I was going to pass over this glowing overview of the last two decades of my life and work in silence, but however commendably modest that may have been, it would be unfair to the author of this piece, my good old friend Jeffrey Rubin. I make it a point to thank Jeff in the Acknowledgments section of each of my books; in my latest, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, I wrote this: “I would be remiss if I did not once again thank the man without whom none of this would ever have happened, Mr. Jeffrey Rubin.” He mentions Jihad Watch below, but leaves one salient detail: he named it.
Hearty thanks to Jeff for this thought-provoking trip down memory lane, which I’ve briefly excerpted below — it’s much longer at the source. Looking back at all this, would I do it all over again? Sure.
“Robert Spencer and the Religion of Terror,” by Jeffrey Rubin, Crisis, October 25, 2018:
“I have been made victorious with terror.” ∼ Muhammad
It couldn’t have been much more than a week after 9/11 when he emailed me an article, “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?,” that he’d written for an obscure Catholic magazine. I was then editor of the Conservative Book Club, and he helped write ads for our books. I was anxious to find, or get published by the Club’s sister company, Regnery Publishing, a book that would refute President Bush’s ridiculous assertions that “Islam is peace.”
The article was scholarly and persuasive. I asked him where he acquired his expertise on Islam; he said it was a focus of his graduate studies in religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I asked him to write a book proposal I could submit to Regnery. He did, but Regnery rejected it (I got the impression they bought the Bush line on Islam). So I brought it to another publisher, Encounter Books; they published it as Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World’s Fastest-Growing Religion, and it sold over 40,000 copies. That woke up my colleagues at Regnery, and they signed him to write the second in the Politically Incorrect Guide series I’d conceived for them, this one to be called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). It jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list, quickly topping 100,000 in sales—and Robert Spencer was off to the races.
Today, Spencer is the author of 18 books on Islam—that’s over one per year—including The Truth about Muhammad (another NYT bestseller); The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran; Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is, and Islam Isn’t; and the just-published A History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS. But that just scratches the surface. He’s also director of Jihad Watch, an online chronicle (which also posts YouTube videos) of jihadist activity around the world (including the “stealth jihad” by which Muslims are transforming Western nations through mass immigration), and a platform from which he refutes, with over 40,000 posts to date, the Islamophilic propaganda that pours from not only Muslim sources but Western ones, notably the media. His public appearances—lectures, debates—have numbered about 400 over fifteen years. He is also co-founder of Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA) and the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI).
With all that, it’s no wonder Spencer has been subject to hundreds of death threats, and must hire security guards or be under heavy police protection whenever he speaks publicly. At a no-doubt deliberately provocative “draw the prophet Muhammad” exhibition and contest sponsored by AFDI in Garland, Texas, in May 2015, jihadis opened fire in the parking lot outside the event. “If they had gotten in,” Spencer told me, “I would certainly have been killed.” And at a speaking event in Stuttgart, Germany, “a young Muslim was standing with the organizers of the event. I shook hands all around, and shook his, taking him for one of them. Then he said to me, ‘If it weren’t for all these police around, I would have killed you already.’”
But it’s not only jihadis who are out to get him: the Left—united with Islam in its hatred of everything Western, especially Christianity, yet oblivious to its own inevitable fate whenever and wherever Muslims achieve critical population mass, as they soon will in parts of Europe—has been relentless in attacking and attempting to silence him. Indeed, they almost succeeded in murdering him after a talk he gave in Reykjavik, Iceland, in May 2017. Here’s his account of what happened…
Read the rest here.