Robert Spencer
American journalist, author and blogger

Robert Spencer

BiographyGalleryBibliographyListsAlso Viewed
The basics
Quick facts
Intro
American journalist, author and blogger
A.K.A.
Robert Bruce Spencer
Gender:
Male
Places:
United States of America
Is:
Internet personalityBloggerWriterConspiracy theoristJournalist
Work field:
InternetJournalismLiterature
Birth:
27 February 1962
Star sign:
Pisces
Residences
USA
Education:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Biography menu
Menu

Jump to

Introduction Background Personal life Relations with liberal Muslims and other activists Views on Islam Controversies Bibliography
The details
Biography

Introduction

Robert Bruce Spencer (born 1962) is an American anti-Muslim author, blogger and one of the key figures of the counter-jihad movement. Spencer describes himself as "the 'good' kind of Islamophobe". His published books include two New York Times bestsellers.

In 2003 he founded and has since directed a blog that tracks Islamic extremism known as Jihad Watch. He co-founded the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of America (American Freedom Defense Initiative) with blogger Pamela Geller. Reports that two of Spencer's books were listed in FBI training materials and that he had given seminars to various law enforcement units in the United States stirred controversy. He has frequently appeared on Fox News.In 2013 the UK Home Office barred Spencer from travel to the UK for 3 to 5 years for "making statementsthat may foster hatred that might lead to inter-community violence".

Background

Spencer was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and joined the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in 1984. In a 2006 interview, Spencer stated that his grandparents were forced to emigrate from an area that is now part of Turkey under Ataturk because they were Christians. According to a 2010 interview in New York magazine, Spencer's father worked for the Voice of America during the Cold War, and in his younger days, Spencer himself worked at Revolution Books, a Maoist bookstore in New York City founded by Robert Avakian.

Spencer received an M.A. in 1986 in religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His masters thesis was on Catholic history. He has said he has been studying Islamic theology, law, and history since 1980. He worked in think tanks for more than 20 years, and in 2002–2003 was an adjunct fellow with the Free Congress Foundation. Spencer named Paul Weyrich, also a Melkite Catholic, as a mentor of his writings on Islam. Spencer writes, "Paul Weyrich taught me a great deal, by word and by example – about how to deal both personally and professionally with the slanders and smears that are a daily aspect of this work."

Spencer was criticized by clergy in the Catholic Church because of his views on Islam. He left the church in 2016 to return to the Greek Orthodox Church as a result of "personal reflection and historical study".

Personal life

Prior to becoming involved in writing and speaking about Islam, Spencer was a saxophonist, and he is an avid and knowledgeable fan of jazz music. Among the jazz artists he has publicly praised include John Coltrane, the conservative evangelical Protestant Charles Gayle (whose pro-life statements Spencer has praised), and the Muslim jazzman Pharoah Sanders. Spencer is also a very big fan ofBob Dylan, particularly of the music Dylan made when he was himself an evangelical Christian, and frequently makes public reference to him. Spencer has been harshly critical of the political opinions of the left-wing actors John Cusack and Robert De Niro, but has enthusiastically praised the films of the Iranian-American libertarian director Cyrus Nowrasteh, many of which contain storylines involving Muslim extremist villains.

Relations with liberal Muslims and other activists

Spencer counted among his friends the late anti-supremacist Muslim Tashbih Sayyed, who was a member of Jihad Watch’s advisory board, and he wrote a glowing eulogy for him upon his death in 2007. He also wrote a eulogy for his friend Oriana Fallaci when the latter died in 2006 – Fallaci was a renowned Italian journalist who agreed with most of Spencer’s views on Islam, buttressed by her acrimonious exchanges with the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, and Muhammad Ali and her criticism of the way her friend Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto suffered under Islamic law in Pakistan. Fallaci is widely regarded as one of the preeminent European Islamophobes of the latter half of the twentieth century, although, like Spencer, she always maintained that her critique was animated by anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian principles.

