Recently two extraordinary articles have appeared at the Daily Kos — extraordinary because, to the rage and dismay of many of that site’s commenters and regular readers — they depart from the standard Leftist line that Islamic jihad violence has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, even if jihadists invoke Islamic texts and teachings to justify that violence, and that only greasy Islamophobes think otherwise.
The articles are “Loonwatch.com and Radical Islam” and “How and Why Loonwatch.com is a Terrorist Spin Control Network,” both by Eric Allen Bell, who is so far from being a “right-wing Islamophobe” that he made a documentary about the “Islamophobia” supposedly being suffered by the proponents of a huge new mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee — and is far enough to the Left to get space to write at the Daily Kos.
Yet Bell had the intellectual honesty to make this entirely true observation about the hate and defamation site that is the subject of his pieces: “But for LoonWatch.com any criticism of the Koran or of violent Jihad – even those criticisms that might have some legitimacy to them – even of radical Islam, are branded as Islamophobia and anyone who dares to raise questions about the nearly constant acts of Jihad going on increasingly around the world today is labeled a ‘Loon’ – thus the title of their blog, LoonWatch.com.”
Since I am the subject of obsessive attention at Loonwatch, I am mentioned in the original article as well as in the followup, which Bell wrote after Islamic supremacists and their Leftist tools rounded upon him with predictable and ludicrous charges that he is a right-wing anti-Muslim bigot. I have a few disagreements with his view of me and of the jihad threat in general. He says I have some kind of religious agenda here, which anyone who reads this site will know is false. While I am a religious believer, Jihad Watch is not a religious apologetics site, but a non-sectarian site seeking to provide the context for a broad coalition of people of all perspectives — atheists, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims of conscience — who are threatened by Islamic jihad. He dismissively distances himself from my colleague Pamela Geller, ignoring her courageous and pioneering work in, among many other things, raising awareness about the human rights abuses in Islamic law, such as honor killing and the death penalty for apostasy. And he seems to be a bit credulous in accepting the smooth deceptions of Muslim Brotherhood-linked forces behind the building of many mega-mosques around the country, and about the stealth jihad in general.
Nonetheless, I was intrigued by Bell’s capacity for independent thought, which is such a rare commodity these days, and willingness to acknowledge that there is a problem within Islam, which is even rarer, so I sent him a note, telling him: “I predict that you will not find anyone on the Left who will be willing to consider the ‘correlation between some of the violent passages in the Koran and the Hadiths and many of the acts of brutality being carried out by radical Muslims in the world’ [that’s a quote from one of his Kos pieces]. However, I do not now and never have considered my work ‘right-wing’: if defending civilized values against institutionalized violence and religiously justified savagery is ‘right-wing,’ the Left has a great deal to answer for.”
I got this email back from Eric Allen Bell, and he has kindly allowed me to publish it here:
Mr. Spencer –
Very good to hear from you. I made a short documentary called “Not Welcome” (http://www.NotWelcomeDocumentary.com) regarding the backlash against construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro, TN. What inspired me to make that film was the same feeling I have now about what is going on in the greater Islamic world. It was my conscience – a sense of justice.
VIDEO LINK: http://vimeo.com/ericallenbell/notwelcome
NOT WELCOME (short documentary) by Eric Allen Bell from Eric Allen Bell on Vimeo.
That said, in the process I absorbed a whole lot of information from traditionally liberal sources. I have only recently come around to a hopefully more expansive point of view. When I finally read one of your books for the first time, I kept waiting for the part where you would prove yourself to be a “Loon” so that I could stop reading, but that never happened 🙂
I watched the documentary, “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and wanted so badly to prove wrong what I had seen and heard – but I could not.
This was not only humbling but it has caused me to really rethink and rethink the possibility that perhaps the truth is not politically correct.
And more is still being revealed. When I made “Not Welcome” most of the arguments against Islam I heard among the people of Murfreesboro, TN were religiously motivated. People would actually say to me that “America is a Christian nation” and they believed it said this in the Bible. The leaders of the movement were Christian Zionists. It was ugly, and yet their concerns were not entirely unfounded.
So I decided to keep the focus of the film on America and look for ways to convey a message about what I perceive to be a real enemy at home. At that time I did not perceive a real threat to America in the way of “creeping Sharia” and so I left that alone.
But as I watch with great disappointment the developments that have followed the so-called “Arab Spring” I am very, very concerned. Islamism is clearly on the rise, they have weapons, they are not rational and I am concerned.
It means a lot to me to hear from you directly like this. I apologize if in fact I have mis-characterized where you are coming from. In my own defense, the anti-mosque crowd in Murfreesboro, TN were a very nasty bunch – and they love JihadWatch 😉 So, perhaps I wrongly judged you by some of them, and if that is the case I am very sorry. I will continue to read your blog and continue to research.
I admire your courage and conviction in being one of the only truth tellers out there about the dangers of Islam, your willingness to use your name and put your picture on your blog, your fearlessness in posting the Mohammed cartoon.
Please feel free to contact me anytime. My sense is that this war of words with Loonwatch (who now have several Islamic websites backing them up and putting my name out on the street) has only just begun.
Peace,
Eric Allen Bell
On a related note, Loonwatch’s chief figure, “Danios,” has just passed up no fewer than four separate opportunities to debate me — three hosted at universities and one on ABN — despite his years of bravado and false claims that I was ducking him. He claimed he wanted to debate the laughable thesis that Judaism and Christianity are just as violent as Islam — as if armed terror groups worldwide were justifying killing people by quoting the words of Moses and Jesus, killing apostates from Judaism and Christianity, boasting about the imminent conquest and subjugation of non-Jewish and non-Christian lands, etc.
But although I was agreeable and he was full of false bluster about how I was avoiding debating him, ultimately he was too afraid to step up and actually agree to a debate. And I don’t really mind, for while it would have been satisfying to defeat him, I doubt anyone would have been enlightened by a couple of hours of him calling me fat, ugly, stupid, and evil, which Reza Aslan-like spittle is essentially all that he and his site can muster in response to the truths I present. They can’t actually refute them.
SOURCE: Jihad Watch