David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have a piece at FrontPage Magazine defending themselves against CAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Centre and the Center for American Progress, who have supposedly waged an “ugly campaign” to depict the authors as Islamophobes.

Horowitz and Spencer inform us that “the term ‘Islamophobia’ itself was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the political fountainhead of Islamic terror”. It is “designed to create a modern-day thought crime” in an attempt to “abolish the First Amendment where Islam is concerned”.

The article has already been published at National Review Online, where it was given the misleading title “A rational fear of Islamism”. However, as Horowitz and Spencer make clear, their target is not Islamism but Islam itself:

Should those of us who are infidels – and therefore targets – not be concerned by a religion whose followers regard this Koranic incitement as the word of God: “Slay the pagans wherever you find them.” (9:5)?

Should Jews not be concerned by the Jew-hatred that permeates the sacred texts of this religion, whose prophet has said: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them, until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” (Sahih Muslim 6985)? …

Should women not fear the expansion of a creed whose God likens a woman to a field men can till: “Your women are a field for you (to cultivate) so go to your field as ye will.” (Qur’an 2:223)? This God has decreed that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282), that men can marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls (4:3), that a son’s inheritance shall be twice the size of daughter’s (4:11), and that husbands can and should beat their disobedient wives: “Good women are obedient…. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” (4:34). This God sanctions marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4). Islamic law codifies all this and adds from Islamic tradition justification for honor killing, female genital mutilation, and even the prohibition of women leaving their homes without permission from a male guardian.