Not quite a Beatles reunion, but cool nonetheless

Instead of John and Paul, we'll have to make do with Bob and Andy -- Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom, that is.  

Without any ado, after years of a rift whose cause no one really knows (only because the principals have never come clean about it and nobody seems to have cared to ask them), Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom have apparently buried the hatchet.  For readers who wish to read my thoughts on the matter of the longstanding rift, see this page of links.  

The first sign of this sudden and welcome rapprochement was approximately a couple of weeks ago, when out of the blue, Spencer featured a Bostom article on Jihad Watch.  After an achingly long winter of silence between them, punctuated only by oblique jabs of acrimony, Jihad Watch readers were greeted with an unforeseen thaw, with its attendant melting and sprinkling rivulets of cordiality in full bloom now this week, as Spencer treated his readers to an in-depth videotaped interview and discussion with his old friend and colleague.

During the hour they converse, Spencer frequently encourages Bostom to expound at length and in fascinating detail about the lionized scholar of Islamic history, Bernard Lewis, and by extension, the sorry state of Academe with regard to that subject.

And Andrew Bostom has a lot to say on the subject.  Indeed, he has so many thousands of relevant facts jockeying for place in the space between his nimble brain and his tongue, one almost senses he can barely get them out in orderly fashion; almost as though he knows he doesn't have the time, even in the span of an hour, to explicate and do justice to the full complications of the horror of Islam and the nightmare of our Western myopia of that horror -- all the more grotesque when that myopia exudes from a remarkably erudite scholar, the focus of the discussion, Bernard Lewis (age 96 and still going strong), who is steeped in knowledge about that horror and thus has had no coherent excuse for his tendencies toward apologeticism.

Bostom's recurring theme, of the intellectual/psychological schizophrenia of Lewis, epitomizes in a searingly acute nutshell the Stockholm Syndrome schizophrenia of the whole West with regard to its most familiar perennial Bully and Enemy who has traumatized her for 1,300 years -- but about whom, like the battered wife with two black eyes, two broken ribs, and bruises and cuts up and down her back who continues to defend and make excuses for her abusive husband, she remains hip-deep in that River of Egypt.

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Whether it was a matter of money, lawyers or Yoko, nobody knows.  I'm just glad they're back together again.  The danger of Islam is too important for two talents like Bob and Andy to indulge the mysterious grudge they had against each other for so long.