Robert Spencer's Libel Against Me: No, I Didn't Steal $8,000

Spencer lost a debate with me. He is angry. He plays dirty. He is a liar.

It is quite unfortunate that I even need to write this entry but JihadWatch Director Robert Spencer keeps repeating the same libel against me and I think it would be useful to have a response handy in one place. This will save the time of me having to continuously repeat myself and also direct others to this response.

Alright, with that said, what’s the basis of Spencer’s smear? Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

LoonWatch

In 2010 and 2011, I used to write pseudonymously under the handle “Danios” for LoonWatch.com. (This was a play on on the word “JihadWatch.”) We used pseudonyms in order to avoid the dirty tactics of Islamophobes and Zionists who issue death threats and, more importantly, try to target a person’s education and employment. In any case, our humble blog became the most popular anti-Islamophobia website at the time, bagging Brass Crescent awards and nominations.

Due to the incredibly positive response to my writing, I quixotically convinced myself that I might be able to quit working full-time as a physician and dedicate myself to such advocacy. At the time I was only a resident (i.e. “junior doctor”) but I thought if I made a sustainable income from my writing that I could immediately switch to part-time work after graduation from medical residency.

Indiegogo Campaign

As part of my foray into this plan, I launched an Indiegogo campaign, which is the equivalent of GoFundMe. I thought that if I could raise $50,000, I could then take half a year (or a full year) off to just write a book. I had already written dozens and dozens of articles against Robert Spencer, so I pitched the idea of writing a refutation of one of his books. Basically, Indiegogo or GoFundMe campaigns work by soliciting funds from people on the internet with a soft promise to render a certain “perk” to them, which is what the money is meant to be spent on.

Our Failed Campaign

Suffice to say, we didn’t make it anywhere near the $50,000 mark and instead raised a much humbler $8,000. Indiegogo has two options for campaigns: fixed or flexible. In a fixed campaign, you don’t get any of the money if you don’t reach your set goal. (In retrospect, this is what I should have selected.) In a flexible campaign, you still get to keep the partial amount you raise.

Contributors understand that they risk losing their money, especially if the goal is not reached. This is clearly stated on the Indiegogo site:

What happens to my money if a campaign fails?

Backing a crowdfunding project is exciting because you get to support a brand new startup or creative endeavor that might change the world.

But the reality is that any business - whether completely new or very established - might fail. If you want to contribute to a project for the latest and most exciting innovations, it's a risk you have to take. This is why it's important to evaluate a campaign and assess any possible risks before deciding to back them.

The whole point of Indiegogo is that you take a risk on someone and hope it pays off. In the case of many projects (such as my own), contributors are usually just fans who want to help support your work (much like Patreon). Therefore, there is no expectation or obligation that you will get a refund if the project is unsuccessful.

For the record, I explicitly warned contributors that I might not be successful with the project if we failed to reach the goal of $50,000:

When Spencer claims that I “deceived” contributors, “stole” from them, and committed “fraud,” he omits to mention that I warned from the very start that “These perks will be redeemable so long as we meet our initial funding goal of $50,000” — which we clearly didn’t. So, contributors knew this going in.

The other point is that I did produce dozens and dozens of articles against Spencer, far more than $8,000 worth of labor for my time.

Having said all of this, I still felt at the time that it would be exhibiting bad faith to simply “walk away” with the money and leave it at that. Of course, that is not what I did.

My Back-up Plan

Instead, I came up with the plan of using that money to decrease the days in the year that I spent moonlighting at the hospital. (Moonlighting is a way residents earn extra cash by picking up extra shifts at another hospital.) The $8,000 would allow me to take off at least two days a month for a few months, which is time that I could use to work on the book.

With this plan in mind, I was hopeful that I might render the product to my contributors. Of course, the project would take much longer than six months to complete. Indeed, this is also something Indiegogo warns contributors about, especially if the project fails to reach its goal. This is for obvious reasons.