Among Spencer’s other friends and allies in the counterjihad movement include Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brigitte Gabriel, Aryeh Eldad, Amir Taheri, Tom Tancredo, Brad Thor, Geert Wilders, Mordechai Kedar, Bat Ye’or, Oskar Freysinger, Frank Gaffney, and Ali Sina. His work has been well-received by Douglas Murray, Mark Steyn, Neal Boortz, Pat Condell, Daniel Pipes, Bruce Thornton, Efraim Karsh, the outspoken Black conservative Jesse Lee Peterson (of whom he is a friend and admirer), the Black libertarian Larry Elder, the Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng, the late Kathy Shaidle, and the Hindu activists Subramanian Swamy, Nupur J. Sharma (of OpIndia), Sanjay Dixit (of the Jaipur Dialogues), Babu Suseelan, Arish Sahani, Sarah Kali Dasi Khan, and the late Narain Kataria. Spencer and Pamela Geller have cultivated alliances with a wide cross-section of activists opposed to Islamic supremacism under the auspices of their American Freedom Defense Initiative, including the Kurdish spokesman Salar Motidi, the Yezidi Haider Elias (of Yazda), the Palestinian Christian Zionist Mazen Warra, and members of the Namdhari Sikh community in New York City.

Spencer has debated the renowned liberal Muslim Zuhdi Jasser of Arizona and has had friendly exchanges with him; he has identified Jasser, Asra Nomani, and Mohammad Tawhidi as being among the very few Muslim public figures actively and sincerely opposed to the global jihad ideology. However, Spencer regards the liberal Islam in which these anti-supremacist Muslims believe as too fringe and heterodox to be able to make a positive difference, and does not regard liberal Islam as compatible with what he considers the core teachings of the Qur’an, the Ibn Ishaq seerah, and the rest of the Sunnah. His relations with other liberal and anti-supremacist Muslim activists have been acrimonious – a dispute over Qur’anic material related to Zaynab bint Jahsh resulted in fallings-out with Khaleel Mohammed (who refers to Spencer as a “satanic ignoramus”) and with the Canadian anti-supremacist Muslim commentator Salim Mansur, and the activist Tarek Fatah, another Canadian Muslim famous for his anti-supremacist views, has supported Spencer on some occasions and angrily denounced him on others.

Spencer has had friendly exchanges with the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and has said he admires Jones’ “courage.” He endorses the work of the conservative historians Larry Schweikart and Jarrett Stepman.

Views on Islam

Spencer is known for his anti-Muslim views. He describes himself as an Islamophobe of "the 'good' kind", and comments on radical Islam, Islamic extremism, Islamic terrorism, and Islamic supremacism. Spencer's commentary on Islam has been regarded as "hav[ing] made a huge impact on the misinformation about Islam that circulates so freely on the Internet, in the media, and in political circles."

Spencer claims to be uninterested in victimizing or otherwise antagonizing any Muslim who does not seek to harm non-Muslims, ex-Muslims, women, or other innocent civilians, and has said, "Any Muslim who sincerely renounces jihad warfare and dhimmitude is welcome to join in our anti-jihadist efforts." In practice, however, Spencer has supported Donald Trump's ban on entry to the United States by citizens of many Muslim-majority countries, claiming this to be justified on national security grounds. His website frequently features stories calling attention to violent, criminal, or otherwise unjust behaviour by Muslims, including many who are converts to Islam or migrants, and generally represents these misbehaviors as logical outgrowths of the real content of core, normative Islamic texts and teachings. With regard to the Rohingya genocide, Spencer does not endorse the murder of innocent Rohingya Muslim civilians by the 969 Movement or other Buddhist militias, but he believes that the roots of the conflict lie in unprovoked Rohingya Muslim aggression towards Buddhists in Myanmar. Spencer has claimed that Islamophobia is "apropagandistic neologism designed to intimidate people into thinking that it is wrong to oppose Islamic terrorism" and what he claims is the "oppression" of women and others by sharia. He has claimed that those who use the term "Islamophobia" do so to silence dissent, and that they do so by conflating two distinct and unrelated phenomena: "Attacks on innnocent Muslim civilians, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motives and goals of the jihad terrorists and the way in which they use the Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism, which is always necessary".

