We don’t want to make big hay over errors even from the likes of Robert Spencer, the pseudo-Scholar who swears he is “never wrong.” We just like to take a hammer to those assumptions being parlayed as facts and reduce them to rubble. Loonwatch, over and over again has done just that to Spencer’s work and we will continue to do it until Spencer acknowledges his folly.

We wrote a piece on one more instance of Robert Spencer getting basic information wrong and then trying to pass it off as fact. He claimed Pope Pius XII was a victim of misinformation and that he was in fact “memorialized in Yad Veshem.” Tipped by one of our readers we pointed out the easy to find out fact that Pius XII was not memorialized in Yad Vashem, in fact he has constantly been rejected.

Spencer, originally wrote:

The record of Pope Pius XII is controversial, but there has been a good deal of misinformation publicized about it. In reality, he helped save many hundreds of thousands of Jews and was memorialized at Yad Veshem.

(Click here for a snapshot of the original comment by Spencer)

One of Spencer’s readers, Raqnu, who the JihadWatchers figured was a Muslim Taqqiyah artist because his name is an anagram for Quran (only problem is it also seems to be a name for the Spirit of Justice in the Zend Avesta) asked Spencer what he thought about our claim. Spencer replied,

As far as I know Pius XII is not honored at Yad Veshem.

(Click here for a snapshot of the reply to Raqnu from Spencer)

A clear contradiction to his early comment. Yet, Spencer doesn’t have the guts to acknowledge his mistake and he especially is not going to acknowledge a mistake when it is pointed out to him by Loonwatch. C’mon Spencer where is our hat tip?

Interestingly, Spencer went back to his original comment, and without telling anyone changed what he had written, so instead of saying,

The record of Pope Pius XII is controversial, but there has been a good deal of misinformation publicized about it. In reality, he helped save many hundreds of thousands of Jews and was memorialized at Yad Veshem.

It now says,

The record of Pope Pius XII is controversial, but there has been a good deal of misinformation publicized about it. In reality, he helped save many hundreds of thousands of Jews. The campaign to blacken his name began much later.

(Click here for a snapshot of Spencer’s quiet attempt at covering up his error)

Not a word about how he was propelled by Loonwatch’s article to change his comment. Not even a disclaimer signifying “Update” as most professional bloggers would react in this scenario. Instead, Robert Spencer keeps trudging along hoping no one will notice his error. To do so would concede that he is wrong, and that would bruise his fragile ego. More worrisome for him, it would open up the door in his and his minions’ brains (if it already hasn’t) that maybe Loonwatch is right about his other arguments.

For a paid polemicist that is a scary proposition.

This is still my favorite picture of Robert Spencer.

A while back Danios wrote one of his most popular pieces debunking Robert Spencer’s work. It dealt with a chapter from Spencer’s, Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and was titled The Church’s Doctrine of Perpetual Servitude. Spencer wrote a reply that basically skirted around the subject and in effect dug himself into a bigger hole then he was in previously. Danios replied to Spencer who has remained mum on the debate since then, essentially conceding to Danios and Loonwatch.

One of our readers, Paterfamilias, wrote to inform us that Spencer’s reply contained more factual errors. Spencer claimed that Pope Pius XII, though “controversial” was “memorialized at Yad Vashem.”

The record of Pope Pius XII is controversial, but there has been a good deal of misinformation publicized about it. In reality, he helped save many hundreds of thousands of Jews and was memorialized at Yad Veshem.

Oh really, a lot of misinformation? So much for Robert Spencer’s research abilities. He could have easily done a Google search to check the veracity of such a claim, but for a paid polemicist with an ax to grind it’s probably considered a waste of time.

The following article, Pope Pius XII and Yad Vashem, from Wikipedia makes it clear that not only is Pope Pius XII not memorialized at Yad Vashem, his candidacy has been repeatedly rejected for decades.

Yad Vashem, the state of Israel‘s official Holocaust memorial, has generally been critical of Pope Pius XII, the pope during The Holocaust. For decades, Pius XII has been nominated unsuccessfully for recognition as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor Yad Vashem confers on non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust altruistically and at risk to their own lives.

Yad Vashem affixes the following captions to two pictures of Pius XII in both English and Hebrew,

In 1933, when he was Secretary of the Vatican State, he was active in obtaining a Concordat with the German regime to preserve the Church’s rights in Germany, even if this meant recognizing the Nazi racist regime. When he was elected Pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-Semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing. In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the Pope did not intervene. The Pope maintained his neutral position throughout the war, with the exception of appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia towards its end. His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged Churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react.

Pretty damning stuff.

