Debating Islamic supremacists

Debating Islamic supremacists
By Robert Spencer

TNN
reported Monday that “a group of scholars who are also members of the powerful
All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) has invited controversial author
Salman Rushdie to debate on Islam and the Prophet’s life. This is a significant
change of position from the general Muslim view which has opposed Rushdie’s
visit to India ever since his controversial novel The Satanic Verses created a storm in the 1980s.”

Mumbai is an ironic place for them to make a public stand
claiming that Islam is a Religion of Peace, but Islamic supremacists never
suffer from any shortages of chutzpah. Anyway, they don’t really want to debate
Rushdie so much as interrogate him: “…let us invite Rushdie to this city and
answer our questions. If he has the guts he should explain to us why he wrote
such a blasphemous book.”

Typical. Islamic supremacists and their Leftists allies
almost never agree to a free, open, even-handed debate with someone who
genuinely opposes their agenda. It’s as if they’re aware of how flimsy their
arguments are, and how easily they could be shown up. The list of Muslim
spokesmen in the U.S. who have rejected my invitation to debate has grown very
long, and gets longer almost daily. They uniformly say — another indication of
how they all work from the same talking points fed to them from higher-ups —
that I am too stupid to bother debating, as if the falsity of what I say is
self-evident; or that I am too evil to debate, as they don’t want the taint of
debating a greasy Islamophobe; or that I am too insignificant to debate, as
their stature is so much greater than mine that they don’t want to give me and
my views credibility by engaging us in discussion.

These are transparent enough as dodges, but I’ll explain why
they're dodges anyway, in case there is any doubt. I may be very stupid indeed,
but since I have two bestselling books, many other popular ones, and a website
that gets 25,000 to 30,000 unique visitors a day, demonstrating that stupidity
in live action would do a world of good for the purveyors of the “Islamophobia”
myth. The same goes for my alleged evil: I may indeed be as terrible a fellow
as they say, but that would seem to be all the more reason why it would be
imperative for them to try to limit my influence. And they certainly do that,
with no fewer than three hate websites now devoted almost completely to
character assassination of me and supposed “refutations” of my work — but none
of these have any real bite unless they can stand up to rebuttal, and meet and
best me in head-on discussion; yet they all clearly fear to do that. Finally,
their claim that they’d be giving me credibility by debating me is clearly
contrary to logic: if they defeated me, they’d be taking away any credibility I
might have — so evidently it is their awareness that they can’t actually
defeat me that keeps them from taking up the challenge.

And so we have the spectacle of the stupid, evil,
credibility-bereft “Islamophobe” writing reasoned refutations of the deceitful
and misleading writings of the likes of Haroon
Moghul and Harris
Zafar, and in response, their ignoring these refutations entirely or
slinging ad hominem smears. They have no interest in genuine, respectful,
reasoned dialogue.

The problem with their approach is that anyone who still is
interested in reasoned dialogue in our increasingly darkened age can see who is
offering evidence and is willing to defend his views, and who is simply shying
ad hominem bricks and then hiding behind contemptuous claims to an intellectual
superiority that has been neither earned nor demonstrated, but only assumed.

I can understand why men like Zafar and Moghul and all the
rest of them fear debating me: they know that what I say is true. And I know
that they can’t say that, even if they know it in their heart of hearts.
So they come up with excuses and excuses, just as the lion tamer, whip ripped
out of hand, grabs the nearest chair to keep the lion at bay. But the lion is
the truth, and despite their best efforts, it keeps coming closer, closer,
closer.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad
Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam
(and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His
latest book is Did Muhammad Exist?.