Topic: WorldNetDaily
Pamela Geller uses her July 23 WorldNetDaily column to take potshots at author Reza Aslan for daring to write a book on Jesus:
Recently this immature creep wrote a book (or more likely, had it written for him) about Jesus, with the pejorative title “Zealot.” The enemedia machine is in full throttle to deliver this seditious hater a bestseller. In what can only have been inspired by the Goebbels template, Reza Aslan will not only be on the Bill Maher show and “The Daily Show,” but this subversive lowlife will be speaking at universities like NYU, Ohio State and the University of Southern California, as well as at numerous public libraries and (gasp) synagogues like Temple Judea in Palm Beach, at upwards of $30,000 a pop. Despite denying basic Christian doctrines, he is speaking at several churches and even preaching the Sunday sermon at one.
You should ask yourself, how did we get here? How can a reasonable, educated and pre-eminent scholar like Robert Spencer be relegated to the very fringe (if that) of the literary world, while jihadist operatives like the vicious Reza Aslan are carried on the shoulders of the media and intelligentsia like a football hero at the end of an impossibly fought game.
Who would have imagined that 12 years after 9/11 the media and academic elite would laud this pro-nuclear Khomeinist? He is funded by who knows who, and he employs vicious trolls who spend their days spreading libel and defamation about Spencer and other freedom fighters, much the way the wicked witch of the west used the flying monkeys – and they, too, are very well paid.
Needless to say, GHeller doesn't back up any of smears of Aslan. As Aslan pointed out in a FoxNews.com interview by the hostile and misguided Lauren Green, he holds numerous degrees and wrote the book as a historian, not a Muslim.
Yet Geller wants us to believe that Aslan is inferior to her Muslim-hating comrade, Robert Spencer:
Not so long ago, Robert Spencer, one of the world’s leading scholars on Islam, wrote an extraordinary book entitled “Did Muhammad Exist?” It was a brilliant, original and scholarly work investigating the legitimate questions surrounding the historical value of the early Islamic texts about Muhammad. Spencer pulled together information from ancient documents with linguistic and archaeological data in a remarkable re-evaluation of Islam’s origins.
Robert Spencer is a writer without peer and a nonpareil scholar, the author of 12 books on Islam, jihad and related topics, including two New York Times bestsellers. Yet “Did Muhammad Exist?” was ignored and dismissed by the intelligentsia, the media elite and subversive academia.
But unlike Aslan, Spencer has no documented scholarship in studying Islam. And if Aslan is disqualifed from writing about Jesus because he is a Muslim, Spencer -- a Melkitte Catholic -- is similarly disqualifed from writing about Islam.
Further, as one critic has pointed out, Spencer does not speak or understand Arabic, which one would think would be a prerequisite to be the scholar of Islam that Spencer proclaims himself to be. Another critic says that Spencer's book "goes to an extreme in its disregard for proper source criticism, and its arguments have more in common with those skeptical and atheist critics of early Christianity than with the best of modern historical scholarship."
Geller wants us to believe that an anti-Muslim activist should be more trusted to write about Muslims than a highly credentialed religious historian's work on Jesus.