Why the Back-up Plan Didn’t Work Either

In any case, my plan sounded good on paper but I did not realize how difficult it is to write a book in a disjointed fashion, with only the occasional day off. Life also got in the way, with all sorts of work and family responsibilities. I was, after all, a busy medical resident with a brutal hospital schedule. I made some initial progress but not to a point that I could publish.

Days turned into months, months into years. All the while I told myself that I would still write that book, but it just never happened. At various points in time, I consulted with trusted friends, who simply told me to just continue to work on it and one day get it out.

My Regrets

In retrospect, it goes without saying that I wish I had just immediately refunded the money to the contributors. Heck, I wish I had not started the campaign to begin with. It was quixotic to think that I could raise that amount of money, especially being a pseudonymous writer.

Academic Career

Life went on and soon LoonWatch became a distant memory (as did the campaign). Additionally, I had by now switched to graduate school in Islamic studies and decided to pursue my doctoral dissertation on the very subject of the book: jihad in the Quran. That is what I am working on now.

Now, many long years later, I consider myself a serious academic and no longer a “LoonWatcher.” The goal is to publish serious academic research. Even though I will address the weak arguments Spencer employs in his book on jihad (and I have already done so in my debate with him), my writing will be geared to changing the scholarly discourse… of which Spencer is simply not a part of.

My Doctoral Dissertation

Once I graduate, my doctoral dissertation will be turned into a monograph (i.e. book). However, anyone familiar with dissertations and academic publishing knows that dissertations can take many long years to complete and the conversion to a book format often takes several more years. The soonest I can get this out, if I do everything perfectly, is two years from now. But, it might take several more years.

Robert Spencer prides himself on the number of books he has written. However, these are trash non-academic books published with trash publishers. The reality is that almost anyone can write a (trash) book. Nowadays you can even self-publish. But not everyone can produce a serious, peer-reviewed publication in a prestigious academic press, which is my goal.

Additionally, I should state that it takes several years of training to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge base to write a scholarly book in the first place. This includes several years’ worth of Arabic-language training, as well as the study of other languages. Spencer has none of this. In my debate with him, I exposed him for his lack of Arabic (which is something he tries to obscure and obfuscate). In any case, the point is that my dissertation work involves going to the primary sources that are in Arabic… I did not have these skills when I used to write at LoonWatch. Rather, I have worked diligently over the course of the last decade to acquire them.

Will I Ever Complete the Planned Book Against Spencer?

After I publish this academic book on the topic of jihad in the Quran (i.e. my dissertation topic), I do think that — at some point in time — I should write a more popular book addressed to a lay audience. If and when I get around to doing this, I do think it would still be a good idea to complete that refutation of Spencer’s book as I had initially planned.

You might ask: Why not switch around the order and write the popular book now? The answer is simple: this is not how academics operate. The peer-reviewed academic monograph serves as the basis and foundation upon which the lay book will rest. My knowledge of the primary Arabic sources has deepened my understanding and analysis of the subject matter.

Also, it would be seen as skirting peer review to reverse this process. Academics must subject their ideas to the peer review process and, most importantly, have their ideas subjected to critique by their scholarly peers. Once I pass all of these hurdles, then I will be in a good position to put out a formal rebuttal to Spencer’s work. (Prior to that, it’s OK to refute his ideas in a different format, such as the debate I had with him.)

Is all of this absolutely necessary? No. After all, Spencer has churned out one trash book after another. Nobody can stop you from doing that. But it will seriously hurt my academic image if I do such a thing. Quite frankly, I am simply less interested in popular books now that I have spent the last decade becoming a scholar.

Why Didn’t I Just Refund the Money? (I Tried.)

At some point in time, I of course realized that I would not be able to publish the planned book against Spencer… at least not for an indefinitely long time. Additionally, I did not want this sword to be hanging over my head. By now, like I said, I had become a serious academic and there were so many more interesting things to me from a scholarly perspective than anything Spencer could write. So, even though I do plan on one day writing a direct and thorough refutation of him, quite frankly this will be on my own time table and when it makes sense in my academic career to do so.

