“Conservative” Muslim Suhail Khan spreads falsehoods about Muhammad’s marriage to 9-year-old Aisha

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/04/29/conservative-muslim-suhail-khan-spreads-falsehoods-about-muhammads-marriage-to-9-year-old-aisha/

2010 April 29

by Robert Spencer

Suhail A. Khan serves on the Board of Directors for the American Conservative Union and as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, a Christian organization dedicated to religious freedom worldwide.

And both the American Conservative Union and the Institute for Global Engagement ought to be ashamed to be associated with this base smear artist.

Suhail Khan here defames me as “anti-Muslim,” and if standing for freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law is against Muslims, well, Suhail Khan said it.

Khan also charges me with “bigotry” and some kind of morphing anti-Semitism, which is particularly absurd since his coreligionists regularly rail at me as a “Zionist Jew,” but of course Khan means that Arabs are Semites, and because Islam is an Arabic faith (although most Muslims are not Arabs), to oppose Islamic supremacism and the denial of rights entailed by Sharia must be anti-Arab and hence anti-Semitic. Got it?

And the corollary to that, of course, is that the Muslims are the new Jews, and so to resist the jihad and Islamic supremacism is to pave the way for a new Holocaust, this time with Muslims as the victims. Khan and others who use this argument are trying to bamboozle people into thinking that standing up for human rights against Sharia is paving the way for genocide.

If you see the ridiculousness of Khan’s twisted trail of self-pity and claim of victimhood for Muslims, you’ll know why he was so thoroughly bested when he acted as Dinesh D’Souza’s backup man in a debate with me — while officially serving as the moderator of my debate with D’Souza at CPAC 2007. See for yourself, and judge for yourself, here and here.

Note also here again the descriptor “blogger,” which Khan uses in order to impugn and diminish, opting for it rather than telling his readers that I have written bestselling books, advised the FBI and Centcom, etc. This is not personal — Khan is under no obligation to say anything or not say anything about me. The point is that this is all part of his presentation, which is one long attempt to smear and discredit those who tell truths about Islam that Khan wishes would remain untold.

Nonetheless, for all his personal nastiness and carelessness with the facts, I am still willing to debate Suhail Khan. Yet despite the fact that he debated me by proxy, pointing most of his remarks toward me while he was supposed to be debating Frank Gaffney, he continues to duck my invitation to debate the real me. Now, why is that?

I suspect it’s because he knows I will catch him out when he tells whoppers like this one:

“Anti-Semitism on training wheels,” by Suhail Khan in The Daily Caller, April 27 (thanks to James):

Anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer proclaims that the Muslim prophet Muhammad was a guilty of host of heinous crimes including the rape of a child because he was betrothed to Aisha when she was nine years old. Of course, most are keenly aware that a betrothal and actual marriage are two separate things and readers of the Old Testament recall that Isaac was betrothed to Rebecca when she was three years old. Like Wilders, Thomas, and Coulter, Spencer’s bigotry easily morphs into anti-Semitism.

Ah, how sweet. He was “betrothed.” Just like Isaac and Rebecca. It’s only I, greasy Islamophobe that I am, who would try to make something ugly out of that. Right? Well, readers of The Daily Caller may be fooled, but for the less cloudy-minded, here is what the Islamic texts actually say:

Narrated ‘Aisha:that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death). — Bukhari 7.62.64

Sahih Bukhari is the hadith collection that Muslims consider most reliable. It says, not just in the above passage but in three other places as well, that Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine years old.

Mr. Khan, “consummated” and “betrothed” are not synonyms.