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On April 3, I learned from Robert Spencer’s Jihadwatch that my book was back on NR’s site [http://www.nrbookservice.com/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=C6077] but that by Fr. Menezes was not. This does not change the substance of the problem: A nasty hate group, CAIR, tainted with terrorist links and steeped in the ideology of jihad, has succeeded in forcing a prominent American institution to practice self-censorship. Once the precedent is established, and the model accepted as legitimate, it will only whet Islamist appetites and encourage their hope that the end-result will be a crescent on the Capitol a generation or two from now.
I hardly ever post articles from Chronicles, but since Serge Trifkovic, being primarily concerned with foreign affairs, is nowhere near as demented as the other paleocons at the publication, and because National Review has acted in a particularly poltroonish manner, I made an exception in this case.
THE BOOK BUSINESS [Rich Lowry ]
Some folks have e-mailed in asking about a book brouhaha going on in some parts of the blogosphere involving us. Here is what happened: A National Review Book Service e-mail blast for the book "The Life And Religion of Mohammed" by Rev. J.L Menezes was sent out a couple of weeks ago to the magazine's (opted-in) e-mail list. The ad copy in the e-mail, which invoked “the dark mind of Mohammed” among other things, was written by author Robert Spencer. But it went out under the name of a member of NR’s publishing staff, who should have, but didn’t review it. The book service is a joint project with a publisher who has been responsible for what books to feature in this service and how best to publicize them.
So, National Review didn’t sit down and say, “Hey, let’s have a public fight over Mohammed and aggressively market books about him,” then reverse course. In contrast, Robert Spencer and some others on the right feel very strongly that it is important to discredit Mohammed and Islam as such in order to win the war on terror. That’s certainly their prerogative, but it is not the tack NR has taken, even as we have vigorously attacked Islamic terrorism and supported the war against it. CAIR has been agitating for us to apologize for weeks, but we obviously aren’t going to apologize for a position that isn’t our own. We are, of course, more than happy to defend our own actual positions against CAIR, or any other noxious grievance group.
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