Therefore, and based on all of this, at some point I had decided to refund the money to the contributors. However, by now several long years had passed since the campaign itself. Additionally, I could no longer access my Indiegogo account. Due to the heavy climate of Islamophobia at the time, LoonWatch writers were expected to maintain their anonymity. People like Spencer and his goons were desperately trying to expose who the writers were behind LoonWatch so that they could begin their smear campaigns.

In any case, I wanted to complete my medical residency and fellowship before “outing” myself as Danios of LoonWatch. Why? Well, certain Zionist groups are active in targeting students and workers who express pro-Palestinian sentiments (which I routinely did and do). It is only in the last couple years or so that this tactic has lost much of its effectiveness, given the change in discourse around the subject. But, back then, this could be fatal to one’s career and job prospects. Additionally, Islamophobes like Spencer routinely smear Muslims, regardless of their actual viewpoints, as “jihadis.”

Long story short, we at LoonWatch had to operate using several layers of anonymity, including a secure alternate email (and, for the Indiegogo campaign, secure banking information). Once these accounts had become inactive several years later, they closed by themselves and became inaccessible to me. There was simply no way for me to recover my Indiegogo account, let alone get access to the contributors so that I could refund them individually.

Donating to Charity

Nonetheless, I did feel bad for taking money and not delivering the perk. Unable to issue refunds, I did the only thing that I could do: I donated $8,000 to charity. This was several years ago and done on my own accord, long before my identity as “Danios” was revealed. This was what I could do to assuage my conscience, as it did not sit right with me to just “walk away” like that (even if no rule or law was technically violated).

Donating to Charity a Second Time (This Time Publicly)

After my debate with Robert Spencer — this time using my actual name — I “came out” as “Danios of LoonWatch.” I did so on my own accord due to the fact that I wanted him to know who I was. (He had a special hate for Danios due to the fact that I was consistently debunking his shoddy work.)

Of course, I knew that Spencer would immediately taunt me about the $8,000, especially as a face-saving measure given that he was utterly embarrassed in the debate with me. This is the typical ad hominem approach of people who cannot engage on an intellectual level.

In our many back-and-forths, Spencer himself is the one who pitched the idea that, if I really could not refund the original contributors, I should at least donate the money to charity. When I repeated the fact that I already had done so, Spencer of course accused me of being a liar and refused to accept that fact.

Therefore, I offered to donate a second time but this time in a public fashion so that I could show receipts as proof. As a believing and practicing Muslim, I actually think God cares more about the first time I donated since true charity should be done privately. However, I did not at all mind donating a second time since my religious faith stresses the rewards of generous and repeated donations to charity.

Neutral Third Party

The question arose: how do I donate in a public fashion without at the same time exposing my private information? That is when we came up with the idea of my transferring the money to Luis Dizon, the Catholic apologist who moderated my debate with Robert Spencer.

Luis was selected as a reasonable neutral third party. He often co-hosts the Reason & Theology podcast, a Catholic apologetics channel on YouTube. By the way, Spencer had himself agreed to the neutral third party nature of both Luis and Reason & Theology. The channel is, after all, a Catholic/Christian apologetics channel, with some anti-Islam content on it. Luis himself has said some not-so-nice things about Islam. Having said that, although I disagree with both Luis and R&T on these issues — and strongly encourage them to use different language when debating the topic of Islam — I consider both the channel and Luis to be reasonable and decent… which is why I had suggested the platform to begin with.

In any case, a brief glance at the comments section to our debate hosted on R&T will reveal that the audience is strongly hostile to Muslims and Islam. In other words, I was the one in “enemy territory,” so to speak. I only say this figuratively, as I, of course, do not consider Luis to be an “enemy.” On the other hand, we have never talked with each other outside of the context of the debate. In any case, Spencer was thus given the advantage by the debate being hosted on a Christian apologetics channel… and yet I still won.