Spencer believes that the teachings of mainstream, orthodoxSunni Islam and Ithna’Asheri Shia Islam teach the responsibility of the Muslim community before God to wage war against all non-Muslims and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law and a system of institutionalized Muslim hegemony. He believes that there exists a spectrum of “belief, knowledge and fervor” among Muslims that explains why many millions of Muslims do not involve themselves in activities which harm non-Muslims, but he argues that mainstream Islam is inherently violent, authoritarian, and supremacist, with the exception of Sevener Nizari Ismaili Islam, which he acknowledges is pluralistic but believes is too small and heterodox to be worth promoting. He contends that, according to all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence (and all non-Ismaili Shia ones), Islam forbids the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience (with its traditional death penalties for apostasy and blasphemy), and the equality of rights and dignity of women with men. Although he is a Christian religious conservative, Spencer has also been critical of the mistreatment of LGBTQ+ people in Muslim countries. His criticism extends to Ahmadi Islam, because notwithstanding the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad counselling amity between Muslims and non-Muslims and renouncing jihad warfare, Spencer claims that the Ahmadis share with Sunnis and Ithna’Asheri Shias the goal of a conquered and Islamized world in which non-Muslims are subjugated. He has also criticized Sufi Islam, because many Sufis have collaborated with Muslim extremists and terrorists or led jihad warfare themselves (especially in Chechnya, Iraq, and Gaza), and because extremist leaders Hasan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ayatollah Khomeini integrated many Sufi practices into their devotional lives and instructed their followers to do the same.

Spencer quotes a wide variety of Islamic source texts to make his case, including Reliance of the Traveller, a Shafi’i manual of Islamic law which was translated into English by Nuh Ha Mim Keller and certified by Al-Azhar University as a “reliable guide to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” in 1991. He also regularly quotes Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, both his multi-volume commentary In The Shade of the Qur’an and the one-volume digest thereof that Spencer himself was given as a gift by unsuspecting Muslims on a visit to the Finsbury Park Mosque in 2009. Central to Spencer’s argument is the contention that Maududi and Sayyid Qutb are not extremists (as they are believed to be by many Muslims, notably by the fifth Ahmadi Khalifatul Masih, Mirza Masroor Ahmad), but that their popularity among conservative Muslims, in Islamic bookstores, and on Islamic websites indicates broad mainstream acceptance.

Among the other Islamic sources Spencer quotes in an attempt to “prove” that mainstream Islam is inherently supremacist include the rulings of the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya, the Hanafi text Al-Hidayah, the Muqaddimah (by the historiographer and Maliki jurist Ibn Khaldun), the Gonabadi leader Sultanhussein Tabandeh’s condemnation and refutation on Muslim theological grounds of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Majid Khadduri’s seminal 1955 book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, and the writings of the twelfth-century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd as quoted in the 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad by Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, who was at one point an assistant professor on the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He also makes frequent reference to the Qur’an commentaries by Ibn Kathir, the two Jalals, Ibn Juzayy, and others, as well as the reliable hadith collections Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Among the Qur’anic ayat whose literal words Spencer considers hateful or otherwise problematic include sura 47 ayah 4, sura 48 ayah 29, sura 3 ayah 110, sura 98 ayah 6, sura 4 ayah 34, sura 4 ayah 3, sura 5 ayah 33, sura 5 ayah 52, sura 7 ayah 166, sura 9 ayah 5, sura 8 ayah 12, sura 3 ayah 28, sura 8 ayah 60, sura 2 ayah 191-2, and, above all, sura 9 ayah 29.

