re: #22 GatorsEatsTaters

OT: I have some friends who run a religious online book store and I just recently noticed they have been pushing books written by Robert Spencer as accurate research material on Islam. Can someone please provide me links to the best material showing his lies/shady connections. I know there were some good articles here at LGF that Charles posted but anything outside would be most appreciated as well.

Would they give something from SPLC a fair hearing?

Two Key Tactics
This coordinated anti-Muslim movement relies heavily on two key tactics. The first is arguing that the most radical Muslims — men like Osama bin Laden — are properly interpreting the Koran, while peaceful, moderate Muslims either don’t understand their own holy book or are strategically faking their moderation. The primary architect of this theory is SIOA co-founder Robert Spencer, who has researched Islam outside academia for more than three decades. He says the Koran itself is innately violent and calls for the utter subjugation of non-believers. Critics charge that Spencer ignores other passages and centuries of interpretive scholarship that mitigate the Koran’s occasional violent verses. Some also point out that the many violent admonitions of other holy books, including the Bible, are not usually taken literally by believers.

The second key tactic is to relentlessly attack individuals and organizations who purport to represent moderate Islam in America, painting them as secret operatives in the grand Muslim scheme (typically attributed to a conspiracy led by the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood) to destroy the West.

One doesn’t have to probe very deeply to find the fingerprints of the eight central activists — Spencer, Pipes, Horowitz, Gaffney, Emerson, Gabriel, Geller and Yerushalmi — on almost every aspect of the recent surge in anti-Muslim fervor in America. The conservative media, led by FOX News personalities Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Eric Bolling and including the upstart Pajamas Media online network, evangelist Franklin Graham, and a contingent of sympathetic right-wing bloggers and commentators, have joined in to help construct a “movement” that 9/11 itself didn’t generate.

The point is that Spencer is not a scholar, he’s an activist, and his ‘research’ is all in the service of his agenda.