Several people have sent me this item from The Corner:
Constant Reader [John Derbyshire]
An astonished reader:
Mr. Derbyshire””You read Human Events? You think abortion is ok, Intelligent Design is bunk, Christianity is false, and Robert Spencer is nuts, yet you read Human Events? Why?
[Me] Well, for great political reporting like the John Gizzi piece I quoted, for one thing. For Ann Coulter. For Jed Babbin. For the Capital Briefs. Perhaps more than anything, for the stats. I’m a sucker for numbers, and HE doesn’t stint on them. (In that Oct. 22 issue, there’s an entire page of numbers on the fund-raising efforts of the presidential candidates.)
And I don’t think Robert is nuts. In my exchanges with him, he has always come across as courteous, civilized, and perfectly sane. His zeal for his own religion, and scorn for other people’s, is the kind of thinking that, in my opinion, gets us nowhere we should want to be; but it’s a point of view, and I respect Robert’s scholarship. Nuts? No way.
Why, thank you, John. I don’t think you’re nuts, either.
I must have been nuts, however, when I did something I had never done before and will never do again: announce that a piece was coming before I had written it. On September 21 I promised an imminent reply to Derbyshire’s “Islamophobophobia” article, and haven’t delivered yet. One day it will appear, but this yawning gap between promise and fulfillment is getting to be embarrassing.
Anyway, one thing for now: this business about my “zeal” for my own religion, and “scorn for other people’s” is wholly false. I don’t have scorn for anyone’s religion, and lots of people would question my zeal for my own. In this I expect that Derbyshire is referring to my last book, Religion of Peace?, which he seems to have taken as some kind of proselytizing tract or exercise in religious one-upmanship. It is neither. I explain in the book that I believe the same book could have been written by any atheist, or Jew, or Hindu, or Buddhist who was interested in the facts of the case, and in setting them forth in a neutral manner.
The book does not proselytize, and doesn’t analyze the truth or falsehood of Christianity or Islam. All it does is evaluate from various angles the question of whether Christianity and Islam are equally threatening to a pluralistic society that respects non-establishment of religion, as Rosie O’Donnell and many others contend. It was an attempt to respond to the “Religion is the Problem” types like Christopher Hitchens by exploring whether it is really useful to lump all religions together, and to the Christian Theocracy scaremongers by examining whether there is really any comparison between Islamic supremacism and the alleged desire of Christians to replace the U.S. Constitution with Biblical law.
And for all that, we hear that it because I am zealous and scorn other religions. John, with respect, that’s a particularly pungent pile of hooey. I don’t scorn any religion, particularly Islam. In fact, I have been fascinated by Islam for many years now, which has led to my doing this work. And I respect Islam enough to tell the truth about it, including its warlike and supremacist doctrines — these are matters of verifiable fact, and it is not “scornful” to point out their existence. I believe it is a particular act of scorn for Islam to adopt the patronizing pap and wishful thinking that marks the work of so many analysts of Islam and terrorism today. When I hear a non-Muslim judge lecturing a jihadist about how he has twisted his own religion, out of a mistaken and condescending distorted view of Islam that he has picked up from the deceivers (both Muslim and non-Muslim), I see scorn for Islam in action.
Speaking about something honestly is not scorning it, much less hating it. I do not wish to become a Muslim or live as a dhimmi under Sharia; I prefer Western notions of human rights. But “scorn” Islam? Not by a long shot. As I say here, I would like nothing better than a flowering, a renaissance, in the Muslim world, including full equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies: freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, equal employment opportunities, etc. If all that is “anti-Muslim,” as some have said it is, so be it.