Given that both Spencer and I had gone on the R&T platform — and that Luis was our moderator and, like Spencer, a Christian — it only made sense that Luis was a good intermediary to testify that I had indeed donated the money. Therefore, I transferred the money ($8,000) to Luis and he then donated the money on my behalf to a local hospital.

Luis then publicly testified that I had indeed transferred the money to him and that he had donated the money on my behalf:

So, Spencer et al. should be satisfied, right? Of course not!

The Proof That I Donated the $8,000

Spencer was not satisfied by simply taking a fellow Christian’s word for it. He demanded that Luis show a receipt of the donation.

OK, so I then asked Luis to show the receipt, which he promptly did:

Problem solved, right?

Of course not!

It’s at this time that you should realize without any shadow of doubt that Robert Spencer is a bad faith actor. He doesn’t really care if I donated the money or not. In fact, he knows that I did. It’s just that this is his one talking point against me — a pure ad hominem of course — and he doesn’t want any attention given to the substance of the debate, which he still cannot defend on an intellectual level.

What could Spencer demand now? Well, he now asked, how do we know that you transferred the money to Luis? This is, of course, an odd question to even ask. Do we think Luis just randomly donated exactly $8,000 of his own money for me?

In any case, at this point in time I well knew that this was a case of “show me your long form birth certificate.” In other words, no amount of evidence would be enough to satisfy Spencer or his minions. (Fittingly, Spencer engaged in this sort of birther conspiracy talk earlier in his “career.”)

My Challenge to Spencer

Now that it was clear to most neutral people that he was a bad faith actor, I challenged Spencer when he asked me to show the transfer details. Before revealing these, I asked him: OK, if I show the transfer details, will you finally accept this as sufficient proof and let this issue go?

This put Spencer in a bind. It revealed to the world that he was demanding “proof” in a bad faith way. No matter how much proof I showed him, it would never be enough. Even if I walked him to the bank and transferred the money under his watchful gaze, this would not suffice Spencer.

Forced into this corner by my question/challenge, Spencer admitted that he would still not accept this. This, of course, begs the question: Why then demand the proof to begin with? This shows the insincere and performative nature of this line of questioning.

Spencer will circle back to the same questions in the circular way that he does: Why don’t you refund the contributors? Of course, I have already answered this question numerous times. Again: I can no longer get access to the Indiegogo account (for the reasons listed above). It’s only pure obstinacy that prevents Spencer from accepting this explanation… and the fact that he even made me go through the process of donating a second time through Luis (and then, on Spencer’s demand, showing the receipt of Luis’s donation on my behalf) reveals what a bad faith actor he truly is. Why make me do that if it was never going to be accepted in the first place?

Spencer Has Engaged in Libel

In a recent tweet, Spencer upped the ante and became even more outright in his libel:

Now, he is claiming that I admitted that I stole $8,000. This is, of course, an outright lie. Not only would no law court on earth uphold the idea that I “stole” the money, but I certainly have never “admitted” such… I have always adamantly denied this.

So, Spencer is a bold-faced liar.

Calling the FBI on Me and Targeting My University Standing

Spencer lost the debate with me. Instead of dealing with that loss in a respectable fashion, Spencer revealed how much of a sore loser he is by actually contacting the FBI to have me “investigated.” He has also repeatedly tagged Harvard University in order to get me kicked out. (And we wonder why LoonWatch writers felt the need to write pseudonymously?)

Who is Amal J Man? Robert Spencer’s Sock Puppet

Either Robert Spencer himself or some other allied Islamophobe has created a sock puppet account by the user name “Amal J Man” (amaljman). This is clearly a dummy account designed simply to smear LoonWatch and Danios (me). Spencer has repeated the claim ad nauseam that Amal is “one of [Danios’s] own supporters and donors.”

