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Robert Spencer in PJ Media: 5 Islamic Scholars Who Say They’d Demolish Me in Debate – But Don’t Dare Try

Oct 14, 2014 10:40 am By Robert Spencer

LumbardDominateThe mainstream media, American academia and even much of the public discourse are for the most part a one-party state. Dissenting ideas are not allowed to be discussed. Instead, academics and media analysts only consider a very small spectrum of opinion, and either ridicule and disparage views that fall outside that spectrum without refuting them, or ignore them altogether. Here is some of my experience with that, in my latest at PJ Media:

With the world on fire from Islamic jihad, the proclamations from Barack Obama, John Kerry, David Cameron and so many others that the Islamic State’s atrocities have nothing to do with Islam, “a religion of peace,” are looking increasingly ridiculous. The academics who further this view with their fantasy pictures of Islam are likewise running scared, despite the fact that they have made this the dominant mainstream view in America’s universities. They’re covering up their abject inability to defend this point of view with a haughty refusal to do so, and an insistence that those who challenge them are not worthy of their attention.

This is a peculiar stance for academics in particular to take, as they are supposed to be professionally dedicated to the discussion and debate of ideas. It illuminates the unhappy fact that our nation’s universities are increasingly not places where genuine intellectual inquiry takes place, but centers of leftist indoctrination, not interested in pursuing truth or examining ideas, but only in turning out cadres of thoroughly propagandized worker ants who will ever after unthinkingly toe the party line.

My own experience with academics in the fields related to study of Islam and the Middle East is that they contemptuously refuse to engage in any discussion or debate with me, generally claiming that I am either too stupid or too evil, or both, to engage. This is despite the fact that my books generally sell far better than theirs (as I write this I have three of the top ten books in Amazon.com’s Islam category, and all three are at least eight years old) and thus, by proving that I am indeed as intellectually and morally bankrupt as they claim, they could go a long way toward ending what they regard as my baneful “Islamophobic” influence over the American public.

But none of them dare to try. Here are five academics who have loudly crowed that they could best me in debate or that my work is easily refuted – only to clam up and run when I give them an opportunity to prove it.

5. Mia M. Bloom, University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

I had never heard of Mia M. Bloom until last Wednesday. It turns out that she is a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror; Living Together After Ethnic Killing; and Bombshell: Women and Terror.

I don’t know her work, but from her careful avoidance here of identifying as predominantly Islamic the cultures in which “women will be killed by a family member for bringing shame to the family,” it is likely that she is just another academic of the type that American universities today hire by the pound: intent on downplaying and denying the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and abjectly incapable of defending her views in a free and open debate.

Anyway, on Wednesday, a reader of my website, Jihad Watch, had an email exchange with Professor Bloom. In the course of it, she wrote: “I am certain in any debate your MrSpencer would be left without anything to say if he were ever in a room with someone educated in this field instead of pandering to a public that thinks just cause it’s published it must be true.”

After the reader sent this to me, I wrote back offering to debate, whereupon Professor Bloom responded:

I’m afraid that Mr [Jihad Watch reader] may have led you to believe that I would waste my time on such an endeavor..,which I would not

I am currently writing my fourth book based on field research in Pakistan and other countries.

Btw That’s what real academics do; they don’t spend their time sitting at the computer distorting texts they could neither read in the original nor are they trained to understand.

Enjoy duping the masses.

Unfortunately for Professor Bloom’s contemptuous arrogance, in her exchange with the reader she not only cited Wikipedia as if it were a credible source, but also made a basic error about the Qur’an, telling him that the triple Islamic choice of conversion, subjugation or death was not actually offered to the “People of the Book” (Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians), but only to pagans, when the Qur’an specifically says this choice should be offered to the People of the Book (9:29). Her lack of basic knowledge of what is ostensibly her field may explain the venomous rudeness of her response to me, when we have never met or previously corresponded: it can fill one with anxiety to spend one’s days flacking for falsehood and fantasy with only marginal competence.

LumbardDominate4. Joseph Lumbard, Brandeis University.

Last April, at the height of the controversy over Brandeis University’s rescinding of an honorary degree they had planned to give to freedom fighter Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I received some tweets out of the blue from Joseph Lumbard, a convert to Islam who is professor and chair of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. Lumbard excoriated me for what he falsely claimed was a factual error I had made in a Jihad Watch post about Brandeis’ rescinding of an honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and in the course of the exchange wrote: “facts confuse u” and “My apologies for citing facts. I know how that confuses you.”

After this had gone on for awhile, I challenged him to a debate. He readily accepted, saying: “anytime any place. I will dominate you!” We had a subsequent email exchange in which he wrote: “I propose that we hold a public debate regarding the accuracy of your book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), with regard to the topics of Shariah, jihad, ‘dhimmitude’, and taqiyyah.” He included a debate format that had one of us arguing in the affirmative and one of us in the negative.

