# Robert Spencer

Robert Bruce Spencer (born February 27, 1962) is an American anti-Islamic author, blogger and one of the key figures of the counter-jihad movement.

## Quotes
### 2000s

* I have never said that the terrorists' interpretation of Islam is the accurate or correct one. But I have pointed out that the terrorists portray themselves quite successfully among Muslims as the exponents of true and pure Islam, and moderates have mounted no successful response as yet.
** Honesty is the best policy, Bob, July 19, 2007: About moderation in Islam
* I was surprised to see that there was indeed religiously sanctioned violence in it, as well as some others things which I found disturbing. But it was all intriguing, because I was entranced by the shorter, poetic chapters. I thought it very striking that this beauty could co-exist with clear mandates for warfare and violence against unbelievers.
** Jihad will destroy us if we don't act now - Catholic Herald (18 July 2007)
* They [Americans] have something worth defending...they need to defend it properly from the foe that most people are afraid even to name. How can you possibly fight an enemy when you're afraid to identify him?
** Robert Spencer talking about identifying Islamic extremists, . (2007-08-13). Michelle interviews Robert Spencer about Religion of Peace: Why Christianity is and Islam Isn’t

#### Islam unveiled : disturbing questions about the world's fastest growing faith (2002)

* Inflamed by this mindset, Muslims all around the perimeter of the Islamic world are fighting their neighbors of other religions—Hindus in India, Communist and Buddhist Chinese, Jews, Christians in a score of countries, and pagan animists in Africa. In this light, it is wishful thinking to bracket Islam and peace.

#### Onward Muslim soldiers : how jihad still threatens America and the West (2002)

* Of course, when Hindus fought Hindus they observed these restraints because they shared the same values: both sides revered the same temples, monasteries, and, for that matter, cows. But Sita Ram Goel is right that the actions of the Muslims were in accord with Islamic law and precedent; these actions can't be attributed solely to attempts to end resistance and demoralize the locals. The Muslim invaders' behavior was consistent with the example of the Prophet who once enjoined one of his followers "to attack Ubna in the morning and burn the place."

#### The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (2005)

* Here’s why the life of Muhammad [and Jesus] matters: Contrary to what many secularists would have us believe, religions are not entirely determined (or distorted) by the faithful over time. The lives and words of the founders remain central, no matter how long ago they lived. The idea that believers shape religion is derived, instead, from the fashionable 1960s philosophy of deconstructionism, which teaches that written words have no meaning other than that given to them by the reader. Equally important, it follows that if the reader alone finds meaning, there can be no truth (and certainly no religious truth); one person’s meaning is equal to another’s. Ultimately, according to deconstructionism, we all create our own set of “truths,” none better, or worse than any other. Yet for the religious man or woman on the streets of Chicago, Rome, Jerusalem, Damascus, Calcutta, and Bangkok, the words of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, and Buddha mean something far greater than any individual’s rendering of them. And even to the less-than-devout reader, the words of these great religious leaders are clearly not equal in their meaning.
** The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Chapter 1, page 3
* Europe could be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century. … Will tourists in Paris in the year 2015 take a moment to visit the "mosque of Notre Dame" and the "Eiffel Minaret?" Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have failed to do at the time of the Crusaders: conquer Europe. If demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by middle of this century. … What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. In her book Eurabia, Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing." … France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.
** The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, 2005, ISBN 0-89526-013-1, pp. 221-224

#### The truth about Muhammad : founder of the world's most intolerant religion (2006)

* With statements like these from the Qur’an and Muhammad, it is no wonder that women in the Islamic world suffer such inequalities.
* While human nature is everywhere the same and Muslims can, of course, act as tolerantly as anyone else, the example of Muhammad, the highest model for human behavior, constantly pulls them in a different direction.

#### Religion of peace? : why Christianity is and Islam isn't (2007)

* Muslim feminists and their allies assert that any oppression of women in Muslim countries occurs in spite of Islam, not because of it, and that the genuine Islamic attitude toward women is one of unstinting respect.

#### Stealth jihad (2008)

* Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i.e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing."
** Stealth jihad: how radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs, 2008, ISBN 9781596985568, pp. 270-273
* I have long contended that Islam is unique among the major world religions in having a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system mandating warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. There is no orthodox sect or school of Islam that teaches that Muslims must coexist peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis. I use the term “radical Islam” merely to distinguish those Muslims who are actively working to advance this subjugation from the many millions who are not, as well as to emphasize that the stealth jihad program is truly radical: it aims at nothing less than the transformation of American society and the imposition of Islamic law here, subjugating women and non-Muslims to the status of legal inferiors.
** Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, Introduction, page 5

#### The complete infidel's guide to the Koran (2009)

* Whatever the wisdom of the Calcutta petition, it was a sincere attempt to address a problem that has existed since the first days of Muhammad’s prophecy, and that will undoubtedly continue to exist as long as there are people who believe the Koran contains the unadulterated words of the one, true God: Muslims will commit violence against non-Muslims, believing that they have been ordered to do so by Allah in the Koran.