Spencer's view of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, is sharply negative. He regards the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah as an instance in which Muhammad deceived unbelievers and made a false peace with them which he broke for his own benefit (a claim mainstream Muslim scholars deny), and he contends that this deception is normative in Islamic law for Muslim individuals and groups entering into treaties with non-Muslims. Spencer points to Yasser Arafat's reference to Hudaybiyyah in a conference in Johannesburg in 1994 as proof that the late Palestinian leader was never serious about making peace with Israel. Spencer contends that Muhammad was intolerant of criticism, citing the murders of Abu 'Afak and Asma bint Marwan, and also cites many examples of attacks on Jews during Muhammad's military career as evidence that Muhammad was also a Judeophobe, a claim hotly denied by mainstream Muslims and by mainstream scholars of Islam. Spencer regards Muhammad as essentially having been immoral and evil, and regards his own book The Truth About Muhammad, which is highly controversial among mainstream Muslims and mainstream scholars of Islam, as a real account of what he claims is Muhammad's bad moral character, claiming that this charge is substantiated by the prophetic biography of Muhammad that was authored by Ibn Ishaq and preserved by Ibn Hisham. Spencer has also cast doubt on the historicity of Muhammad as a real historical personage, a claim which is far outside the mainstream of scholarship on Islam – Patricia Crone in particular is known to have been dismissive thereof, although there is no evidence that she ever interacted with Spencer.

Spencer regards the Muslim Brotherhood as very dangerous, essentially believing it to be fascist, and has spoken of the Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America as a kind of "smoking gun" document proving that the Brotherhood's aims are nefarious; he dismisses the efforts of such writers as Ezra Klein to debunk as a conspiracy theory the idea that the Brotherhood intends to undermine Western civilization. Spencer frequently quotes from the Memorandum, which was written by a Brotherhood operative named Muhammad Akram Adlouni in 1991 and which reads, in part:

"The Brothers must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it falls and Allah's religion is made victorious over other religions."

On this basis, Spencer advocates opposition to and distrust of any and all groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which include the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the Muslim American Society, the North American Islamic Trust, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, and the Islamic Circle of North America, among others. He has quoted approvingly the writings of the Sufi cleric Hisham Kabbani, which purport to show that, as of 1998, 80% of American mosques were teaching hatred of unbelievers.

Among the specific Muslim public figures Spencer has publicly castigated are Omar Ahmad (whom he charges with making Islamic supremacist statements to the effect that "Islam is in America to become dominant" in 1994, a charge Ahmad denies), Wagdy Ghoneim, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Safwat Hegazi, Nihad Awad, Hussein Ibish, Ibrahim Hooper, Salam Al-Marayati, Edina Lekovic, Louis Farrakhan, Ahmed Bedier, Ghassan Elashi, Zakir Naik, Mehdi Hasan, Reza Aslan, Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Suhaib Webb, among many others. He has been particularly critical of the state of academic study of Islam in the United States and much of the rest of the world, and has been derisive of John Esposito, Karen Armstrong, Carl Ernst, Omid Safi, and Hamid Dabashi, among others. He believes that the government of the United States should intervene to close the Islamic Society of Boston, citing the fact that Tarek Mehanna, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzokhar Tsarnaev, and Aafia Siddiqui, all Muslims who have been convicted of terrorist activity, were members there.

Spencer co-founded the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of America (also known as the American Freedom Defense Initiative) with Pamela Geller in 2010. The organization is designated as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He and Geller led a campaign to stop the building of Park51, an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center, which they referred to as the "Ground Zero Mosque".

In 2009, Spencer blamed then-president Barack Obama himself for false rumors that Obama was a "secret Muslim".

In July 2011, Wired reported that two of Spencer's books were listed in FBI training materials. Both The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam were recommended for agents hoping to better understand Islam.

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian spree killer behind the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks which killed 77, cited Spencer 64 times in his manifesto and wrote of him, "About Islam I recommend essentially everything written by Robert Spencer." Spencer condemned Breivik and said he was unfairly blamed by the media for the attack.

Spencer is a critic of the Communist Party of China and its genocide of the Muslim Uyghur people, despite his criticism of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and other Uyghur militias. He has claimed that the Chinese government is engaged in a response to Islamic extremism that is as cruel and inhumane as Islamic extremism itself, and thus denounces it. In an interview with Sanjay Dixit in 2021, Spencer called the Communist Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs “absolutely unacceptable”, and said, “If we are as inhumane in countering the jihad as the jihadists are themselves, what’s the point of countering the jihad?”

