to overcome his sins. No matter how bad his sins are, waging jihad is a great good act that wipes all his sins out. This explains the enormous attraction that the murder of infidels holds for Muslims.

At the end of part three, Glazov asks if there is any hope, and Spencer says that the hope is that people will start to understand the truth about Islam. Naturally (no, unnaturally), Glazov doesn’t ask Spencer what we should DO about Islam once we understand the truth about it, and Spencer for his part doesn’t volunteer what we should DO about Islam once we understand the truth about it.

Weirdly and tragically, it remains the case that Islam is the only historic threat to our civilization in response to which its warners advocate no practical steps to save us from it, and, furthermore, do not seem to think that such steps are even called for.

In the interview, Spencer is amiable, witty, engaging, likable. He doesn’t portray the tiniest hint of the paranoid side that has repeatedly led him to regard even the mildest intellectual criticism of himself as a personal attack and to reply to it with a real personal attack, as seen most recently in his public argument and parting of the ways with his 18 year old former colleague, Aymenn Jawad (see this, this, and this). How can someone who is so affable also be so nasty? I don’t have an answer, beyond repeating the truism that every human being is a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses, of light and dark.

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LA writes:

There was also a remarkable personal revelation in the interview, I think in part three. Spencer tells Glazov that he was a Communist or a quasi-Communist in his younger days.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 14, 2011 08:18 AM | Send