The actual positions of the best-known Islam critics, revisited

I’m informed that a commenter at the 4W thread, “The trouble with Larry,” asked:

Could someone help me out and tell me whether there’s an actual dispute over whether Auster is factually correct when he states that neither Steyn, Hitchens nor Phillips have ever explicitly endorsed the curtailment of Islamic immigration to the West.

Since there seems to be some uncertainty on the point, I will repeat that neither Steyn, nor Hitchens, nor Phillips has ever explicitly endorsed the curtailment of Islamic immigration into the West. Readers can determine the facts for themselves by perusing the below articles:

VFR on Mark Steyn: a collection

VFR on Melanie Phillips: a collection

And these entries on Hitchens:

An inadequate critique of Britain’s immigration woes—and of the BNP [Hitchens’s convoluted explanation of the immigration problem]

When it rains it pours: another Brit calls for immigration reductions [But less to it than meets the eye—but he doesn’t actually, he says we should be “concerned” about mass immigration but doesn’t say it should be stopped.]

P. Hitchens: if you think race matters, you’ve not a civilized human being]

P. Hitchens confirms himself in his liberal folly about race and immigration

Are my criticisms of Peter Hitchens unfair?

Peter Hitchens—conservative surrender monkey [He says Obama election signals third-worldization of America brought on by Third-World immigration—which he has never opposed.]

If there are conservatives who are still under the impression that writers such Steyn and Phillips have called for the curtailment of Muslim immigration into the West, that only shows the enormous power of the conservative illusion, about which I’ve written so often. Readers see certain writers waxing passionate about the Islam threat, and, being rational, they assume that those writers must have taken a strong position on what to do about that threat, when in reality they haven’t—when in reality they’ve assiduously avoided the subject.

- end of initial entry -

A reader asked why I did not include Robert Spencer in this entry. Unlike the other three writers mentioned, Spencer has said that Muslim immigration ought to be stopped, though he has also contradicted that statement with other statements. But at least he has said on a couple of occasions, in categorical terms, that Muslim immigration ought to be stopped, and, notwithstanding his famous inconsistencies, he deserves some credit for that.

Also, I don’t include in this entry the collection of my articles on Daniel Pipes, because Pipes is at least as much an Islam apologist as an Islam critic, and so his silence on Islamic immigration does not represent the gross contradiction that it represents in the case of Steyn and Phillips. The same goes for Bernard Lewis, who, like Pipes, is an apologist as much as a critic. However, my collections on Pipes and Lewis are linked in the sidebar on VFR’s main page.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 14, 2009 05:25 PM | Send