Let us remember that Robert Spencer is in the business of haute vulgarisation, of mass divulgation. He would like his texts to be read, and have an effect, and he knows he must appeal to a book-buying audience that might find certain kinds of titles too dull, or who would not be put off but attracted by certain kinds of book-covers, blurbs, and so on. And he is well aware -- how could he not be? -- that at present the publishers of books that offer the kind of disturbing and ungainsayable information that his contain -- after all, every quote in his book on Muhammad could have been used by a Muslim author, for a Muslim audience. It is only when the Infidels happen themselves to quote those same Qur'anic passages, those same stories in the Hadith (found in Bukhari or Muslim, or refer to those same details -- Banu Qurayza, Khaybar Oasis, Asma bint Marwan, Abu Akaf, Aisha, Al-Hudaibiyya -- that Muslims become enraged, and denounce the texts, always vaguely of course because they cannot find a single inaccuracy to point to in, for example, "The Truth About Muhammad" -- enraged because the same texts that they have no problem with if those texts are read lovingly, acceptingly, by them and by fellow Muslims, become a source of fury if Infidels dare to reprint or quote or point to them with quite a different attitude. Infidels With Attitudes must be denounced, must be accused of that tendentious, ludicrous thing, "Islamophobia."

But as my cousin M. L. K. Fitzgerald once explained, "Don't judge a book by its cover, but by the character of its contents."

And let me conclude this posting with what another cousin, Archimede Pitagorico Fitzgerald, once told me -- "Chi ha orecchie per intendere, intenda."

Which is to say: A Word To The Wise Is Sufficient.