Video: Robert Spencer on RT’s Worlds Apart, full edited interview as broadcast

This was a good, wide-ranging and heated discussion. The broadcast version, however, is not complete. Apparently RT thought that their host was coming off looking so blinkered and willfully ignorant that they cut out some of my remarks to make it a fair fight. There are three main portions of my remarks on this show that RT cut out of the show that they broadcast: I explained how violent passages in the Bible are descriptive, rather than prescriptive as in the Qur’an, explaining that there is no open-ended command in the Bible to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers, as there is in the Qur’an, and pointing out that there are no Jewish or Christian groups worldwide committing acts of violence and justifying them by quoting the Bible, while there are Muslim groups all over the world committing violence and justifying it by reference to the Qur’an. I also challenged host Oksana Boyko’s claim that “Palestinians” in Gaza were suffering under deplorable conditions, explaining about the sophistication of “Palestinian” jihad propaganda and suggesting that her “Palestinian” hosts took her to Potemkin villages constructed for propaganda purposes; and I listed the Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence (Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi and Hanbali), pointing out that all of them, as well as the Shi’ite schools, teach warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers.

I requested the full tape, rather than this selectively edited version, but RT would not release it to me. In any case, the broadcast version here gives a good, albeit partial view, of my contentious exchange with Boyko, whose objectives were to demonize the United States and to exonerate Islam of all responsibility for the violence that Muslims commit and then explain and justify by reference to Islam.