I have enjoyed my stint so far as a daily columnist for Jihadwatch, and been impressed by the vast majority of the commentors who have joined in the discussion of my columns. The pieces I've posted have had their share of resonance outside the site: One of them, the scripturally-inspired "If Thy Cojones Cause Thee to Sin," ended up in the email blast the brave Rep. Tom Tancredo sent out to his supporters, and earned a denunciation in the radical-leftist American Independent, and winning a link from Forbes.com. My ruminations on the Islamicization of Spiderman (is it time for a new SIOA-style group to protect Gotham City?) were picked up in USA Today. There has been plenty of hand-wringing on pro-Islamic sites about my (fruitless) call for Egypt to keep the Tsar in power, lest the Bolsheviks of the Muslim Brotherhood seize control of the best-armed Arab nation and persecute its millions of Christians. Not bad for two months on the job.
Given the fact that I'm joining the struggle against a billion-man world religion, and doing so from the point of view of a pro-Israel, American Catholic paleocon, I expected disagreement, even hostility. What I didn't guess would happen was that my work would be attributed to someone else--much less to our fearless leader, Robert Spencer. One of the parasitical sites managed by stealth jihadists, who spend all their time reading Jihadwatch, then posting snarky, misleading commentary, has called me out as follows:
Lately, Spencer has posted articles by the mysterious Roland Shirk, someone we know nothing about, probably because he is another one of Spencer's pen-names (like Hugh Fitzgerald). Apparently, Mr. Shirk is a mouthpiece for JihadWatch's more belligerent attacks on the constitutional freedoms of indigenous law-abiding Muslims.
Okay, we're busted. "Roland Shirk" really is just another name used by Robert Spencer. Ditto "Hugh Fitzgerald." I'm stunned at the perspicacity of the Muslim supremacists who were able to smoke us out. After all, it can't be easy to spot the similarities of style between the sort of prose Robert employs under his own name, and those of his pseudonyms.
Here's a passage written by Spencer under the pen name "Hugh Fitzgerald":
And The New York Times continues, in ways little and big, to ignore the reality of Islam. It is a case of individual folly and mediocrity - the egregious Tom Friedman comes immediately to mind, and so too does Nicholas Kristof. But then there are the reporters. There are those who report from Pakistan on various rapes and murders of Christians but are careful never to dwell on, and sometimes fail to mention altogether, the religious prompting of such atrocities by Muslims. See, for example, the report recently of Sabrina Tavernise on the young girl murdered by her Muslim employer, a leader of the Lahore bar, and how little she explained, and how much that was relevant she left out. See how other reporters, in Iraq, for example, have by ignoring Islam never asked the most obvious of questions: how is it that the goal, under Bush, or under Obama, of leaving Iraq unified and prosperous, will somehow contribute to our own defense, the Defense of the West, against the worldwide Jihad that is merely the sum of all the local Jihads? And the same question should be asked of Afghanistan. But while the editors of the New York Times so clearly did not support Bush, and are vaguely unhappy with the transfer of the "center of the war on terrorism" to Afghanistan by the Obama Administration, they lack the ability or willingness to discuss Islam, the ideology of Islam, and hence even to begin to think in terms of the threat to Western Europe through such instruments of Jihad as deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest.
Compare this to Spencer inhabiting the alternative personality "
Roland Shirk":
George Orwell must be collaborating with Evelyn Waugh, controlling events from Heaven. I've often had dark thoughts of the sort, while skimming world events--particularly Third World events. Living on New York's Second Avenue back in the 90s, I got in the habit of listening to the BBC as I slept, to drown out the sound of 18-wheelers ba-da-BOOM-ing over potholes covered with iron plates. The habit stuck, and ever since I have periodically had my dreams invaded by prim-sounding reports of native uprisings, tribal massacres, Afro-socialist and multiculturalist rants, and elaborate rationalizations of how this year's corrupt election, cholera epidemic, or jihadist attack can be traced back and blamed on colonial oppression. My subconscious gave events an even more lurid twist, and the dream-narratives that resulted invariably seemed like discarded drafts for Waugh' Black Mischief or Scoop. All terribly incorrect.
