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Ralph Peters and the truth

Sep 15, 2006 8:33 pm By Robert Spencer

Ralph Peters has followed up his mudslinging attack on no one in particular with a stinging email to California Republic, in response to an invitation to reply to my recent article about him. In this email, he names me and makes a number of false accusations. For the record, I will correct them here.

Thanks. No, I don’t intend to reply to Spencer, Bostom and Co. Replying only gives them what they crave so desperately: Attention. Bostom, for example, has been panting for attention for his book and his views in my columns for years (he doesn’t mention that, does he?). I’m tempted to publish some of the sycophantic e-mails this crowd has sent me over the years–just to let their groupies know how little integrity they have.

In fact, I have never sent even one email to Ralph Peters, sycophantic or otherwise. I do not even have his email address.

But this shouldn’t be a personal matter–it’s about ideas, about freedom, about defending our country, about getting it right. And I simply don’t find close-minded loonies helpful–so I don’t respond to their pleas for my time.

By the way, that’s why I didn’t “name names.” First, it would have given them attention. And, second, it’s my belief that it’s okay to attack those more powerful than me by name, but it’s ungentlemanly to attack the weak as individuals. And you shouldn’t exaggerate the reach of these guys. The blogosphere inflates the image of a lot of little men, from the Timothy McVeigh Fan Club to pedophiles. If their views had genuine merit, they would be widely published in forums where they have to get past the editorial gates. But they’re not widely published because they don’t pass the quality or sanity tests. Their stuff is just self-important net-dweller hate-porn. And in a nation of 300 million, they’ll be able to find a good number of fellow haters.

And please note that my attack was on their positions–their attacks (very poorly written, by the way) have been on me personally…on my integrity, my military services, etc.

It’s interesting that he calls the work of those he hates “self-important net-dweller hate-porn” and then claims to take the high road. But again, he is making false statements. And if we are indeed the ones he meant in his column, and we are so insignificant, why did he see fit to spend a Post column attacking these shadowy evildoers at all?

Anyway, when “Spencer, Bostom, and Co.” is the apparent group meant in the phrase “their attacks…have been on me personally,” this is simply false on the face of it. Here is my full reply as it appeared in FrontPage. In it, this is everything I say about Ralph Peters: I say he is a “retired military officer and author of several books on this present conflict”; that his NY Post piece was “one of the most confused and irresponsible pieces I have ever seen in an American newspaper”; that he doesn’t tell us who he is attacking in the piece, and that by not doing so he is “allowing himself the coward’s retreat of being able to deny, if challenged by anyone, that he had him in mind”; that he is “setting up straw men, blurring distinctions and drawing unnecessary conclusions”; and that he makes several “false assumptions.”

Does that look like a personal attack to you? Do you see anything in there about his military service? I don’t either. Do you see anything in there about his integrity, other than that his hit piece on a nameless, faceless “rotten core of American extremists” is cowardly — which I stand by? Nope. My response was actually just what he says it wasn’t: a reply to his positions, and an explanation of mine.

I have not attacked their personal lives, and won’t.

Other than comparing us to Tim McVeigh and pedophiles, and saying we publish hate porn.

That’s Brownshirt stuff. I’ve been out there risking my life, often alone, in the Muslim world while they’ve been sitting at home. They’re like professors who’ve never really done anything but only know the world (in this case, Islam) from books. If they haven’t seen the Muslim world first-hand, how do they know what it’s really like? Just reading about it here in the USA is like trying to understand what sex is like just from the manuals.

Here Ralph Peters simply doesn’t know what he is talking about. He has no idea what I have done or where I have been, and it is irrelevant anyway: jihadists are manifestly using Islamic teaching to further their goals, unchallenged by any significant movement of moderates, whether or not I have kissed the ground in Karachi or sunned myself in Kuala Lumpur.

As you know, I’m for waging a harder war on terror than we currently do. But what is the point of alienating a billion Muslims with our own hate speech? These guys are bigots. Period. No matter how they dress up their prejudices with quotes from dead Muslim clerics.

Oh, I have plenty of quotes from live ones, Ralph.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone nuts over another person (me, in this case) expressing his views. They cannot bear dissent from their narrow doctrines (sounds rather like the case they put against Islam).

I can bear dissent just fine. In fact, I’d be happy to debate you on this. I gave you a reasoned response to your piece, and all I get back from you, Colonel, is another shower of abuse and insults. Looks as if the one who can’t bear dissent is not me.

They are resolutely against free speech and insist that their views are the only possible views–a very good definition of a fanatic.

The irony is getting a little thick in here, don’t you think?

Finally, conservatism has always defended the individual against the mass. The left has raised the mass above the individual. Bostom, Spencer and co. describe Muslims as an undifferentiated mass.

