Spencer's Absurdities, Again

Robert Spencer was recently interviewed on Frontpage Magazine, where he talks about his new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran. As usual, Spencer is adept at quoting Koranic verses and explaining them to some extent, and I believe he has made tremendous contributions in that regard. But there’s always a catch to Spencer’s interpretations, despite his diligent scholarship.

Spencer talks about the Arabic nature of Islam, and how the Koran needs to be read and understood in Arabic only – the language of Mohammed. All Muslims, irrelevant of their native tongues, have to recite the Koran in Arabic. Spencer mentions a funny (and poignant) quote from a Pakistani Muslim in his interview who says "I am very proud of my religion, and have memorized almost all of the Koran. And one day I plan to get one of those translations and find out what it means."

Now this gives Spencer license to say absurd things. It is as though Spencer is unable to believe his original – factually sound – findings, but has to make up his own interpretations instead. Perhaps that is why Mohammed wanted his Koran read in Arabic only, as "lost in translation" is a phrase that comes to mind, and of which Spencer is frequently guilty.

This is what Spencer says about the dangers of "peaceful" Muslims not understanding the Koran:

[W]hen the Koran is not immediately understood – and its seventh-century Arabic can be difficult even for native Arabic speakers – those who believe in it understand it by means of how it is preached and presented in the local mosque. If the imams there do not preach hatred of Infidels and the necessity to fight and subjugate them, then these probably won’t be live ideas in the minds of the devout – and such has long been the case in many areas of the world.

At the same time, however, the Koran says what it says, and so jihadist movements do point to chapter and verse to attempt to recruit peaceful Muslims to their cause, and to justify their actions within the Islamic community.

I suppose the biggest mystery about Islam could be how it has remained latent for so long, mostly stuck in Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, and parts of Africa. There is no mention of outright jihad in the past several centuries, until it suddenly came to full force in our era. In Spencer’s view, this could be because imams "there" - as Spencer ambiguously refers to non-Western Muslim lands - had decided in previous centuries not to emphasize the jihadist verses to their non-Western followers.

First, Spencer needs to provide concrete evidence that imams never preached jihad in non-Western Islamic countries until contemporary political issues, which he calls terrorism, started to occur. But, second, and more likely, surely they didn’t need to put that aspect of Islam front and center, since jihad had been accomplished successfully with the Islamization of these countries.

My interpretation of this resurgence of jihadist preaching – non-peaceful preaching, as Spencer would call it - is that Islam has reached a new phase, where it has now entered the West filled with infidels, including Christians and Jews. The jihadist component of Islam has to click in naturally to Islamize, or at least fight and subjugate, the infidels in these countries, as it is written in the Koran. Peaceful preaching is no longer sufficient, and the jihadist mode is necessary for the great task at hand.

This is why I wonder about Spencer’s true understanding of Islam, despite his many years studying it. He can read the words, but misses the meanings, it seems to me. I wonder if Spencer reads the Koran in the original Arabic, and if not, perhaps that is why he cannot understand Mohammed’s glorious message as presented in the Arabic (true) Koran. Or maybe some infidels just don't get it, which is perhaps why so many countries fell so swiftly and quickly to the mighty sword of Allah.

There is a warning here, somewhere.

Steve Paikin's Good-Hearted Naiveté

I wasn't going to post about Ezra Levant's recent interview at TVO. But, this uninteresting interview is now up on The International Free Press Society, which is elevating Levant's run-of-the-mill discussion as a "freedom of the press" and "freedom of expression" issue, as their website indicates.

In Levant's comments section at his website on his TVO post, there is praise after praise for his positions. There are also comments on Steve Paikin's (the TVO host) role as a devil's advocate.

Steve Paikin was no devil's advocate. He was expressing a genuine, naive and good-hearted concern, which I think many Canadians have, when he kept saying things like "you feel your identity is under attack" and especially this:

"Is it not beneficial to a society to try to reduce the amount of hate that we inspire through writings towards one another? Is that not an intrinsically good thing to do?"

Paiken’s well-taken point is: how do we deal with all these differences, these inequalities, these potentials for hurts and insults that is now so prevalent in Canadian society?

Levant was really quite unprepared to answer this question. He is stuck in his narrow fight of dismantling this fraudulent institution. And he never questions why it exists in the first place.

My answer, as I’ve indicated in many posts, is that as long as high levels of immigration of peoples of such divergent backgrounds from the traditional Canadian culture and society continues, there will be increasing governmental coercion to be "nice" to our neighbors. Dismantling the HRCs doesn’t get rid of the problem.

