Robert Spencer, author of the new Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), told a group of college students gathered for the Young America’s Foundation conference in Washington, D.C., that he spends his life trying to “dispel myths and stereotypes” about Islam perpetuated in the media and on college campuses.
Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and a HUMAN EVENTS columnist, blamed political correctness, which “stifles public discourse,” combined with a general unwillingness among public officials to recognize the fundamental teachings of the Islam as a source for acts of terror throughout the Western world for distorting the public’s perception of the War on Terror.
He cited British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s rush to defend Islam as a peaceful religion as an example of the public’s failure to recognize that the motivation of Islamic extremism often comes directly from the Koran itself.
In order to understand “who they are, what they think they are doing, and…how we can best respond to it,” Spencer claimed Americans must understand the true nature of the enemy through a historical perspective of a feud dating back to the Islamic invasion of Christian lands centuries prior to the crusades.
Spencer argued that the overriding goal of Muslim fundamentalists was to “re-establish the caliphate,” taking the entire world back to the day of strict Islamic rule as it exists in Saudi Arabia and Iran today. He pointed out that in 1924 the Muslim Brotherhood, the first Islamic terrorist group and predecessor to al Qaeda and Hamas, formed in response to the Turks’ separation of religion and state.
According to Spencer, to effectively engage the real enemy and achieve victory in the War on Terror, Americans must move beyond political correctness and confront the Islamic terrorism by restoring “sanity in immigration”, “monitoring the mosques”, and most importantly promoting “pride in our own cultural history”.