Is that so? Can you quote me on that? Because if you can’t, you might think twice about saying it. And of course, you can’t come up with such a quote.

Of course, Peters is probably referring here to my assertion that all the schools of Islamic law teach violent jihad and the subjugation of unbelievers. Not in ancient times only, but today. Of course, unanimity does not equal an “undifferentiated mass,” but never mind. If I am wrong in this, Colonel, show me the evidence, please. Enlighten me. Be so kind as to pull me out of the darkness. Show me the Islamic school or sect that teaches peaceful coexistence on an indefinite basis with non-Muslims, and is accepted as orthodox by the others. I’d love to see it.

Is that conservatism? Sounds like a bizarre form of anti-Muslim Marxism to me. Of course, in the end extremists are all the same–whether they end up on the ultra-right or ultra-left is just an accident. We forget that Nazi was an abbreviation for “national socialist.”

Conservatism should be a big tent–but we have to keep the tentpoles out of the sewer.

I just have to draw the line at damning Islam as totally beyond hope.

Contrast this crude caricature with my words here, and tell me who is the frothing fanatic.

I’m not optimistic about the religion in the Middle East, that’s certain. It faces self-imposed handicaps that may prove insurmountable. But Muslims elsewhere offer at least some glimmers of hope. Let’s not extinguish those glimmers ourselves.

Finally, Spencer and Bostom are whiners and fear-mongers. But they don’t offer serious solutions. Spencer, for example, never addressed the questions I’ve raised in interviews (he edits and mis-edits my remarks very selectively, lifting things wildly out of context–he’d be boohooing from here to Christmas if someone did that to him):

Actually, people do that to me more or less on a daily basis, and I just don’t have that many hankies. But anyway, gee, I’m sorry about mis-editing your remarks, Colonel. I assure you it was unintentional. Perhaps you could furnish me with some examples of this misuse?

First, if Islam is totally hopeless, what do they propose to do about it (and I don’t mean silly nonsense about a Muslim Vatican II)?

I have never said that “Islam is totally hopeless.” If you think I have, produce the quote. Nor have I ever recommended a “Muslim Vatican II.” If you think I have, produce the quote.

Anyway, to answer your question: What I have said, many times, including earlier today, is that the Muslim reformers on which you place so much hope need to repudiate the elements of Islamic teaching that jihadists use to recruit terrorists and incite violence. Why is that so farfetched or unreasonable?

Second, if all Muslims are in on a conspiracy to get us, why have the overwhelming number of victims of Islamist terror been other Muslims? Not just Sunni killing Shia, but Sunni killing Sunni.

I have never said that “all Muslims are in on a conspiracy to get us.” If you think I have, produce the quote.

As for Muslims killing Muslims, this happens because of the phenomenon of takfir, or the declaring of other Muslims to be apostates or heretics or hypocrites, and thus lawfully killed.

How about our Kurdish allies? Are they in on the jihad?

Some are, some aren’t, as with all groups.

Do Sunnis and Shi’as get together at secret-handshake meetings to plan our doom?

I would doubt it.

On the contrary, the great bloodshed looming ahead for Islam is the next round of Sunni-Shi’a warfare–they hate each other with an even deeper passion than Catholics and Protestants hated each other a few centuries ago.

Some do, some don’t. There is an old Arabic saying with which I am sure Peters is familiar, given his extensive travels in the Middle East: “my brother against my brother, but both of us against our cousin.” Sunnis and Shia will fight, but will also unite against non-Muslims. Witness the Shi’ite Iranian support for Sunni Hamas, etc.

Islamist terror must be dealt with ferociously. But we must not suggest that a hundred-billion Muslims are all Salafist violent jihadis. They’re just not.

Nor have I said they are. If you think I have, produce the quote.

We all need to apply a little common sense.

You can say that again, Ralph. You can say that again. I thought that myself today when I read your new piece saying that violence in the Middle East is the fault of the Middle East itself, not of Islam. So by the logic of your first piece, does that mean that you are a bigot who thinks that all Middle Easterners, Muslim, Jewish, Christian whatever, are Untermenschen?

Also, what about non-Middle Eastern terrorists like Adam Gadahn or Richard Reid, etc. etc.? How did they get infected with Middle Easternism?

Anyway, just so I understand: if someone thinks the problem of terrorism comes from the Middle East as such, he’s enlightened. But if he thinks that it comes from one aspect of one religion that originated in the Middle East, he’s a bigot. Got it!

Personally, I would rather stand side by side with an honest Muslim-American than with a bigot whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.

My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower. They came over after World War I as exiles from the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Conservatism doesn’t engage in mass hatred. And America gives the individual a chance.

Best regards,

Ralph

Mass hatred, verboten: check. Defamation and misrepresentation: apparently a-ok.

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