Now here's a sample of naked, full-frontal Spencer:
Sun Ra was born on the planet Saturn some time ago. The best accounts agree that he emerged on Earth as Herman "Sunny" Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, although Sun Ra himself always denied that Blount was his surname. He returned to Saturn in 1993 after creating a stunningly variegated and beautiful assemblage of earthly and interplanetary music, most notably with his fervently loyal Arkestra. (Many great musicians passed through the Arkestra over the years, including reedman Pharoah Sanders, trombonist Julian Priester, and violinist Billy Bang. Most notable and long-tenured were the criminally underrated John Gilmore on tenor sax and Marshall Allen on alto). Mr. Blount, or Mr. Ra, or Mr. Mystery (as he was sometimes styled in later years) first appeared on the scene as a pianist with Fletcher Henderson's band, and to the end of his life Ra retained an affinity, respect, and genius for big band music in the style of Henderson and his contemporaries, with Sun's own extra-galactic twists.
...
Because he insisted that he was a Saturnian, and developed an elaborate cosmology and myth-system with considerable spiritual and political implications, Sun Ra was often dismissed as a clown. For some listeners it was enough to see him decked out in his extraterrestrial regalia to call him a con man and move on. Even the most cursory hearing of the music demonstrates that such dismissals were and are patently unfair. Behind Ra's mythology were a good number of sound and sensible ideas; more importantly, he was a master musician who left a magnificent body of work. His influence as an arranger and a leader cannot be underestimated, and is ignored by musicians only at their peril.
Frankly, I'm taken aback that people credulous enough to believe in the djinn, and accept the story of Muhammad riding a genetically-modified donkey into heaven, had the sharp critical faculties needed to detect the common threads connecting Spencer's many stylistic diguises. But now they're onto us, so we might as well 'fess up. I would like to make the point, however, that none of Spencer's impersonations arose from timidity. (When you're already on Al-Qaeda's hitlist, you really have no motivation to hide behind pen-names in order to slam the
New York Times; it's not like they were planning to review your books, anyway.) No, the reason Robert Spencer invented me, and Hugh Fitzgerald, was simple modesty. He didn't want to make a vulgar display of versatility, to show off the way Rahsaan Roland Kirk (the source of my pseudonym!) used to when he'd
play three saxophones at once. Our parent personality, Robert, is just too self-effacing for that sort of thing--which may explain why he never hit the pop charts in his first career as an itinerant saxophone player in Eastern Europe. Those Slavs want somebody willing to put on a show, and do an endzone dance. (Though there is somewhere online a grainy video of Robert playing Charlie Parker after setting his saxophone on fire.)
But the stealth jihadists shouldn't spend too much time congratulating themselves. They have only uncovered two of the many, many alternate personalities and literary voices Robert Spencer has developed--essentially cloning himself like Agent Smith in Matrix 2: Reloaded. Yes, Robert Spencer is Roland Shirk and Hugh Fitzgerald. What his enemies do not know is that Robert is also Ibn Warraq, Stephen Emerson, Bat Ye'or, and (in his spare time) Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And those are just the names we've decided to cop to at this time. There are more--oh, so many more--avatars of Robert Spencer, appearing all over the Internet, in guises too multifarious for our enemies to uncover. At least three major jazz critics writing remotely for major music magazines, one biographer of Bob Dylan, and a major importer of hummus to southern California, are also secretly Spencer.
In fact, to discourage assassins, Spencer no longer appears in public under his real name. That avuncular, slimmed-down fellow recently seen at CPAC is actually actor Tony Shalhoub, who has donned a false beard to portray Spencer on television and at major speaking events for the past seven years. (Has no one ever noticed that "Spencer's" speaking schedule is eerily incompatible with the shooting schedule of "Monk"? Our enemies are so foolish, so blind....) There are three other "stunt-Spencers" who show up for less important events, like college talks and debates with Dinesh D'Souza, where their answers are fed to them through sophisticated Bluetooth devices purchased second-hand from Shin Bet. Hundreds of "Spencer's helpers" are now in training at the Jihadwatch Ranch (formerly Neverland), for release throughout the country in 2012. It is our aim to make Robert Spencer as ubiquitous each Eid as Santa Claus is at Christmastime--so that one day, every little girl and boy in America can sit on "his" lap at department stores, and tell him the gift they really want: "Freedom."
