If any of you Jihad Watchers are insomniacs, you may be interested in catching me discussing jihad, dhimmitude, and my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) on C-Span this Sunday, September 4.
The C-Span Book TV schedule lists the talk at 1:00 AM EDT and again at 8:30 AM EDT Sunday morning, not too long after Kinky Friedman and right before Mahmood Mamdani.
This is a film of a talk I gave to the Young America's Foundation on August 1.
The inhospitable scheduling may, of course, improve in future C-Span broadcasts; they generally run these things more than twice. But it's par for the course for a book that spent two weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List while being ignored utterly by the mainstream liberal and conservative media, and only being reviewed twice (here and here).
Jihadists and their allies, as well as the befuddled and bemused non-Muslim analysts who think that to discuss forthrightly the elements of Islam that give rise to violence and terrorism harms the efforts of genuinely peaceful Muslim reformers (as if pretending that there is no problem for them to try to solve somehow solves it), cannot answer the points I have made in this book. Thus they prefer to pretend that the book doesn't exist.
As Salman Rushdie recently put it to George Galloway: "The simple fact is that any system of ideas that decides you have to ringfence it, that you cannot discuss it in fundamental terms, that you can't say that this bit of it is junk, or that bit is oppressive ... we are supposed to respect that?" Evidently virtually every media mogul would say yes -- and rule out even respectful discussion of those "bits."
If I hadn't seen it first hand, I would have thought Spencer was being facetious.
The inability to discuss Islam's shortcomings with Muslims is something I've run into on an Islamic website discussion board. Islam is not only 'ringfenced' as unassailable truth, but anything that obviously refutes Islam (and apparently any part is equal to the whole) automatically generates attempts to redirect the conversation, and/or ad hominen attacks.
The less than desirable time slots for Mr. Spencer's presentation is probably nothing more than an attempt to air events already filmed for C-Span. However, I have noticed in the past few years, as Brian Lamb has less and less to do with the daily operations, the station seems less balanced, with more emphasis on politically correct guests and topics. I know that a coalition of non-Muslim Iraqi groups asked that C-Span cover their 90 minute news conference. C-Span turned them down flat, despite the fact that the station had aired numerous conferences featuring different Iraqi Muslim groups and Iraqi (Muslim) womens' groups. So much for getting all sides of the story.
To see how extensive the dhimmi mentality is, I would invite jihadwatch and dhimmiwatch readers to look at this thread in a philosophy discussion forum called "Examined Life".
The thread is called "Islam: does it generate violence?"
At least 20 intelligent and well-educated non-Muslims have contributed, and only two of us have defended the principle of criticizing Islam -- all the others have found elaborate ways of defending Islam. And my fellow critic of Islam I noticed recently used the phrase "the newly violent Islam", implying that Islam has not always been violent (!).
http://examinedlifejournal.com/discus/
(to get to the Islam thread, click on "Last Day" from the Discussion tree located on the left)
If you have the patience to read through this very long thread, ask yourself why all these intelligent, well-educated non-Muslims are doing so many gymnastics in order to defend Islam from criticism? It baffles and enrages me.
That is a truly brutal schedule, Mr Spencer. I hope you'll still have powers left to update JihadWatch in the morning. :-)
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dolphin, CAGE co-founder.
http://www.acage.org
Fortunately, there is this invention called the VCR. I may just pass on a VHS copy to a relative ... or just buy them the book!
I have been networking and polling my extended family recently; daughters, cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers, sister-in-law, etc.
The approval rating of Islam and Muslims is a unanimous 0%. My family does not buy into the PC crap being put out by our politicians.
5 yrs ago, my family probably would have had no comment or opinion about Islam, but they are learning very fast and don't like what they see now.
They are now in favor of ending Muslim immigration into the USA and favor FBI surveillance of US mosques.
We also favor a moratorium on construction of new mosques in the USA; and an end to religious freedom protection for Islam.
If my family is typical, then the American people are wising up to the Muslim Trojan Horse.
Well the timing should be OK for Eurabia to watch it on the web if that stream actually works.