There is nothing wrong with being good neighbors, as Paiken innocently kept bringing up. But, if our whole governmental system is geared toward forcing people to be nice to each other, and specifically to the new comers of such divergent and different backgrounds, then we have to start asking how to stop this.

One obvious solution is to reduce (stopping is too much to ask) the number of immigrants that come into Canada.

If Levant had read my blog, and I don’t mean this facetiously since none of the other conservative bloggers and writers are bringing this up, and also read my most recent recommendation, Lawrence Auster’s The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, he would have known how to respond to Paiken.

In fact, I also invite Steve Paiken to this blog to get a clearer answer for the kinds of questions he was asking Levant.

Levant has an obligation to answer genuine questions like Paiken's and which ordinary Canadians are also asking. They sincerely want to live in harmony with their neighbors. He has entered into the fray of coercive governmental policies. He cannot avoid the issue of high immigration and the many HRC-type of activities the government is still performing.

Brigitte Gabriel Has Another Interview At Frontpagemag.com And Says Even Less Than She Did In 2006

A very vocal Muslim woman from Iran, Homa Arjomand, made it her life's goal to stop Sharia in Ontario a few years ago. To avoid the many negative impacts of Sharia on Muslim women, as was her main argument, the Jewish and Catholic arbitrations were also dismantled, and the Muslim Sharia thus lost its bid. Multiculturalism won a strange victory.

I wrote about this in Islam's Missionary Women where I say:

All these women [Homa Arjomand, Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan and Irshad Manji] are pleading that their Western compatriots help them reform Islam and support their fellow Muslim women in achieving their dreams of transformed lives in the West. Each of them is using the rhetoric of freedom of the individual, freedom of expression, and a simplistic concept of secularism to justify her appeals.

But our duty as Westerners is not to reform Islam, nor to accommodate Muslim women--those very women who will have male and female Muslim off-spring, thereby turning our countries into what they left behind. Our responsibility is to make sure that Islam is kept at a distance, which includes Muslims...We can never be sure if our assistance to these multitudes of Muslim women would alleviate their plight, but making drastic changes in our own societies in response to their grievances will only damage us.

Brigitte Gabriel is another Arab woman speaking against Islam, but who is a few steps ahead of the rest perhaps because she is Christian. Her new book, They Must Be Stopped, attempts to address what to do with the growing Muslim presence in the US. It is equally relevant in Canada.

I have written about Brigitte's impassioned demands previously [also links to her 2006 Frontpagemag.com interview], and in her recent January 16, 2008 interview at Frontpagemag.com, she still doesn't come up with a better plan than stopping them from doing whatever it is they're doing through regulations, laws and constant monitoring.

Her argument is to stop them once they are here. One major thesis of her argument should be to stop the from coming here in the first place. She doesn't say this at all in her interview, although in her 2006 interview she does say "close our borders". That's it. In fact, in her 2008 interview, she seemed to have regressed. No mention is made about border closing at all.

They Must Be Stopped has to include the argument that allowing such a large, dangerous group in our society is unacceptable.

Brigitte now needs to think one more step ahead. In a sane world, no Muslims should be admitted into our countries. In an even saner world, we should find ways to remove such a large presence of a group that is eternally set to destroy us (for reasons of their own which they certainly find valid) . The policies need to be fine-tuned, but that is the direction that Brigitte, as a vocal and well-known spokesman, should be going.

Although to be fair, the full title of her book is They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam And How We Can do It .

In order to really critique it, I should read the whole thing, including the part where she says "How we can do it." But the problem is, she never talks about the "how", always about the "what" (sometimes about the "why".) I don't know why this is, but Robert Spencer once told in me in an interview that he feels the public is not ready for the "how".

But, if they never talk about it at important interviews, how is the public ever going to be interested in, and realize the feasibility of the "how"?

Email Conversation with Robert Spencer

What can we do about Islam?

Update: with my comments on Spencer's critique of Abul Kasem's 8-point strategy to confront Islam.

Update II (11-12-09): I have removed my comments under Spencer's point-by-point answers to Abul Kasem's strategies. They were not my emailed responses to Spencer, simply my comments on Spencer's replies posted on the blog.

Here is a series of email conversations I had with renowned author and expert on Muslims and Islam, Robert Spencer.

My question, when all is chiseled away is:

Given that Robert Spencer knows how destructive Islam is to societies, and that Islam is making such a strong presence in the West, and specifically the United States and Canada, how can we get rid of the problem of Islam from our society?