I’m happy to defend my positions, but while his debate format provided for an affirmative and a negative statement, he didn’t propose any statement on which an affirmative or negative position could be taken. An amorphous discussion about my book in general would have given him too many opportunities simply to change the subject and thereby avoid being pinned down about uncomfortable facts — I’ve been in too many radio debates and exchanges with Islamic apologists not to guard against that by having a clearly defined topic.

Accordingly I wrote back to Lumbard proposing some specific debate topics that could actually be argued in the affirmative and the negative, but he seemed to have no clear grasp of how a debate topic should actually be formulated, and after a few more exchanges he went silent, with me decidedly un-“dominated.”

3. Omid Safi, Duke University.

Last July, Omid Safi was named director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center (DISC). Back in 2004, when Safi was a professor at Colgate University in upstate New York, he taught a course called “Islam and modernity,” in which he assigned students a three-page report on one figure of their choosing from a Safi-provided list of “Islamophobes, Neo-cons, Western triumphalists.”

As I was on the list (along with figures ranging from Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and including at least one Muslim, Stephen Suleyman Schwartz), I contacted Safi and offered to come to Colgate at my own expense to discuss my work and the concept of “Islamophobia” with him and his class. Safi contemptuously refused, saying that I first had to “publish a book by a credible university press (which you have not), and then we’ll talk.” Ironically, at that point Safi’s only published book had come from Shambhala Press, a New Age house that hardly qualifies as a “credible university press.”

So unnerved was Safi by my challenge that he later falsely claimed that I threatened to kill him and his family, and of course refused to retract when I asked him repeatedly to do so. Likewise when I asked the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (his employer by that time) to take disciplinary action against him for his libel, they did nothing as well.

And Safi, by virtue of his faithful regurgitation of politically correct falsehoods about Islam, continues to rise up the academic food chain, blissfully unchallenged. No one in a crowd of haut-couture nudists dares point out that the emperor is likewise unclothed.

Read the rest here.

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Filed Under: academia, Robert Spencer, Useful idiots, willful ignorance Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. Joseph says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 10:49 am

    The text of my recent email to Mia Bloom:

    Dear Dr. Bloom-

    Honestly, when I read your condescending and, frankly, rude comments to and about Mr. Robert Spencer of JihadWatch dot com, I was taken aback. As a university professor, I believe you should conduct yourself with [much] more decorum and simple professionalism. With all due respect, you came off sounding like a junior high school girl in a heated argument with one of her friends on the bus ride home. I speak several languages and I too have a Ph.D. and have worked (albeit merely as an adjunct) at several universities on the east coast. I would never stoop to the level of name-calling and condescension as you have here towards Mr. Spencer. It is simply unbecoming of a professional educator, in my opinion.

    I feel that you owe Robert Spencer an apology for your unprovoked attack and smear on his character and intelligence. It was unprofessional and unacceptable, in my opinion.

    Finally, if you are quite certain that Mr. Spencer would lose a debate about Islam and its tendency towards violence, why not debate him on the matter? Or, if you do not feel up to the challenge yourself, find the most well-informed person you know on the subject and invite them to debate Mr. Spencer. I know Robert personally and I can guarantee you he would never turn down a debate against anyone on the topic of Islam. And the reason for that is that he is a true scholar and knows his material expertly. And he is a superb debater to boot, I might add. So, frankly, why not debate him? Or find someone else to debate him? You have had the temerity publicly to smear his character and question his intelligence. Now have the simple decency to allow him to respond to your claims. It is the honorable thing to do.

    Sincerely-
    Joseph

    • wildjew says

      Oct 14, 2014 at 11:14 am

      Good job. I devote a fair amount of time (at least for me) to the study of history, American, Middle East, the history of Israel, etc. I am reading biographies of American presidents and a few other well-known American figures. I study religion, both my own, Christianity and Islam. I think I have most of Spencer’s books both hard copy and from Audible.com. Audible is a wonderful resource especially for me.

      I have not nor could I devote the time to the study of Islam which Mr. Spencer has given it much of his adult life. My guess is, it is times like this (when so-called scholars and experts shrink from debate) that he is thankful he has devoted so many years to (what is for many) a tedious subject.

  2. John Spielman says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 11:11 am

    Every time I read these liberal academic’s diatribes against the Truth, I must agree that they are but truly evil ” totalitarians trying to get out”as FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE moto says!

    • wildjew says

      Oct 14, 2014 at 11:16 am

      Here, here!

  3. Frank Scarn says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 11:23 am

    Spencer could handle all of them as easily,

    http://i.imgur.com/TRE80Dw.jpg?2

    BTW – pretty sure that Mia Bloom wouldn’t even make it to this room, having failed in every one of her pre-qualifying rounds.

  4. Beagle says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 11:24 am

    As an alleged student of Islam Bloom already lost all credibility by asserting 9.29, probably the most important and deadly small group of words ever written, does not apply to the people of the book. Inexcusable and inexplicable as the ayat by its own terms includes the people of the book.

    I liken it to an astronomy professor lecturing on celestial spheres or feathered serpents in 2014.

    Bloom’s mistake suggests she does not understand the trajectory of Muhammad’s life and basic early Islamic history. As al-Tawba is the last sura, thereby normative to many Muslims, no Islamic theology is more important.