### 2010s

* Islamic apologists in the West argue furiously that child marriage has nothing to do with Islam, and that the idea that Muhammad married a child is the invention of greasy Islamophobes. In reality, few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage.
** Frontpage Mag - Hamas-linked CAIR Rep. Arrested for Pedophilia (10 June 2015)
* We are truly in a battle for our very lives not just in the sense that they will kill us if they can, but in the sense that life itself is being challenged, that it's life versus death, you either love life or you love death, creation versus destruction, love versus hatred, that's what this is about. And so, when we see the Islamic State (ISIS), we see not only that they embody Islam as I have explained here in this, that's all in the Quran what they do, but also that they embody what may be, the foremost evil force that the world has ever seen.
** ACT for America chapter in Mission Viejo, California (9 March 2015)
* Most local imams in Dagestan shun radical views, but they have found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State. Some imams who spoke against radical Islam have been killed.” Why have they “found it hard to counter the appeal of radical ideas promoted by the Islamic State”? To Western leaders such as David Cameron, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Pope Francis, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and a host of others, it is patently obvious that the Qur’an teaches peace and that Islam is a religion of peace. So it ought to be child’s play for these imams in Dagestan to refute the twisted, hijacked version of Islam presented by the Islamic State. Here’s an idea: why doesn’t Barack Obama send Kerry to Dagestan to explain to young Muslims how the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misrepresenting Islam? Or maybe Pope Francis could go there, or he could send some Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic bishop — say, one who knows that Islam is at its core a peaceful religion and who moves actively to silence and ostracize those who say otherwise — to the Islamic State, straight to Raqqa, to explain to the caliph how he is misunderstanding Islam. That would clear up this problem in a hurry. I volunteer to pay the bishop’s airfare.
** Jihad Watch - Islamic State on recruitment spree in Russia, “moderate” imams can’t counter the jihadis’ appeal (29 October 2015)
* The myth that poverty causes terrorism. In reality, study after study has shown that jihadists are not poor and bereft of economic opportunities, but generally wealthier and better educated than their peers. CNS noted that “according to a Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009, ‘Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.’ One of the authors of the RAND report, Darcy Noricks, also found that according to a number of academic studies, ‘Terrorists turn out to be more rather than less educated than the general population.’”
** Jihad Watch - Islamic State on recruitment spree in Russia, “moderate” imams can’t counter the jihadis’ appeal (29 October 2015)
* It is no surprise that the Washington Post is thrilled about Khizr Khan’s “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump,” even though Khan, not quite accurately, claims that Trump wants to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. In any case, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan today overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.
** About Khizr M. Khan's speech during the 2016 Democratic National Convention - Father of slain Muslim soldier rebukes Trump at DNC Jihad Watch (July 29, 2016)
* It isn’t surprising that Trump would be reading Jihad Watch. ... What makes this striking is that Trump made no secret of reading this site, unlike numerous others who are so afraid of the politically correct thought police that they read it in secret — even back when I was giving seminars for the U.S. military on the terrorist mindset, one colonel urged me not to say that I had been there, so afraid was he of Hamas-linked CAIR. It’s long past time to stop that kind of kowtowing. Those of us who are defending human rights against jihad terror and Sharia oppression have nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of, and must not accept the enemy characterization of us, as that characterization itself is just a weapon in their arsenal and an attempt to clear away opposition to jihad and Sharia. It’s good news that the corrupt media is being passed over in favor of the truth tellers. Kudos to Trump for not bowing to the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion.
** After Donald Trump linked to a Jihad Watch post on his Facebook account. Donald Trump links to Jihad Watch story on Facebook (August 3, 2016), Jihad Watch.
* [Sweden and Britain are] two weak and spineless dhimmi states
** Sweden, Britain in talks with Iran to free tanker seized by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, jihadwatch (Jul 25, 2019)

#### Did Muhammad Exist? (2012, revised 2021)

* The name Muhammad actually appears in the Qur'an only four times, and in three of those instances it could be used as a title – the "praised one" or "chosen one" – rather than as a proper name.
** Did Muhammad Exist? (2012), p. 17
* In short, the lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that material developed, and much more suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him.
* But at first, the Arab empire did not have a compelling political theology to compete with those it supplanted and solidify its conquests. The earliest Arab rulers appear to have been adherents of a monotheistic religion centered around Abraham and Ishmael, which Crone and Cook dubbed “Hagarism.” They frowned upon the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ—hence Muawiya’s letter to the Byzantine emperor Constantine, calling on him to “renounce this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham.”
* Whatever the case, the records make clear that toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, the Umayyads began to speak much more specifically about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book.

