In that same fashion, he also says that Rauf is “an open proponent of Sharia,” and that I “ignore” this. What Spencer means by “ignores” is “pick up the phone and ask him about it,” and here is what Rauf said to me:
Rauf says that this is a “complete misunderstanding” and that what he meant was that the U.S. allows Muslims to freely meet their own religious obligations. “The thing that people mistake, is that we’re trying to impose Sharia law in America, there are aspects of Sharia law that we are allowed to practice. Like Jews practice their dietary laws, we practice them without contradiction.”
A “complete misunderstanding.” All right. But Rauf is an open proponent of Sharia, and judging from his honesty on other issues (as explained above), perhaps Serwer will pardon me for not being as sanguine as he is about Rauf’s truthfulness when he assures this naive and ignorant reporter that he doesn’t want to bring Sharia to the U.S. After all, Rauf says that “what Muslims want is to ensure that their secular laws are not in conflict with the Quran or the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad.” For Muslims in the U.S., that will inevitably involve bringing Sharia here.
But Serwer has no clear idea of what that means anyway:
“Sharia” is Islamic law. In repressive societies like that of Afghanistan under the Taliban, it is indeed brutal and repressive. In say, Turkey, the legal structure is studiously secular, and Sharia only matters to the extent it governs the personal affairs of the religious. Islamophobes like Spencer have dutifully exploited the former incarnation because it allows them to fearmonger in free conscience, because he assumes and hopes that his audience understands and associates Sharia with Taliban style injustice and oppression. The Sharia of Rauf is not the Sharia of the Taliban, and Spencer conflates the two because it is the only way to justify interfering with Muslims’ ability to build sites of worship where they please under the freedoms guaranteed to all Americans under the Constitution.
This paragraph is so staggeringly intellectually incoherent that it is hard to know where to begin. First Serwer notes that the Taliban adheres to Sharia while Turkey currently does not, and then says that “Islamophobes like Spencer have dutifully exploited the former incarnation” of Sharia, that is, that of the Taliban, “because it allows them to fearmonger in free conscience.” But of course Turkish secularism is not an “incarnation” of the Sharia at all, but rather the absence of Sharia, so what it demonstrates about the nature of the Sharia itself is precisely nothing.
Nonetheless, apparently Serwer believes that the (increasingly tenuous) existence of Turkish secularism somehow demonstrates that “the Sharia of Rauf is not the Sharia of the Taliban,” but he offers no actual evidence for that assertion at all. He does not produce, and cannot produce, any statement from Rauf condemning Sharia-mandated stoning, or amputation, or denial of women’s rights, or the Sharia-mandated death penalty for apostates. He just takes for granted that Rauf’s Sharia must differ from the Taliban’s, because he likes Rauf and dislikes his opponents, and Adam Serwer knows that Adam Serwer is an enlightened, tolerant, progressive liberal, and so he can’t possibly be putting himself into the position of being a shill for authoritarian oppressors, now, can he? Why, of course not!
But that is exactly what he is, and worse:
As for myself, I am a Jew, the child of a white man and a black woman. I am quite familiar with intolerance and what it looks like. In this instance, it looks like Robert Spencer, whose dark admiration for those he claims as enemies is expressed in the sincere flattery of imitation. Spencer doesn’t simply reflect their conspiracy theories or their wish for a society in which equality under the law is abolished, he also clearly imagines himself some kind of martyr.
Look closely at what Adam Serwer is saying here. He is charging me with “imitation” of those whom I “claim as enemies.” In other words, he is saying that in resisting Islamic supremacism and Sharia, and in fighting to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for women, I am the equivalent of mass murders who glory in the deaths of innocents. This is a moral myopia of immense proportions and a monstrous defamation not just of me but of every anti-jihadist — Pankaj Mishra does the same thing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
The point here is in no sense personal: I am not affected in the least by what Adam Serwer or anyone else says about me. The point is that we have grown accustomed to these casual exercises in moral equivalence, yet they are as abominable as it would have been in 1942 to equate Churchill with Hitler, or Roosevelt with Mussolini. Adam Serwer is writing in the service of people who would strip him of his rights at very least, and probably do far worse to him besides. The fact that he is serving as their useful tool will not make them go easier upon him in the end, and it should only sharpen the moral indignation that every American who reveres human rights should feel toward this collaborator with evil.