Mr. Spencer has given me permission to post the interaction on my blog, and here it is.

------------------------------------------------

On 7/12/08 12:10 PM, "cameralucidas@yahoo.com" wrote:

Dear Mr. Spencer,

I have been reading your articles for a few years now, and have learned
copious amount of information from them.

But, during your recent interactions with Mr. Auster at the VFR, the
contention is that you haven't provided enough strategic and realistic
attempts to rid the West of Islam.

In the recent Frontpage Mag symposium "Confronting the Islamization of the West", you unfortunately spent littletime discussing Abul Kasem's practical strategy to combat Islam in the
West.

You preferred to spend most of your time and attention on the problems
with Islam (which we now know so much about), and not the strategies to
get rid of this problem.

I wonder what you think of Kasem's efforts, and would you find time to
make such a 8, 10 or even 5-point strategy to remove the dangers of
Islam from the West?

So far, you may have written them in between many other topics on Islam, but I haven't seen a deliberate, concise, direct and clear strategy from you.

Perhaps what I'm saying is can you make the leap from the scholar to the
activist, or is that (the activist's) role something you feel should be
done by others?

Sincerely,

Kidist Paulos Asrat

------------------------------------------------

From: Robert Spencer <director@jihadwatch.org>
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:50:35 -0400
To: <cameralucidas@yahoo.com>
Conversation: Abul Kasem's 8-point strategy
Subject: Re: Abul Kasem's 8-point strategy

Dear Kidist Paulos Asrat

Thanks for your kind note.

I am happy to discuss this with you, but allow me please to ask you first:
have you read any of my books? In three of them the final chapter contains a
series of recommendations for what we must do in order to defend ourselves.
Yet Mr. Auster has stated several times that he hasn't read any of these
books, and then he claims that I have made no recommendations. I must say I
find this peculiar.

Also, I ask that you please look over the symposium again. Please note the
abysmal ignorance of Rohan Gunaratna, and the influence that he has. Rohan
Gunaratna rejected Abul Kasem's recommendations because he doesn't see the
need for them -- because he thoroughly misunderstands the nature of the
problem itself. And remember, please, that the overwhelming majority of
Americans and others are still just as ignorant and uninformed about the
nature of the problem as is Rohan Gunaratna. It is because of this that I
spend the bulk of my time trying to raise awareness of the problem. In fact,
I believe that pushing for certain policy recommendations before there is a general awareness of the problem they are intended to solve can actually make it less rather than more likely that the policy recommendations in question will be taken seriously and eventually adopted.

You ask, "I wonder what you think of Kasem's efforts." Answer: in the
Symposium itself I wrote this: "...we need to take strong and decisive
steps, such as Abul Kasem outlines, to protect ourselves."

[Ed. note: Here are Spencer's answers (via email to me) to each of Kasem's 8-point strategy from the FPM symposium. 

n.b. Spencer was also part of the FPM symposium, but didn't address these points directly at FPM].
-----------------------

1.
AK: Adopt tough policies on the entry of Islamists to non-Islamic countries. However, we must make a distinction between the large number of in-name-only Muslims and the diehard, jihad-infused, conniving, pan-Islamists."

RS: I have taken a stronger position on this than Abul Kasem, given the
impossibility of distinguishing Muslims-in-name-only from jihadists: end
Muslim immigration. Mr. Auster grasps at straws in claiming that I don't
mean this since I have only stated it at my blog. Well, I mean what I say at
my blog. 

2.
AK: Enforce strict restrictions on the construction of mosques and Islamic seminaries. If this sounds unethical/ and or infringing on the religious
rights, please note the non-existence and disallowance of construction of
non-Islamic worshipping centres in Islamic Paradises. We must call spade a
spade.

RS: This cannot be done in America given the First Amendment. I have called (I
think it is in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam -- I am unsure
because I am in a hotel and do not have my books with me, but I am sure it
is one of my books) for the reclassification of Islamic groups in the US as
political unless they renounce the Sharia supremacist imperative and make
themselves open to inspection to show that not only are they not teaching
the political aspects of Islam, but are teaching against them, and
advocating the Western principles of republican government and equality of
rights for all. And if they are found to be still teaching Islamic
supremacism, they should be closed.

And of no construction of mosques or Islamic schools funded by Islamic
supremacist governments such as Saudi Arabia should be permitted. 

3.
AK: Stop paying jizya to the Islamists. Do not accede to any unreasonable demands solely by the Islamists. Keep other religious people in mind. Why must Islam be treated more favourably than other religions? Ask the Islamists this simple question.