    Bloom purports to be an expert on suicide terrorism. She is a fraud. Her students should get their money back.

  5. duh_swami says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 12:02 pm

    I have been around the Islamic block often enough to know just about every argument and claim that can be made in Islams defense…Both of them can easily be refuted.

  6. Jay Boo says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 12:16 pm

    If a large portion of the supposedly infallible and immutable word of Allah can be changed in abrogation by a single verse doesn’t that mean that the testimony given by the supposed prophet of Islam is without any foundation at all?

    At least we can give Muhammad some credit for not stooping so low as to claim that “The devil made me do it”

    Oops! He did
    The Satanic Verses

  7. Boston Tea Party says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 12:26 pm

    It’s really quite funny. Now I’m not saying that Robert is not a good debater, because he certainly is–but he’s got the easier job by far. There is NO significant, codified version of Islam that’s “moderate” by any reasonable definition, and there are TONS of widely-read, respected, mainstream Islamic writings, scholarship and exegesis that support the “extremist” view of Islam. That’s largely why his opponents won’t debate him: in a sense, they wouldn’t be arguing with Robert Spencer–they’d be arguing with mainstream Islamic theology and scholarship. And that’s a situation they don’t want to find themselves in.

    And as I’ve said before, they’re much more comfortable with their straw-man “right wing extremist” caricature of Robert. The real Robert Spencer—not so much.

  8. Wellington says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 1:16 pm

    The insufferable arrogance of these academics mentioned by Robert Spencer is only superseded by the fear that I strongly suspect lurks in the heart of each of these posturing fools about what would really happen if they took Robert Spencer on in debate. In short, they’re afraid of Spencer and are hiding behind excuses masquerading as arguments. What a bunch of cowards.

  9. Boston Tea Party says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 1:26 pm

    This situation tells us something else about the state of western academia, something beyond the subject of Islam. Open, vigorous public debate has really been a fundamental cornerstone of democracy in the West—to a large degree, that’s what has differentiated the democratic systems from the totalitarian ones. Clearly, many leftist intellectuals no longer see public debate as important, and one can quite naturally surmise that they have a similar degree of ambivalence towards democracy itself.

  10. Infidel Grandma says

    Oct 14, 2014 at 7:18 pm

    I’m just an ordinary Australian Grandmother, living in the ‘burbs although I do have a tertiary qualification in Early Childhood Education and I would be happy to debate any of these so called academics without fear of making a fool of myself. Perhaps my qualification in teaching young children would hold me in good stead in imparting information but then again maybe not because at least young minds are inquisitive and questioning before they are stifled by our left leaning educational system.

    • Champ says

      Oct 14, 2014 at 7:40 pm

      From one blessed and proud *infidel grandma* to another …Welcome, Infidel Grandma! 🙂

      • Champ says

        Oct 14, 2014 at 7:46 pm

        And I am also a blessed and proud Christian ✞ …however, I am considered an “infidel” to mohammedan slaves.

  11. Jackbo Godfrey says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 2:16 am

    Mr Spencer, your courage and persistence are honorable and inspiring. The “Chamberlain” politically correct gang running things now will not last for long and Radical Islam will eventually do the convincing. Your educational and intellectual endeavors are direly needed for now and when that inevitable time comes in the future.

  12. ApolloSpeaks says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 8:00 am

    THE ONLY WAY SUPREMACIST SCHOLARS

    can demolish Robert is by giving him the Van Gogh treatment-which all or most of them want to do. And we pray that never happens.

    http://www.apollospeaks.com

  13. Jaladhi says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 9:03 am

    How can these morons and liars debate truth with you, Robert?? They stand not a chance with their usual lies that Muslims have propagated for centuries!!

  14. jihad me at hello says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 9:42 am

    After reading one of Roberts Spencer’s books I wanted to check out the Islamic sources for myself that he quotes before forming a firm opinion. I bought a Quran with commentary from the hadiths and read it. Also requested a dawah CD series from a Muslim website (On one of the CD’s it mentioned that Mother Terasa was burning in hell. How kind). What I’ve discovered for myself from the primary sources of Islam and it’s proselytisers is that Mr Spencer is absolutely correct about the nature Islam.

  15. Mark says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 9:46 am

    RE: Mia M. Bloom, University of Massachusetts-Lowell

    Since she has shown her incompetance for the position she is employed in, how about students make complaints to the university- presumably they pay fees for the tuition?

  16. Jim says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 4:23 pm

    So the Furious 5 took a rain check on debating. Robert Spencer is one clever dick – actually resorting to truth & documented facts. Clever Dick – an intellectual who is ostentatiously and irritatingly knowledgeable! Go Bob !

  17. David Darman says

    Oct 15, 2014 at 5:46 pm

    I once offered to underwrite Juan Cole’s expense in a public debate with RS. He said to do so would cloak RS with a degree of respectability he didn’t merit supposedly based upon a lack of academic credentials. What a bullshit, supercilious, lame excuse from an academic coward!

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