Pat Dollard

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Last Moments…

I was just over at Jihad Watch and had my mind blown, probably not half as much as the sites founder Robert Spencer’s mind was blown, to see an article about Benazir Bhutto attacking Spencer and Jihad Watch in her last book “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West” which was published posthumously.

In her book she writes:

Robert Spencer is the author of the well-known Web site Jihad Watch. He uses the Internet to spread misinformation and hatred of Islam, while claiming he is merely putting forward the truth. But as in much extremist advocacy, he presents a skewed, one-sided, and inflammatory story that only helps sow the seeds of civilizational conflict. For example, he takes apparently violent verses of the Quran out of context and then does not provide any peaceful verses as a balance.

Unlike many of the more mainstream authors presented, Spencer does not understand the true Muslim faith or differentiate between moderate Muslims and violent Islamists, and so lumps them all in one boat…

Spencer was befuddled because what she attributed to his writing didn’t quite sound, to him, like something he had written. He said it wasn’t in his style. Here is the quote:

Islam is a totalitarian ideology that aims to control the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects, the life of its followers without qualification, and the life of those who follow the so-called tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from getting in the way of Islam in any way. And I mean Islam: I do not accept some spurious distinction between Islam and “Islamic Fundamentalism” or “Islamic terrorism.” The terrorists who planted the bombs in Madrid, and those responsible for the death of more than 2,000 people on September 11, 2001 in New York and the Ayatollahs of Iran were and are all acting canonically; their actions reflect the teachings of Islam, whether found in the Koran, in the acts and sayings of the Prophet, or Islamic law based on them.

Baffled, Spencer writes:

That long quote from me sounded funny to me — it just didn’t sound to me like the way I write. But Bhutto’s endnote said it was from page 11 of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, an essay collection by many different authors that I edited, and so when I was laboriously typing all this out I went into the Word document of the material I wrote for that book, hoping I could just paste the paragraph in here. But…it wasn’t there! It turns out that that quote is from the book’s Foreword, “The Genesis of a Myth” by Ibn Warraq. Page 13, not 11.

So while excoriating me for allegedly quoting the Qur’an out of context, Benazir Bhutto attributed to me words written by someone else. And that someone is, like Bhutto, a Pakistani who was raised a Muslim. Ibn Warraq has spent years doing research on the historical Muhammad and the origins of the Qur’an — and yet apparently he somehow now misunderstands the Islamic faith.

Click here to go to Jihad Watch and read the rest.