Lawrence Auster has just noticed my post about his attacks on me and the false charges they’re based on. In case anyone is interested, he and I are mud wrestling in the comments field there.
It seems I am a “neocon,” and I don’t value Western civilization, and I don’t even know it. I guess that as long as I am involved in things without even knowing it myself, in that case I must also be a Jesuit temporal coadjutor and a Sephardic Jew.
But Larry, God bless him, is sticking to the high road.
UPDATE: Auster is, quite simply, misrepresenting my positions and beliefs, and persisting to do so after I explained them. He has abundantly established that he was not worth all this time.
FINAL THOUGHTS: Auster continues to insist I am a “liberal,” which to him is worse than a “mujahid,” although his only evidence for this is that I don’t hesitate to ally with Hirsi Ali. Auster evidently believes that to ally with someone means to agree with them on all points. Churchill might have found that amusing as he sat next to Stalin at those Big Three meetings.
In any case, he claims that I have failed to grasp his distinction between not valuing the West and valuing the West only for liberal reasons. This is in fact a distinction without a difference, for he considers the liberals worse enemies of the West than the jihadists.
Unfortunately, it is he who has glossed over key distinctions and jumped to innumerable erroneous conclusions, and he who gave the discussion a nasty personal cast by presuming to speak of my motives and values, of which he actually knows nothing.
In fact, I value the Judeo-Christian West, the culture and the people — which is what he accuses me of not doing. Anyone who reads what I write knows this. He has not read the chapter of my book Onward Muslim Soldiers in which I take real liberals to task for their short-sighted hatred of America and the West and willingness to side with the mujahedin, or the passages in my books Islam Unveiled and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam which warn that we will never prevail in this struggle unless we recover a sense of pride in who we are and who our forefathers were. But he doesn’t know that material exists.
But I will still ally with people on the Left against the mujahedin, for if the mujahedin prevail, Larry and I will not be free to have these delightful exchanges.
His imperviousness to the facts is clearest in our last exchange, in which he claimed that I denied calling him a racist. In fact, I never called him a racist in the first place. I said the statements that a commenter had posted were racist, and expressed no certainty that Auster had actually made them. The second, supposedly self-contradictory message from me denied none of this.
What he says about me as a liberal is not true, and is contradicted by my writings, in which I repeatedly call on the West to recover its own spiritual and cultural resources. But Auster acknowledges that he hasn’t read what I have actually written. That makes him particularly irresponsible in launching this attack.
Finally, he says I am “not a thinker,” although here again this is based only upon what he assumes I believe and say, not what I actually believe and say. Very well. If a “thinker” is one who launches a sustained smear attack based on an erroneous and baseless judgment of what someone else actually says and believes, sweeping aside all evidence presented to the contrary, then I would prefer not to be one.
Anyway, I am aware that nobody in this world cares this much about Lawrence Auster and Robert Spencer to read all this. But in any case it is here now, on the record, for anyone of good will who comes across his attacks and would like to see the other side, and for anyone who wonders where I actually stand on alliances with those I may oppose on other issues, or on the enduring value of Western civilization and the importance of defending it. All those who are quick to praise Auster for his “intellectual honesty” should ask him for actual material from my writings that establishes that I have no regard for Western civilization except insofar as it preserves and allows for relativism and multiculturalism. And then be prepared for a long wait.