Speak for yourself, Mr. Spencer

Robert Spencer's incompetent, not evil, twin Dr. Roberto Espencero, on the Spanish soap "Como El Jihado Revuelvo" ("As the Jihad Turns")

In a recent notice on his site Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer reports on, and analyzes, a new propaganda venture by Muslims trying to whitewash Islam and American Muslims called "All-American Muslims".

Again, as I noted in my essay directly below (and in numerous lengthy analyses on my now retired blog Jihad Watch Watch), Spencer has certain excellent skills -- reportorial, and analytical within limits. However, he needs to keep his analyses under control, lest he continue (as he has been doing for years) making statements like the following, as he did in the aforementioned notice:

But Americans aren’t suspicious of Muslims who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football. Americans are suspicious of Muslims who are trying to blow up American buildings, subvert American freedoms, and assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law. The problem people have with Islam is not with every Muslim person.

Speak for yourself, Spencer. And who is Spencer speaking for here anyway? "Americans" in general? If so, I dare say he'd be considerably off the mark, for there are many indications that the majority of Americans either don't care about Islam and/or think it's "bigoted" to be worry about Islam. If Spencer is intending (and failing) to be more precise here, he may well mean "those few Americans who have woken up to the problem and danger of Islam".

If it is the latter, the statement suffers no less from a major flaw: Who is Spencer to say, and to speak for, the way we few Islamo-realist Americans think and feel about Muslims? In fact, any reasonable Islamo-realist would be suspicious of the seemingly All-American Muslim which Spencer describes as "who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football" etc. Doesn't Spencer remember Maher "Mike" Hawash, who precisely fit that stereotype of the All-American suburban husband (though a Muslim Arab he had become an American citizen by 1990) working for the Intel corporation with a pretty white wife and children playing little league, who one day felt the perennial call of jihad and left his wife, sold his house, and went off to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan? Of course Spencer remembers (for he reported it on Jihad Watch).

Indeed, what makes this worse is that Spencer over the years has published innumerable reports of Muslims who seem to blend in with Western society and values, but who have turned out to have jihadist and terrorist sympathies, and often active involvement in them. And these reports have led him, reasonably, to utter a statement many, many times over the years to the effect that because of the facts that keep coming to light about so-called "moderate Muslims", we cannot reasonably distinguish the harmless Muslim from the dangerous Muslim.

But then, the second Robert Spencer, his not evil but incompetent evil twin with the eyepatch, turns around and makes statements that logically contradict that elementary principle.

The problem people have with Islam is not with every Muslim person.

To which any self-respecting anti-Islam person would respond: "Oh...? Says who...?" Why does Spencer have to interject these distracting, unhelpful, and downright specious points in his analyses -- points, furthermore, that contradict innumerable other points he has made (not to mention the veritable mountain -- nay, burgeoning, quaking, lava-spewing mountain ranges -- of data he has been amassing and reporting) over the years about Muslims?

At any rate, I would hope most of the sane reasonable people who make up the small minority of Those Who Have Woken Up to the Danger of Islam and of Muslims disagree emphatically with Spencer in this regard. We have precisely a problem with "every Muslim person" -- only because there is no adequate way to tell whether any given Muslim -- no matter how cheerily he smiles and waves at us wearing a Cosby sweater over the white picket fence as he is putting out his recycling to the curb before he gets in his 2011 Saturn to go off to work as a doctor or engineer while his pretty wife without a hijab gets in her own Prius to take the kids to day care before she goes off to her own job as a bank manager or dental hygienist -- can be trusted, given all we know (or should know, by now) about Muslim behavior and Islamic culture.

To begin to grasp the full breadth and depth of the problem I am briefly recounting here, one would have to peruse (and I mean "peruse" in its original and accurate meaning -- meaning "read thoroughly and carefully") the last ten or so essays on my now retired blog, Jihad Watch Watch. One of them I link below.

Further Reading:

Apple Pie Allah Mode

Robert Spencer's Two Hats: Keep Your Day Job