Many posts at Jihad Watch denounce the Patani United Liberation Organization, a terrorist irredentist group which aims to force Thailand to allow the Yawi-speaking ethnic-Malay Muslim peoples in its three southernmost provinces to secede. Jihad Watch has also routinely been critical of the Islamic Defenders Front of Indonesia, which routinely harasses Christians there, and of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and other Muslim terrorist groups in the Philippines. In an interview with Sarah Kali Dasi Khan in 2021, Spencer denounced Tablighi Jamaat.

Spencer very strongly opposes the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and has denounced the Iranian nuclear deal, believing Javad Zarif and the Khomeinist regime in general to be engaged in lying to the West about the regime's true intentions. He has been harshly critical of Barack Obama for not supporting the Green Revolution protesters in Iran in 2009 or the protests against the regime of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt in 2012 and 2013, and has also criticized ex-President Jimmy Carter for welcoming the Ayatollah Khomeini to power instead of aiming to shore up the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Spencer accuses the National Iranian American Council of being a front group for the Khomeinist regime, citing as vindication of this claim the fact that Trita Parsi lost a case in court to prove that this was not so. The winners of that court case were the Iranian dissidents Hassan Daioleslam and Arash Irandoost.

Controversies

The government of Pakistan banned Spencer's book, The Truth About Muhammad, in 2016, citing "objectionable material" as the cause. Onward Muslim Soldiers was banned in Malaysia in 2007.

In an October 2010 news article, an investigative report by The Tennessean described Spencer as one of several individuals who "... cash in on spreading hate and fear about Islam." Tennessean investigation concluded: "IRS filings from 2008 show that Robert Spencer earned $132,537 from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Horowitz pocketed over $400,000 for himself in just one year."

On April 13, 2017, Spencer spoke at the Truman State University despite protests and a petition against him. He was invited by the Young America's Foundation. On May 1, 2017, Spencer spoke at the University of Buffalo. There he was shouted down and heckled. On May 3, 2017, Spencer spoke at Gettysburg College; 375 alumni urged the college president Janet Morgan Riggs to cancel the speech, but the event went on as planned. Spencer said, "There is one kind of diversity that is not valued generally in an academic setting and that is intellectual diversity." On November 14, 2017, Spencer spoke at Stanford University. Many students walked out during the event.

Spencer said that "a young Icelandic Leftist" poisoned him in 2017 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Spencer also criticized the doctor who then treated him and the police who investigated.

Ban from entering the UK

On June 26, 2013, Spencer and Pamela Geller were banned from entering the UK. They were due to speak at an English Defence League march in Woolwich, south London, where Drummer Lee Rigby was killed. Home Secretary Theresa May informed Spencer and Geller that their presence in the UK would "not be conducive to the public good".

A letter from the UK Home Office stated that this decision is based on Spencer's statement that Islam "is a religion or a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose of establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society. ...Because of media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown."

The decision was to stand for between three and five years. The ban followed a concerted campaign by the UK anti-racism organization Hope not Hate, which said it had collected 26,000 signatures for a petition to the Home Secretary. Spencer and Geller contested the ban, but in 2015 the British Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal, arguingthat "this was a public order case where the police had advised that significant public disorder and serious violence might ensue from the proposed visit."

The ban was criticized by Douglas Murray. He stated that Islamist hate preachers are still allowed to enter the UK, and noted his belief that what Geller and Spencer say is much less objectionable than the views and statements of extremist Muslim clerics such as Muhammad al-Arefe, who was allowed to enter the UK shortly before Spencer and Geller were banned.

Bibliography

Best sellers

  • The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion, Regnery Press, 2006 (NYT bestseller list – 2006-10-29) ISBN 1-59698-028-1 OCLC 232648493
  • The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), Regnery Press, 2005. (NYT bestseller list – 2005-10-16) ISBN 0-89526-013-1 OCLC 779057129

Other books

Pamphlets