I don’t mean to be abrasive, but people like Mr. Spencer are irrelevant for a reason: because they should be. Have you looked at his website? His links and referrers are from places like FrontPageMag, Israeli American patriot, LittleGreenFootball, etc. I don’t want to presume guilt by assocation, but the content of the site proves it. Pro-Israel, neoconservative propoganda that gets masquared as academic research and serious reporting? The content of his site rarely reaches past Islam + Islam followers = terrorism. I’m for an open debate, including the role of religion in facilitating agregious actions, and don’t hold myself to whatever PC bias we are supposedly afflected with (and it’s laughable to me personally to think that Westerners are somehow more PC then prejudiced on this subject to begin with). Yes, Islam is a part of the equation, but there are more weighted variables in my opinion to what exists.

But it was good to see ‘Undercover federal air marshals will no longer be held to a strict dress code that many thought compromised their in-flight anonymity.’ – and CA missed it!

I’m stumped by this Q&A session w/ Robert Spencer, in particular his treatment of Christian versus Muslim literal hermeneutics. Spencer’s analysis of the Old and New Testament (his treatment of the Gospels as one example) is simply wrong: outside of conservative Christian circles, even into what most would call moderate evangelical camps, the concepts of literalism and inerrancy are held to stridently. One does not have to go to an extreme by delving into the fundamentalist dispensational camps w/in Christianity to find literalism in every form and fashion strictly held to.

His analysis seems to touch on something important – the PC tendency to avoid calling militant Islam for what it is and for always pointing towards factors outside of Islamic political, religious and philosophical discourse, for the portion of its worldwide presence which is hateful and the literal underpinnings for global terror; however, were we to take much of the Christian and Judaic Penteteuch, we would be forced to bend our contemporary sense of morality through stories, rules and theologies that can be recognized as similarly hate-filled. I think Spencer’s analysis does have something to offer in that too-much of the analysis post 9/11 is coming from religious historians such as Karen Armstrong, someone whose infatuation and sincere love of religion at times overwhelms her sense of the darker sides to Christianity and Islam.

We seem to lack a coherent understanding of how to engage the Muslim world, which is sad for any number of reasons, not least of which is that our own story shows the extent to which we have grappled with separation of religion from the public sphere – a debate still very much alive, yet whose manifestations are less hateful than those taking place w/in Islam. My own sense (which is only the result of what I have been able to study on my own, and certainly not from the formal education many of the commentators and writers on this site have), is that what Muslim culture needs is very much something they can only do themselves, which may echo and loosely parallel the struggle, strife and questions asked and answered by the Enlightenment.

What we want for them is right, but it is not a gift we can give them, it is a change they must earn on their own. To the extent we can “assist” the transformation in the Muslim world I am unsure; my sense is that our policy of engagement has to meet people where they are. Spencer’s analysis of Islam reminds me of Sam Harris’ analysis of Christianity: both are (in my estimation) factually and rationally accurate, but pragmatically ineffective and probably destructive in the end.