#### Not Peace but a Sword (2013)

* The nearly total silence manifests itself in the curiously euphemistic manner in which human rights groups report on the plight of Christians, when they notice that plight at all. For example, Amnesty International’s 2007 report on the human rights situation in Egypt dismisses the suffering of Coptic Christians in a single sentence so filled with euphemism and moral equivalence and so lacking in context that it almost erases the crime it describes... The passive voice seems to be the rule of the day where jihad violence against Christians is concerned. The 2007 Amnesty International report on Indonesia includes this line: “Minority religious groups and church buildings continued to be attacked.” By whom? AI is silent. “In Sulawesi, sporadic religious violence occurred throughout the year.”41 Who is responsible for that violence? AI doesn’t say. Amnesty International seems more concerned about protecting Islam and Islamic groups from being implicated in human rights abuses than about protecting Christians from those abuses.

#### The complete infidel's guide to ISIS (2015)

* It would be patently obvious to everyone that the Islamic State is Islamic—were it not for the fact that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, David Cameron, and virtually every other authority in the Western world insist that it’s not.

#### The complete infidel's guide to Iran (2016)

* As they did in other lands they conquered, the Arabs made a clean sweep of the Persian Empire. Islam holds the achievements of all civilizations before their conquest by Muslims to be worthless trash, jahiliyya, products of the society of unbelievers. And so in the fourteenth century the pioneering Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had to ask, “Where are the sciences of the Persians that Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest?” The answer was that they had been obliterated at the hands of those who believed, as in a quip attributed to the Caliph Umar, that if books agreed with the Qur’an, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed with it, they were heretical—in either case, of no account.

#### The complete infidel's guide to free speech (and its enemies) (2017)

* There has been remarkably little pushback against the Islamic and leftist assault against the freedom of speech. For the most part, those in positions of power and influence seem not to realize the implications of what is happening, or else they don’t care—when they aren’t actively complicit in the steady muzzling of dissent.

#### Confessions of an Islamophobe (2017)

* There are, in short, very good reasons to be an Islamophobe, that is, to be concerned about Islam for the devastation that it brings into the lives of human beings both Muslim and non-Muslim. It is not hatred and bigotry to be the right kind of Islamophobe, that is, as opposed to one who attacks innocent Muslims, something that is never justified.
* India, too, felt the force of jihad. Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel notes that by 1206, the Muslim invaders had conquered “the Punjab, Sindh, Delhi, and the Doab up to Kanauj.” The jihad also continued elsewhere. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet besieged Constantinople in 1453, he offered the Byzantines a triple choice: “surrender of the city, death by the sword, or conversion to Islam.” This was based upon the tradition in which Muhammad told the Muslims to offer unbelievers conversion to Islam or submission to Islamic hegemony, or war if they refused both.
* Propaganda may be effective in the short term, but reality cannot be hidden forever. (Chapter 1)

#### The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS (2018)

* This book represents the crown and summit of everything I have to say that anyone who doesn’t know me personally may care to listen to. I’ve written a guide to the Qur’an and a biography of Muhammad, and with this book, the case is complete—that is, the case that there are elements within Islam that pose a challenge to free societies, and that free people need to pay attention to this fact before it is, quite literally, too late. It is necessary for me to repeat yet again that this does not mean that every individual Muslim, or any given Muslim, embodies that challenge and is posing it individually, but as this book makes clear, the Islamic jihad imperative remains regardless of whether or not any Muslim individual decides to take it up.
* The government of Myanmar denied committing any atrocities against the Rohingyas, asserting that many widely reported incidents had been fabricated, but the media generally brushed aside these denials. Few news outlets reported that the conflict had intensified in the summer and fall of 2017 because of an August 2017 jihad attack on Myanmar police and border posts. And hardly any news reports informed the public about the roots of the conflict: the Rohingya Muslims had actually been waging jihad against the Buddhists of Myanmar for nearly two centuries... In 1942, the British armed the Rohingyas to fight the Japanese, but the Rohingyas instead turned their weapons on the Buddhists, destroying whole villages, as well as Buddhist monasteries. When the British withdrew that same year in the face of the Japanese advance, the Rohingyas set upon the Buddhists of Arakan in force, killing at least 20,000... But for the media, the crisis in Myanmar was simply a matter of “anti-Muslim bigotry”...
* In July 751, at the Talas River on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the forces of the new caliphate met those of the Chinese Tang dynasty, in what was to be the decisive battle for hegemony over Central Asia. China’s Westward expansion was stopped, and the region was definitively secured for Islam. The Buddhist and Christian presence in Central Asia went into rapid decline. The area would be Islamic ever after.