Yad Vashem’s official website has this to say about Pope Pius XII,

The controversy about Pius XII and the Holocaust is still open. At the end of his visit to Israel in 1964, Pope Paul VI came to Pius’s defense in Jerusalem. On March 12, 1979, Pope John Paul II met with Jewish leaders in Rome and said: “I am happy to evoke in your presence today the dedicated and effective work of my predecessor Pius XII on behalf of the Jewish people.” In a meeting with American Jewish leaders in September 1987 in Miami, John Paul II again recalled the positive attitude of Pius XII. However, his passivity in the face of the Holocaust remains a controversial subject.

How could Robert Spencer get a fact so brutally wrong? Maybe one day Yad Vashem will find Pope Pius XII legitimate for memorializing, but as of now the controversy surrounding his actions and inaction during the Holocaust continue to make the attempts of various Pope’s and advocates unsuccessful.

Robert Spencer should think twice before undertaking a task of disinformation, it just doesn’t fly anymore.

"Islam Scholar" Robert Spencer Exposed

[UPDATED 11/4/09: "f**kislam.com" Magically Disappears from Robert Spencer’s JihadWatch.org]

Imagine if the scientific research belonging to a scholar of marine biology was accessible online via the URL “fuckmarinebiology.com” or if a scholar of Jewish Studies put out his material under the URL “fuckyahweh.com” or “fuckjudaism.com”.

What would that say about the scholarly ways of such a scholar? Would such a buffoon be taken seriously by anyone? Would his work carry an ounce of credibility?

Well imagine no more, Loonwatch has gone digging and sure enough, Robert Spencer, a  long discredited anti-Muslim hatemonger posing as an “Islam scholar” has shown his scholarly objective ways with the heinously named URL’s “fuckallah.com” and “fuckislam.com” redirecting to his cesspool of subjectivity, the David Horowitz funded hate blog, Jihadwatch.org.

In doing so, Robert Spencer may have been trying to actively market his hate material to like-minded audiences. It is a well known fact that keywords are a crucial factor in the popularity of a blog. This is damning evidence of the true gutter intent behind his little blog project which is to attract and further incite those with Islamophobic tendencies, his primary audience.

fuckallah.com & Jihadwatch.org

In that respect, Jihadwatch.org has grown into a special-interest niche, a hate cult that attracts a small but vociferous number of anti-Muslim Spencer groupies while having little credibility with the mainstream.

Now, it is often said that hatemongers are cowards, and we believe that Robert Spencer is no exception. So expect Spencer – now that he has been publicly exposed- to try to wiggle his way out of this one . Expect him to deny responsibility, claim ignorance, and deflect blame.

After all that was his strategy when it was revealed that he had become a fan of an anti-Muslim genocide-promoting hate group on Facebook. Despite being unable to deny the fact that he had willingly signed up to this group, he still ventured to argue that he had not meant to and that the meticulous researcher and astute observer in him had somehow failed to notice the plethora of in-your-face literature that permeated the group’s Facebook page from beginning to end. Unfortunately for the career liar, Mr. Spencer, he seemed to have forgotten that he had previously promoted the logo of the group’s supremacist philosophy on his website (as documented by LoonWatch with screen still shots from Jihadwatch.org) thus cementing his complicity and premeditated intent.

This time, expect Spencer to argue that he redirected those vile and vulgar slogan url’s by mistake. Or that someone else did him the favor without his consent or knowledge. Given Spencer’s track record of intense hatred for Islam and his knack for lying his way out of trouble, one would not be inclined to believe him.

But let us for the sake of the argument ask “what if”? Well then Spencer would have to explain why he has not yet disavowed and apologized for the association?  He would also have to explain why someone would choose Jihadwatch.org out of the internet’s 200 million websites. Why not the Islam page on PBS or the BBC or Beliefnet? Could it be that these sites are deemed objective and that someone filled with the intense hatred required to register “fuckallah.com” and “fuckislam.com” could not find a more fitting site that would resonate with his hatred than Jihadwatch.org. That in itself is a blatant referendum on the editorial content of Jihadwatch.org.

The fact that the petty Robert Spencer is anything but a serious objective scholar of Islam and is instead every bit of a paid anti-Muslim polemic and agitator who is a prized tool in David Horowitz’s shed is not breaking news for most people.

The serious question then is this: how could any self-respecting church, Synagogue, college, or institution even think of associating with such a discredited buffoon and mire their reputations with his? To think that the likes of the American Library Association almost got duped by this guy sends shudders down our spine. As the number of the blissfully ignorant victims of his two-faced marketing campaigns who are quickly catching on continue to dwindle, expect his antics to get more desperate and more pathetic.

Editor’s note: Our apology to our readers for having to reprint those vulgar URL’s