Hate Crime: Spencer Attacked @ NY University

Jihad Watch

Fascists Attack Robert Spencer at NYU/Atlas Shrugs

Earlier this evening I spoke at NYU on a panel with Elan Journo. I had just started explaining the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism when a young man in the middle of the audience stood up and started yelling and refused to be quiet. When the security guards went over to start moving him out of the room, they left a side door by the stage unsecured — and sure enough, the yelling guy turned out to be a diversion. Two other young men rushed in that side door and threw pies at Elan Journo and me. They hit Dr. Journo on the shoulder but missed me altogether, as I had jumped aside when I saw them coming.

Of course a pie in the face is a staple of American comedy going back to the Marx Brothers (by far my favorite Marxists), but this was no joke. In the first place, it is yet another manifestation of Leftist thuggery, antipathy to the freedom of speech, and alliance with the global jihad; it also shows yet again the degeneration of our nation’s universities into propaganda mills in which those with opposing views are hounded out or intimidated into silence. (And then there is this.)

As we continued the event with pie splattered all over the curtain behind us, it was a vivid object lesson in how much free inquiry threatens the Left, and created a nice backdrop for our discussion of the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s war on free speech, which is, of course, intended to enable the global jihad to advance without challenge.

Here is an eyewitness account of what happened from the audience’s perspective (thanks to Pamela).

Comment from Hugh Fitzgerald:

Not only is this not a joke, but in a well-ordered society, given the dangers reasonably understood, wouldn’t the police have been justified in not hesitating at all, but shooting to wound, or even to kill? How are the police or security guards to know that what is being hurled is a pie, that the pie contains nothing toxic, that the pie is not a diversion for someone else’s gun? If we did not have a long history, in this country and in other countries, of Muslim death threats, and the carrying out of such threats, then such a reaction might be considered an over-reaction.

Given the world today, it would not be, and those who disrupt such gatherings which attempt, in the mildest and most reasonable of ways, to present certain uncomfortable home truths, should be met with appropriate force. And “appropriate” force means “reasonable” force. And in circumstances such as this, when there is no time to carefully discern what exactly is being thrown, and every reason to fear or suspect, the worst, it is not unreasonable — it is therefore “reasonable” — to shoot such attackers rushing the stage. If such an attack were made, say, on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, would her contingent of Dutch bodyguards, trained in the use of deadly force, not be perfectly justified in not hesitating, not waiting to find out, but in using such force? And those who protect Geert Wilders?

Charges should be pressed, and a case made that will ensure the pie-throwers are themselves thrown out of decent society. A jail sentence might be just the ticket. A little time in Riker’s can help change behavior, if not win hearts and minds, and the hearts and minds of those who threw those pies are impervious to reason and decency. So forget about that. Just change their behavior. And mkae the punishment sufficient to give others pause.

Would those setting out, before an audience in, say, New York, in 1942, the ideology of the Nazis, in 1942, that is once the war had begun, been attacked, what wouuld the government have done to the attackers? But, you will say, we are “not at war.” Oh yes we are. The Jihad war has begun in earnest, and along with the many thousands of terrorist attacks by Muslims recorded just since 9/11/2001, the other instruments, even more effective than those acts of terrorism, of Jihad include deployment of the Money Weapon (and the propaganda it can buy), campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest.

Those who attempt to shut down or intimidate, not rabble-rousers, but all those who try to elucidate matters by quite reasonably bringing to the public’s attention the texts and tenets of Islam that explain the acts, and the attitudes, of many Muslims that cannot be changed unless Islam itself were to be changed, or the Qur’an cease to be regarded as the uncreated, literal Word of God, should be heard. For what they are attempting to make clear is that those texts, those tenets, explain Muslim behavior, including the behavior of those murderous smilers in that novemdectet, acting — as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Magdi Allam, and all the other defectors from the Army of Islam well know and have explained and explained — according to, and not in opposition to, the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam. Not all Muslims take Islam fully to heart. Some, fortunately, are lapsed or indifferent or bad Muslims. But those who take their Islam straight up, instead of on the rocks, need to be understood. We won’t have what the Muslim boys in the back room are having; we just need to know exactly what is in their drink. And that is an effort that recent events at Fort Hood make clear, many of us, and many of those who rule over us or are supposed to instruct or defend us, have not yet done. But they will.

Tagged as: Spencer attacked, UY university