#### The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process (2019)

* By now the attentive reader will have noticed a curious absence from the drama surrounding Jewish settlement in Palestine, the rise of Zionism, and the establishment of the Jewish state: through it all, the “Palestinians,” named as such, are nowhere to be seen. It is no accident that neither Mark Twain, nor any of the series of English travelers who visited the area, nor anyone else who traveled through desolate Palestine over the centuries ever mentioned the “Palestinian” people. They spoke of encountering Muslim Arabs, as well as Jews, Christian Arabs, and others, but no one, among multitudes of people who wrote about Palestine, ever refers to any Palestinians. Nor do the many British white papers and other documents the British government produced during the Mandate period ever mention the Palestinians. The opposing factions in those documents are the Jews and the Arabs. There is a very simple reason for this: there were no Palestinians.

### 2020s

* Facts? Jimmy Wales, your Wikipedia bio of me is a propaganda piece full of half-truths, distortions, & outright lies, & has been for years. Wikipedia does this to everyone who dares dissent from the far-Left agenda. Everyone knows this. You’re not fooling anyone.
** Tweet on Twitter, Aug 25, 2020.
* People don't do this because the pressures are too great for the most part, not only death threats, but all the defamation, all the negativity, like the wikipedia bio, everything, if you search me on the internet you'll find 99 percent of it is negative, this is what happens.. to anybody who speaks the truth about these issues.. India, along with Israel and Spain, are really the only places where the jihad has ever suffered losses and been ruled back from territory control.
** Robert Spencer talks about the global menace of Jihad, Interview with Nupur J. Sharma, Aug 25, 2020.
* Hindutva isn't an American problem, @AudreyTruschke It never was and never will be. Hindutva means "Hinduness" or the qualities of being a Hindu; it's simply Hinduism. What you call Hindutva are Hindus who oppose the Hinduphobia that your Leftist/Islamic hate alliance produces.
** Robert Spencer, May 4, 2022

#### The Critical Quran (2021)

* Offered with love to all the people of the world who love the Qur’an
* Around 1655, the Persian-language book Dabestan-e Mazaheb (School of Religions) was published in India, containing the texts of two chapters of the Qur’an, Sura al-Walaya (“The Guardian”) and Sura al-Nurayn (“The Two Lights”). These two chapters are clearly meant to bolster the Shi‘ite case. The guardian is Ali, and the two lights are obviously Muhammad and Ali. However, these two suras are almost certainly forgeries, and not only Sunnis, but Shi‘ites also consider them inauthentic.
* However, there are so many grammatical errors and repetitions in the Qur’an as it stands that these cannot make the case for the inauthenticity of these two suras. The strongest case against them is based upon their relatively late appearance and clear apologetic intent, along with the fact that even though these passages are meant to establish the Shi‘ite case, the Shi‘ites reject them. Nevertheless, their very existence is noteworthy, as Islam’s theology of the perfection and unchangeable character of the Qur’an did not deter their author from making edits in the holy text; they could be the product of a time when the Qur’anic text was still undergoing revision, and one was not risking one’s life by making changes. If they originated later, that their author would have dared produce them is all the more striking in light of what were then and still are the prevailing beliefs and assumptions about the immutability of the Qur’anic text. In any case, even if they originated close to the time of the publication of Dabestan-e Mazaheb , and the Arabic version is no older than the Persian, they attest to the fact that in some quarters, changes were indeed made in the Qur’anic text, and that text has never been static.

#### Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization (2023)

* The Roman Empire of Constantinople deserves not dismissal but patient study, gratitude, and respect. We are still living in its long shadow. In the best aspects of our society, we are still living in it.

## Quotes from Jihad Watch

* “Islamophobia” is a propaganda term that is used for two unrelated phenomena: vigilante attacks against innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology behind jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. The goal of this conflation is to inhibit such analysis and intimidate people into thinking it’s wrong to oppose jihad terror. And it’s working great.
* Child marriage is sanctioned in Islam.Islamic tradition records that Muhammad consummated his marriage with (i.e., raped) Aisha when she was nine, and the resultant fact that child marriage is accepted in wide swaths of the Islamic world. Child marriage has abundant attestation in Islamic tradition and law.

## About Robert Spencer

* If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the crusader-in-chief George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers in Islam. And we send a special invitation to all of you fighting Bush’s crusader pipe dream in Afghanistan, Iraq, and wherever else W. has sent you to die.
** Adam Gadahn My Invitation From al-Qaeda
* Spencer’s readers are carefully steered away from all contact with the Islamic interpretative tradition, which equals or exceeds that of any other religion, because any scholarly knowledge about Islam would expose all his extremist interpretations to ridicule.
** Robert Dickson Crane, quoted in "Unmasks the Smearcasters - Robert Spencer" at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). From original article in “Fascist-Islamophobia”: A Case Study in Totalitarian Demonization - Part 1 at TheAmericanMuslim.org (October 20, 2007).

## See also

* Eurabia
* Pamela Geller

## External links

* Jihad Watch