Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch simply smacks the living crap out of Dean Esmay and catches him in a blatant contradiction all at the same time. If you’ve never witnessed a web smackdown before, you can hold this one up for all eternity as one of the greats.

I’m not even gonna bother summarizing it or pulling quotes, save for this one:

Anyway, Esmay has entangled himself in an insuperable contradiction: he has admitted that no “mainstream school of Islamic thought…completely rejects holy war (violent jihad).” Then he renews his accusation that I am taking “the most tendentious and pernicious interpretations” of Islamic scholarship and declaring “that these are the inescapably correct views.” Well, if no mainstream school of Islamic jurisprudence rejects violent jihad, then violent jihad is the Islamic mainstream — and it is not I who am cherry-picking among Islamic texts to create my own private Islam.

Just go read the whole thing. Also take note of the two comments where Spencer’s readers also lay into Esmay for his assinine (and obviously uneducated) assertion that the Bible doesn’t condemn slavery so therefore we should still have slaves. Even though Spencer demolishes that red herring, the readers found specific Bible passages that do, in fact, condemn slavery.

Woops.

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