This whole situation is sickening.

I could have ignored Spencer’s joining two highly offensive Facebook groups in a day. That he was on my Facebook friends list meant I and his other friends were notified of it. Currently he has 164. I could indeed have stuck with my original plan to ask him for an explanation and give him the chance to quietly withdraw from those groups. But 160+ other people saw it too. Was I the only one who took offense? What does that say about his other friends? And why should he get a pass for repeatedly contaminating the anti-jihad movement with associations that make it easy for Islamic apologists to dismiss everyone who criticizes Islam as fascists or “racists” or haters? Even if he joined these groups out of monumental carelessness, it shows a dereliction of his responsibility as a would-be spokesman for the reasonable critique of Islamist ideology.

We are not at war with any Islamic state. If we want to be at war with the whole Muslim world, the best way to achieve that is to give them proof that those who criticize jihad ideology have allied themselves with its mirror image, fascism, nativism, xenophobia and blanket hatred.

There is a certain type of ideologue who never directly, in so many words, endorses the murderous, fanatical, genocidal fantasies of his friends and associates. He allows them to say what he will not, perhaps because he wants to remain above the fray, perhaps because he thinks the enemy of his enemy is always his friend, perhaps because he is pleased to let others do the dirty work for him. I cannot pretend to know Spencer’s heart. But association and silence imply consent. Someone who wants to be the face of reason in the anti-jihad campaign would take care, I should think, to carefully vet what those he links to endorse. It would be better for Jihad Watch to be a stand-alone website with no blogroll at all than to continue sending readers to hate sites.

Spencer has done untold damage to the cause he espouses by the bedfellows he himself has chosen. If the Facebook groups were the first I had seen of this, I would never have come forward. But it is just another link in a chain of bad faith.

We cannot overcome evil by becoming what we hate, and we cannot excuse ourselves from the duty of screening those who claim to be on our side. We must fight the good fight without making things worse. And allowing oneself to be linked to insane haters achieves not merely nothing positive, it brings about the opposite of what we intend.

I mourn for Spencer and the good work he has done. And I pray that he may see the light and turn away from those who would wreck it.