Sunday, February 10, 2008

Reprise: The whole Vlaams Belang thing and Robert Spencer


My previous posts about Vlaams Belang failed to provide all the important links to essays about Vlaams Belang and Filip Dewinter.


Below, I link to five essays in support of Vlaams Belang and Filip Dewinter: four eminently cogent and scrupulously detailed essays written by Christine at the Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF) website; and one by Diana West (that was also cross-posted at CVF).

Robert Spencer owes it to Vlaams Belang, Filip Dewinter, and all their supporters throughout the West and on the Blogosphere, to read all five of these essays and, wheresoever he disagrees with their arguments and evidence, to provide counter-argumentation.

(Readers who wish to learn further of the details of Spencer’s unfair and McCarthyesque expectation that Vlaams Belang and Filip Dewinter prove themselves innocent of the charge of quasi-Fascist and neo-Nazi sympathies may read my previous posts here about Vlaams Belang.)


If, by some unprecedented miracle, Robert Spencer actually changes his mind upon reading the essays, he then owes a big juicy crow-eating apology to Vlaams Belang, Filip Dewinter, and all their supporters throughout the West and on the Blogosphere.

Here then are the essays:

Facts Part 1: Intro: Counterjihad Brussels 2007 Conference

Facts Part 2: Filip Dewinter and Vlaams Belang

Vlaams Belang in the European Parliament, Part 1

Vlaams Belang in the European Parliament, Part 2

Diana West: Vlaams Belang, Freedom Fighters

P.S.: When I call on Spencer to read these five links, I of course am not expecting him to read all the peripheral information contained therein. For example, where, in the first link, the writer Christine cites “the best book on the history of Flemish independenceA Throne in Brussels by Paul Belien”—it would not be necessary for Spencer to read that book as part of his penitential homework (though it would be a dearly appreciated demonstration of going the extra mile!). An assumption of a reasonably judicious selection from the many sources supplied in the above links (particularly the first two, which are richer with a smorgasbord of different citations and internal links) is being made, which would, naturally and necessarily, include anything directly related to Filip Dewinter and Vlaams Belang.

Man, sometimes it’s exhausting to have to spell out—as one must, with stubbornly opinionated quibblers like Spencer who tend unfairly to assume the worst in their challenger—all the nuances of one’s point in scrupulously legalistic and semantically impeccable terms!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

OT

Hesp, IP,

I've sent you guys a message re the JW thread about "Allah's punishment" with fire. The upshot of it is that there are plenty of precedents for punishment with fire in the Hadith and Sira. In other words, the hadith which Spencer cites does not mean that Muslims cannot punish with fire. Jurists such as Taymiyyah and Ghazali concluded that non-Muslims could be drowned, burned, etc., even if there were women and children among them.

There seems to be no end to the specific apologetics that need to be refuted.