Okay, I confess it: I have been known to put my elbows up on the dinner table. And I do have a guilty taste for old 60s sitcoms, although even I draw the line at the likes of Gilligan’s Island. But Jihad Watch reader Miss Moneypenney has alerted me to a posting about me at a silly little site dedicated to “Islamophobia” (a concept I discussed here), which isn’t worth sending traffic to with a link, where I am accused of presenting in a “particularly crude and transparent form the sort of double-talk we hear from more sophisticated Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes.”
I know Dr. Pipes is a highly sophisticated individual, but my friends, for once I have encountered a personal attack that is really wounding. Unsophisticated, eh? Despite the fact that as I write this here in sunny Secure Undisclosed Locationville I am wearing top hat, tails, and spats, sipping a glass of Veuve Clicquot 1995 La Grande Dame Rose, and enjoying a performance of Pergolesi’s delightful Pulcinella? Unsophisticated, eh?
What’s that? The guy isn’t speaking in general? He’s referring to the “crude” and “unsophisticated” nature of my “Islamophobia”? Oh, I see. Well then, let’s take a look at what exactly he finds unsophisticated.
He juxtaposes two paragraphs that I have written:
“I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.” Robert Spencer spells it out.
Jihad Watch, 30 May 2005
This is the man who has also written: “Islam is not a monolith, and never have I said or written anything that characterizes all Muslims as terrorist or given to violence.” See here
Then he concludes:
So, while it’s tempting to dismiss Spencer as an irrelevant right-wing crank, his pious declarations that he doesn’t regard all Muslims as terrorists, accompanied by more hardline statements that this is exactly what he does think they are, presents in a particularly crude and transparent form the sort of double-talk we hear from more sophisticated Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes.
I have said on numerous occasions that this is a struggle on which both left and right should unite, as jihad threatens both. But leave that aside, for here we have come to the source of my lack of sophistication. I have contradicted myself, have I? How unsophisticated. I can hear General Burkhalter now: “Klink, you eeediot!” But alas, I must plead not guilty. Islam is indeed not a monolith, and I indeed never have said or written that all Muslims are terrorists. But that doesn’t mean that there is a firewall or any kind of separation in American mosques between Muslims who incline to terror and those who do not. Baptists don’t tend to frequent Catholic churches, and vice versa, but America’s mosques do not have signs in front that say things like “First Extremist Mosque of Dubuque” or “United Moderate Mosque of Dearborn.”
The writer at this “Islamophobia” page evidently thinks that because I am saying there is no separation between the two groups, that they are all jihadists. How unsophisticated of him.