Brett_McS is our contest winner, and Dinesh D’Souza is hereby crowned the Dilettante of Dhimmitude. Congratulations to Brett and Dinesh also — send your address, Brett, to me at director[at]jihadwatch.org, and I will send you an autographed copy of The Truth About Muhammad. And thanks to all those who entered the contest. The entries were all terrific, and I think Dinesh richly merits the titles “Hooper of Hoover” and “Lawrence of Taqiyya” as well as the winning entry.
Meanwhile, Mr. D’Souza himself, unable to deal with the facts Hugh and I gave him in response to his challenge to name two Sunni/Shia conflicts, has resorted to making things up, attributing them to me, and then refuting those. And I can see how that is a much easier task.
In “More Religious Wars, Mr. Spencer?,” he says this:
Today’s New York Times reports on escalating sectarian conflict in northern Iraq between Sunnis and Kurds. I’m sure Robert Spencer would be on the case, spouting his nonsense about religious wars, except that the Kurds happen to be Sunni as well!
Ah, yes, but Robert the history major can find examples in history of clashes between the Kurds and other Sunnis. Indeed there have been clashes, but that’s because most of the Sunnis in the Middle East are Arab, while the Kurds are not. Ethnic and tribal identity–not religion–is the source of the conflict.
Saladin was a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish descent, and I’m sure Spencer can find some ancient conflict over territory to convince his gullible followers that the Sunni-Kurd clash has been going on for centuries. Actually this is nonsense, but fortunately for Spencer none of his readers actually knows what any of the internecine Islamic conflicts were about. So Spencer relies on the argumentum ad ignorantium: the argument that relies on the ignorance of the reader.
Now have I actually said that the Sunni/Kurd conflict was religious? Of course not. Meanwhile, however, the other straw men D’Souza sets up turns out to have teeth: if Mr. D’Souza cared to do any research, he would have discovered that the Kurds have been in conflict with the Arabs, Turks, and Persians for centuries. When the epic poet Ahmad Khani called for the creation of an independent Kurdish state, free of Arab and Turkish domination, in the Kurdish national epic Mem-o-Zin in 1695, modern Kurdish nationalism was given its first great boost. The Kurdish Zand kingdom flourished in the latter half of the 18th century, but by the mid-19th century it and other Kurdish principalities had been destroyed by the Ottoman Turks and the Persians.
But in fact, I have never written about this before. That’s because it has little to do with jihad, which, as you may have noticed, is what I do write about. D’Souza’s whole column is just made up. But all is not lost: as his career as a pundit continues to implode, I see a bright future for him…as a novelist.