Anyone with half a brain should realize that this is a fake account created by an Islamophobe. A review of both the website and Twitter account created by this fake entity reveals as much. There is simply no way that such an Islamophobic person would ever have donated anything to an anti-Islamopobia website. It just wouldn’t make any sense. Additionally, both the website and Twitter account have no content other than the attack on LoonWatch and the claim that I supposedly “stole $8,000.” Really, this Islamophobe should have spent a little bit more time making it look like a real person/account.

My Challenge Back to “Amal” and Spencer

I would say in response to “Amal” and Spencer: prove to us that Amal is anything but a sock puppet. Who is this person? Also, show us proof that this person actually donated to the campaign. Why didn’t this person show this proof when making the initial accusation? That would be expected, right?

In any case, this is all fake. Even if someone donated and felt that they wanted their money back, it’s simply not realistic to think that they would simply turn full blown Islamophobe.

My Own Promise

As I have said, I still do hope to produce the equivalent of what I initially set out to do… although it might take a different form. In fact, in some way it already came out in a different form: I utilized my notes and research in the debate that I had with Spencer. This was a service that I provided the Muslim community and a “product” that was delivered to anyone who actually cares about combatting Islamophobia. I took down the King of Islamophobes like nobody has done before.

However, if there is a contributor out there who wants a refund, I would ask them to send a message to me. If they can show proof of donation, I am more than happy to refund the money. This is absolutely no problem from my perspective.

When I do eventually come out with a book on this topic, I will give out another $8,000 (the third time I would be donating this amount!) worth of free books, including and especially to anyone who claims that they donated to the initial campaign.

Should I Sue Robert Spencer for Defamation?

I normally do not like to pursue such legal action. Nonetheless, I am considering it. In the United States, defamation is notoriously difficult to prove and even more difficult to secure a favorable judgment for. However, Spencer has recently been even more explicit in his statements, which I do think would constitute defamation in the legal sense. Therefore, it is something on the table for me.

Why Does Spencer Keep Repeating This Claim?

The bottom line is that Robert Spencer was humiliated in his debate with me. I revealed how he is an intellectual fraud. Despite writing on these topics for decades, Spencer is still a layman without the expertise that is acquired through graduate work in Islamic Studies. He does not even possess basic Arabic knowledge, which is absolutely necessary to access the sources. More than this, his claims were carefully deconstructed by myself.

So, if you haven’t already watched the debate, do yourself a favor and watch what Spencer doesn’t want you to see:

Dodging Intellectual Debate

The debate has made Spencer realize that he cannot ague his points with an actual scholar like myself. Therefore, he must resort to his standard ad hominem whenever his weak points are refuted. For example, recently he posted the following:

In other words, Spencer is here pointing to Q 2:191, 4:89, 47:4, 9:29, and 8:39 as proof that the Quran really says “to kill random disbelievers.” I swiftly responded to Spencer’s weak argument here, which was me basically just providing the surrounding passage to clarify the verses. Quite comically, Spencer accused me of “revisionism.” It’s comical because Spencer denies the very existence of the historical Muḥammad — which is the most revisionist take you can possibly give (and widely rejected by actual scholars in the field).

Unable to respond any more than this, Spencer fell back on the $8,000 smear. It’s just proof that he cannot respond to my actual points… even if he tries to hand wave it away. And we know what happened when he had to defend himself face-to-face with me: he wilted.

In Conclusion

There is absolutely no truth to the claim I stole $8,000. No reasonable person would take the idea seriously that a physician would need to cook up a scam to steal a measly $8,000. Indeed, the real “scam” is the fact that Robert Spencer is paid well over $300,000 per year to spread hate and bigotry, especially given the intellectual fraud that he is.

When you cannot debate the actual substance of an issue, then you must resort to such lowly tactics and methods as Spencer is using here. Don’t fall for it.

This is Dr. Javad T. Hashmi’s Substack.