All in a day's work: The indefatigable Robert Spencer, far from shrinking from, or even just ignoring the personal attack--"Spencer hates Muslims"--transforms it into an inspirational object lesson on distractingly deceptive smear tactics.

From the ultimate point of Spencer's post:

3. In saying "Spencer hates Muslims," [Grover] Norquist does what he has done for years. [Frank] Gaffney says in his article that Norquist "made repeated ad hominem attacks on Fox TV and elsewhere against me and anyone else (including noted experts like Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson) who dared to warn about the dangers of Islamism. More often than not, he portrayed such warnings as bigoted, racist denunciations of all Muslims."

The bottom line on that, however, is that even if Pipes and Emerson and Gaffney and I really did hate Muslims, that wouldn't establish a thing about the Islamic supremacist agenda, or about how Grover Norquist has helped to push that agenda forward. If we really did hate Muslims, would that mean that Grover Norquist has not enabled Islamic supremacists to gain access to the highest levels of the U.S. government? As common as this "hate" charge is, it is just a red herring, a diversion from the genuine issues.

And it is, of course, an effective diversion on many levels. It moves the onus from Norquist and the Islamic supremacists to those who are resisting them. It changes the categories, so that Muslims become the victims of "hate" -- the cardinal sin in today's multiculturalist fog -- instead of perpetrators of Islamic supremacist oppression. It lines up anti-jihadists for vilification and marginalization as bigots and for possible prosecution under hate speech laws, if Islamic supremacists can succed in ramming those through.

And it isn't even true. I don't hate Muslims. In fact, I like Muslims so much that I don't want them to fall victim to the stonings and amputations and denial of the freedom of conscience mandated by Islamic law. As I said here, "I would like nothing better than a flowering, a renaissance, in the Muslim world, including full equality of rights for women and non-Muslims in Islamic societies: freedom of conscience, equality in laws regarding legal testimony, equal employment opportunities, etc." Is all that "anti-Muslim"? The Muslim correspondent to whom I first wrote that thought so. He responded: "So, you would like to see us ditch much of our religion and, thereby, become non-Muslims."

So would Grover Norquist rather see women beaten (per Qur'an 4:34) and stoned for adultery, and those who leave Islam hunted down and killed? For my protesting against these things is what makes him say that I "hate Muslims."

This demonstrates the superficiality of Norquist's analysis as well as a propagandist's unwillingness to debate honestly and tendency to demonize his opponents. It shows what he is really standing for, and whom he is standing with.

Nevertheless, my invitation to debate him is still open.