Spencer gets back (justifiably) at Peters and D’Souza

I was planning to write about Ralph Peters’s column in Tuesday’s New York Post, but Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has already done so, scoring Peters for his insane column in September 2006 in which he damned certain unnamed Islam critics—he clearly meant people like Spencer, Andrew Bostom, and Bat Ye’or—as Nazi types who want to exterminate all Muslims. I roundly condemned Peters at the time, here and here.

Spencer writes:

Ralph Peters mugged by reality

Ralph Peters, call your office: “a rotten core of American extremists” is out to make it harder for moderate Muslims again, just as you warned us in 2006 that they would do. That’s right, Ralph, “right-wing extremists bent on discrediting honorable conservatism” are “insisting that Islam can never reform, that the violent conquest and subjugation of unbelievers is the faith’s primary agenda—and, when you read between the lines, that all Muslims are evil and subhuman.”

And this time, Ralph, the nasty right-wing extremist is writing right in your own New York Post. He claims that “our insistence that ‘Islam’s a religion of peace’ would have been cold comfort to the family members of those passengers had the bomb detonated as planned.” He even goes so far as to say: “We proclaim that the terrorists ‘don’t represent Islam.’ OK, whom do they represent? The Franciscans? We don’t get to decide what’s Islam and what isn’t. Muslims do. And far too many of them approve of violent jihad.” In a frenzy of what you have called “self-important net-dweller hate-porn,” he makes the outrageous claim that “we’re not just fighting men but a plague of faith.”

Get him, Colonel! Get that bigot! His name is … wait for it … .

It looks as if reality has caught up to yet another self-righteous Islam-Is-A-Religion-of-Peacer.

Now, when I pointed out a similar shift by the equally befuddled Dinesh D’Souza, some admonished me to be more gracious, to welcome the former miscreant into the fold of those telling the truth, and to portray their change as a growth in knowledge and perceptiveness rather than a craven flip-flop. And certainly I am ready to disregard the vicious personal invective both Peters and D’Souza have sent my way—these are not personal issues, and I understand how being proven wrong so spectacularly can cause some to lash out.

The problem is that guys like this want to have it both ways. In private and in some public settings they say that they know there’s a problem with Islamic doctrine; in other public settings they say that Islam is a Religion of Peace™ and that the Bible is just as likely as the Qur’an to inspire violence, etc. I will happily debate either Peters or D’Souza on these issues, anytime, anywhere. But I’m not going to give them three cheers for stating the obvious several years too late, and only when it is so painfully obvious that it cannot any longer be ignored or obfuscated.

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Paul Nachman writes:

Your entry on Spencer criticizing Peters led me, circuitously, to this Trifkovic article from 2007, where he writes:

A priori hostility towards Islam should not be “used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims.” Quite the contrary, a comprehensive education campaign about the teaching and practice of Islam should result in legislative action that would exclude Islam from the societies it is targeting, not because it is an offensive religion but because it is an inherently seditious totalitarian ideology incompatible with the fundamental values of the West—and all other civilized societies, India, China and Japan included.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 30, 2009 01:53 AM | Send