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A letter of apology

Sep 11, 2006 5:19 am By Robert Spencer

I get vicious hate mail all the time, and there are falsehoods about me and my positions all over the Internet, as you may gather from some of the questions in my FAQ (“I’ve read that you are a member of Opus Dei”…”Do you think all Muslims are terrorists?”…etc.). But I have never before received a letter like the one below, which comes from Morgaan Sinclair, a contributor to several publications. She has asked me to post it here, and so with great respect for her courage and integrity I am doing so:

For Robert Spencer, Visitors to JihadWatch.org, and Friends on Other Websites…

It is at once a blessing and a curse: Time moves only in one direction, dragging space along with it. That’s tidy, I suppose. It would be a mess otherwise. But it means we rarely have the chance to set something straight once it’s gone wrong. We have to live with our mistakes, if, indeed, we even know we have made them. Others have to live with the damage those mistakes have caused them, with no way to set right the error or to clear the misconceptions that have now spread to others.

But every once in awhile, some situation unexpectedly comes ’round the spiral again, standing now on the octave above the point in space-time when it all went wrong, and an opportunity miraculously presents itself that we might examine the situation once again and find it not what we had imagined at all. And then, perhaps most miraculously of all, we have a chance to set things right and to heal what has been done.

Some of you who visit Robert Spencer’s website often — or others for which he writes — are aware of a situation from about 18 months ago when I accused Spencer of having said some terrible things to a friend of mine, a personal attack witnessed by nine people at a party. I didn’t then detail what was said. The kind and level of insult involved is too basic to talk about in print. I was concerned then that such tales would spread over the internet instantaneously, used by friends and foes alike to make some point. I don’t detail them now for the same reason. But they were egregious and vicious to a degree that literally makes one’s mind hurt. A short time later, I was told about them at a private lunch in Washington with six of the nine people involved and to whom I extended what amounts to a blood-oath of confidentiality.

On a conservative website for which Spencer writes, I confronted him about the statements. He immediately denied he had made them. I went back to the six with whom I’d talked and eventually all nine, and they said they were absolutely certain that it was Spencer who said it. Based on their passionate certainty that they were right and my previous experience of never having been lied to by a single one of them, I stood my ground on behalf of my friend.

As it turns out, they didn’t actually lie. They just simply had no idea what they were talking about and didn’t have the humility or the healthy self-doubt to question whether they themselves may have made a mistake. Angry posts and e-mails flew about. Spencer and I, having about the same ability to stand with a tiger when we feel we’re right, both refused to back down. Spencer’s friends believed me to be the doppelganger of the anti-Christ, and those who know I never consciously lie believed Spencer had behaved horribly. Eventually, the flap died down, but the history of it was all over the internet.

In the last week, Robert Spencer and I started e-mailing about this situation again. He again asserted his innocence. He promised me he had not been involved.

This left me sitting on the sand on the Massachusetts North Shore wondering how in the world I could determine the truth. Could nine people be wrong? Could nine have set me up to lie on the internet about someone they didn’t like? Could nine friends have done that? Could a group that comprised reliable, trustworthy business people, government employees, human rights workers, artists, and home-schooling soccer moms with IQs on the roof have actually deliberately created a public internet flap using me as some kind of Useful Idiot?

No, I decided, there hadn’t been a lie. But what if there was a mistake? Robert Spencer’s denial didn’t feel like a fight: It felt like an appeal. The bottom line for me was that I believed Robert Spencer was telling the truth. The question now is how I could manage to prove it.

I decided to create an experiment in which I would poll the nine people with a positive identifier. It wouldn’t be double-blind, but if I hid the real question, perhaps it would be close enough. And perhaps I would be forgiven for the trickery, clearly not malicious, it would be. (I was.)

So … By e-mail, I sent all nine the photograph of Robert Spencer from the JihadWatch website. I attached a note that said, in effect: A friend has sent me this photograph asking if I know who this is. I think I’ve seen this person before, but I can’t match a name with the face. Do any of you know who this is?

By 7:00 in the evening, we were seven for nine. By the 9:00 the next morning, all nine people had responded. None of them had any idea who Robert Spencer was. Not one of them could identify him from a picture. Not one proffered his name even as a possibility. None of them had ever seen Robert Spencer. None of them had seen him at the party, because he wasn’t there. And whoever the author of the invective they had attributed to Spencer, it was not he.

The revelation was illuminating, liberating, healing and devastating, for it meant that for 18 months Robert Spencer had stood accused of an egregious act he had not committed, had been subjected to an ongoing argument in which he’d tried to clear his name but couldn’t, and had been left with the kind of dark cloud that hangs over the temperment of those who know they’ve been treated unfairly but can’t find a civil way to effect justice and are of too good a nature to resort to anything less: a kind of pall that never quite clears from the consciousness of those who’ve experienced it — a kind of thin, smoky vapor in the atmosphere that may only faintly dim the light but manages to rob it of its ultimate brilliance — a kind of dull pain that robs even the best moments of happiness of their full joy.

And it is for the pain and anger, the dull sense of despair that attended the seemingly unresolvable assaults upon your name, the insult it was to you and to your family and to your friends, that I offer you, Robert, and your family my deepest, heartfelt apology. If I could take it back, Robert, I would. But I can only take it back to a degree:

The references I’ve made are being removed from every website on which I am aware they have ever been posted. I will post this letter multiple times over the next six months or so, in the hope that all those who witnessed the original arguments will be aware that the accusation proved baseless.

And I will hope that you will post this apology on the JihadWatch website for as long as you like — but I would urge for at least six months to give people who don’t visit every week some chance of seeing it. Please also feel free to send it to everyone on the JihadWatch list, so they know that you were never to blame.

It’s a remarkable experience for me to have had what I consider a rare opportunity: a chance to make something right so far as I can with so much time having already slipped away from me — time during which you have lived under the cloud of a false accusation. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that when I realized what had happened and apologized, you responded with gratitude, and your forgiveness was instantaneous. I am grateful for that kindness and for the opportunity I have now to look at the person you are with new eyes.

Again, Robert, I have no way even to begin to tell you how sorry I am…

Warmest regards,
Morgaan Sinclair

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