RS: We have advocated this many times at Jihad Watch. Hugh Fitzgerald has
written about it frequently and in great detail, and I endorse his views.

4.
AK: Halt the interfaith dialogue with Islam. Remember, Islam is
uncompromising. There is no way Islam will accommodate un-Islam. Please read
this sentence one more time and memorize. You will save a lot of time and
money wasted to please Islam. We do not have to please Islam."

RS: Yes. I devoted a chapter to the perils of this interfaith dialogue in my
book "Religion of Peace."

5.
AK: Assert the un-Islamic (non-Islamic) cultures, traditions, customs and ethos. We must let the Islamic world learn a bit that the world is not prepared to accept its 7th century Arab Bedouin customs and laws."

RS: This is something I have advocated for years in many, many contexts and in
many different ways. My book "Religion of Peace" is dedicated to this in
particular.

6.
AK: Reject any demand to impose Sharia in a non-Islamic society; even if it
is in the pretence for Muslims only. Remember, Muslims are the first victimsof Islam."

RS: This also I have advocated repeatedly for many years. Search for "Sharia" at
Jihad Watch and you will see.

7.
AK: Muslims migrating to non-Islamic countries must sign a declaration that they do not believe in pan-Islamism. If found contravening their signed declaration they should be stripped of their citizenship and promptly deported to the Islamic Paradise they had migrated from."

RS: If this idea did not originate with me, at very least I have been one of its
foremost advocates. This is the "screening" proposal upon which Mr. Auster
has heaped scorn. He has pointed out that Muslims entering the country will
lie when they declare their rejection of Sharia and acceptance of Western
principles. Quite so. But then if they begin advocating Sharia in any way,
this will become grounds for deportation. You can find this at JW in
connection with earlier controversies with Mr. Auster.

8.
AK: Proselytizing by Islamic dawa must be strictly controlled, and if necessary, banned. If you think I am being unreasonable. Please look at the laws of Islamic Paradises (such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Sudan, NigeriaŠ) with regard to the propagation of other faith among the Muslims."

RS: Of course. Its political and supremacist character must be recognized.
-------------------------

In sum, I stand by my contention that Lawrence Auster is falsely stating my
views. I have advocated numerous solutions, and continue to do so. At the same time, as I explained above I still believe that the primary task that must be done is raising awareness. And I am going to continue to focus on that, without apology.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

------------------------------------------------

On 7/12/08 1:30 PM, "Kidist Paulos Asrat" wrote:

Mr. Spencer,

I think this clarifies my understanding of your position:

At the same time, I explained above I still believe that the primary task that must be done is rasing awareness. And I am going to continue to focus on that, without apology.

I understand that not everyone can be a strategist. But there is only so much awareness that we can raise, without making the final call.

With all due respect, that must be why you are having such a difficult contention with Mr. Auster. Raising awareness is no longer necessary (and even if so, it is now ineffective.)

The role for Islamic experts now is to combat, directly and without equivocation.

[...]

Even God felt it necessary at some point to give us a list of things to do with His Ten Commandments, rather than to just read and ruminate over a story.

I say all this with such conviction because my own country of birth (Ethiopia), although I came here to Canada as a very young child, went through a devastating Islamic Jihad. Fortunately we are now able to tell the tale, and recognize the ominous signs.

If you wish, you can read my entry on "Christian Tolerance, Islamic Jihad" it is at my blog: Camera Lucida .

Thanks once again,

Kidist

------------------------------------------------

From: Robert Spencer
Subject: Re: Abul Kasem's 8-point strategy
To: cameralucidas@yahoo.com
Date: Saturday, July 12, 2008, 10:37 AM

I respectfully disagree. Most Americans have no idea of the facts you know well and are impatient with me for repeating. I am going to continue to try to change that. You say that raising awareness is no longer necessary. I disagree.

------------------------------------------------

From: "Kidist Paulos Asrat"
To: "Robert Spencer"

Of course I agree with you that the facts will ever be there to be unraveled, by scholars like you and also like Dr. Bostom.

I was talking of the necessity to put strategy to fact. And convince Westerners that the facts they know so far (however limited they may be) along with awareness, need to be, at this critical time, joined with specific strategies.

Perhaps, if I may be so bold, your important role now as an expert on Islam, is to make these clear strategies in the manner that I have suggested that Mr. Kasem has so clearly delineated. I think people would trust you, and would not doubt any ominous suggestions you might make given the depth of your scholarship.

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