Spencer Responds to Derbyshire
At PJ Meda, Robert Spencer responds to John Derbyshire’s review of his new book, Religion of Peace?—Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. It’s an excellent rebuttal, and a great example of debating an important subject without descending into ad hominem arguments.
Mano a mano: Spencer v Derbyshire.
Derbyshire’s review, while marvelously written and delightful to read, is full of inconsistencies. I don’t see how he could possibly find what I reveal about Islam to be “persuasive” if at the same time he thinks that Islamic and Christian doctrine are equally likely to inspire their adherents to commit acts of brutality, since the contrary assertion, as he himself notes, is a major point of my book. He also wonders whether “an equally learned Islamic scholar, bent on making the opposite case, might not produce equally persuasive points, to be then rebutted by Spencer, who would be re-rebutted by the Islamist … ” I would welcome such a rebuttal, by the way, unless it were characterized by the torrents of abuse and sly deceptions and diversions that usually come to me from Islamic spokesmen in America, but the point is that while Derbyshire says he is persuaded, he evidently still suspects that I am just engaging in some kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.
And that is by no means the only inconsistency, alas, that mars his elegantly written and thoroughly entertaining review. Derbyshire asserts that “it can hardly be disputed that we have got into the mess we are in with Islam today not so much because of the letter of Islamic theology … as because we have executed policies of staggering idiocy.” Yet what is the nature of that staggering idiocy? The fact that “there are now tens of millions of Muslims living in Christian nations; and this is the case because our nations allowed the tens of millions to enter.” Yet why would that be a problem, if Islam were like Christianity – absurd but ultimately harmless at its core? Obviously the problem with allowing tens of millions of Muslims into the West has to do with “the letter of Islamic theology,” which Derbyshire dismissed as irrelevant just before complaining about the admission of so many adherents of what he sees as a wacky but unthreatening creed.
Derbyshire asks if it is “actually that important” to take on the “‘equivalence’ school of thought, the one that says that there isn’t anything to choose between Christianity and Islam in the way of militancy or obscurantism.” A few weeks ago I was on a TV show on France 24, where I explained that jihadists recruited among peaceful Muslims by referring to the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah and presenting themselves as the exponents of true or pure Islam. One of the other guests on the show then responded by asserting that there were passages of the Bible that were equally violent as anything in the Qur’an, and anyway, what about the Crusades? This kind of howling irrelevancy is extraordinarily common; even conservatives such as Ralph Peters, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Dinesh D’Souza have made similar statements on the way to claiming that it was misguided, futile, and somehow in poor taste to investigate the ways in which Islamic texts are used to incite violence. We are supposed to believe, as Christiane Amanpour’s recent CNN series would also have us believe, that all religious traditions have their nutcases, and all of them are marginal, discredited by the majority, and ultimately insignificant. But this – and I’m sure Mr. Derbyshire can appreciate this distinction – is a dogma, not an established fact. And if it is false (and it is), it may be blinding us in numerous ways to the nature and the magnitude of the problem we face, as well as to the steps we need to take to protect ourselves. This cuts both ways: if Christian theocrats are really the threat Chris Hedges, Barry Lynn, and Kevin Phillips think they are, it only plays into the sinister hands of the Bushitler to focus attention on the adherents of the Religion of Peace. This may seem irredeemably nutso to John Derbyshire, but Hedges’ book was a bestseller: considerable numbers of people out there are taking the Christian theocracy scare very, very seriously. So my book is an examination of both threats and both traditions, an examination that has clear, important, and numerous policy implications.
