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Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes have held a debate with Muslim apologists Moustafa Zayed and Abdullah Kunde. Moustafa, I believe, is Egyptian and Abdullah looks in the video to be a native Australian convert.

Both Spencer and Pipes present their arguments well, but we see from the debate what takes place regularly on this forum; the Islamophiles launch into ad-hominem attacks, create strawmen and out-and-out distort history.

The Muslim apologists simply did not come off the same as both Spencer and Pipes did in this video, as I think any 'neutral' outside observer would agree before moving on to the contents and my personal analysis.

There were also a number of basic errors that Moustafa Zayed made in the video that I would like to address:

Fist, he claims that Christians did not suffer reprisals following Muslim conquests of Crusader held territories, this is patently untrue. The Christian populations were religiously cleansed or massacred following the Muslim conquest of Odessa in 1141 (?), Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem and other Christian cities in the third crusade and Baibars' massacre of the Christian inhabitants of Antioch.

Secondly, Moustafa would have us believe that Muslims never forcefully expelled Christians (ignoring the examples during the Crusades I mentioned above) and quite ironically mentions al-Andalusia, perhaps unawares of Muslim religious of oppression against Christians and Jews during the fundamentalist Almohad dynasty and to lesser extent the Amoravid prior to the Almohad takeover.

Thirdly, Zayed claims that v 9:29 is only talking about Christians having to pay taxes to the Muslim state, and not the common interpretation of perpetual, offensive warfare to bring Christians under an Islamic state to pay taxes and feel themselves 'subdued'. He then goes on to claim that Christians payed taxes that were less burdensome than the taxes Muslims had to pay, ignoring the conclusions of Muslim Islamophile historians, such as Sherman Jackson, have shown elsewhere.

For the pro-freedom, anti-Jihad side of the debate, both Spencer and Pipes came off well, as I said. Spencer's quoting of Maimonides at the end of the video was priceless, since both Muslim apologists, for whatever reason, thought it helped their argument in name dropping the great Jewish philosopher and physician.

Spencer methodically disarmed his opponents' talking points and presented his own that would go unaddressed throughout the debate. Pipes was articulate and the debate's one deficiency was that he did not speak more.

I don't know anything about the Austrialian Muslim apologist, but Moustafa Zayed has written a book claiming to debunk a book by Spencer on prophet Muhammad. So, clearly, at least one of the Muslim supremacists in this video were 'armed' with the so-called 'facts'.

The main point on the Muslim apologist side, I think, was that Islam has not been hijacked by radicals and that, indeed, Islam can never be hijacked. According to the apologist camp, Islam, as what we have it in the world today, is perfect and in no need of 'reform' or 'change'. According to both speakers, Islamic terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, have no connection to Islamic religious teachings whatsoever, though neither speaker presented any argument for their belief nor addressed the points/questions by the moderator or from Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer. Instead, they went on to mention Christian terrorism, or terrorism they perceive as being carried out by Christian fundamentalists, such as Eric Rudolph, Abortion clinic bombings and Timothy McVeigh.

There were a number of callers on the show and most expressed disagreement with the way the apologist side conducted themselves. One caller revealed himself as being a former Muslim from an Arabic speaking country whose father was/is an Imam. He pointed out that the ahadith Moustafa Zayed had quoted were weak and asked why he had ignored other ahadith showing a less flattering picture of Muhammad, including the strong hadith (actually, ahadith) of Muhammad ordering the expulsion of Christians and Jews from the regions of what is now Saudi Arabia.

JihadWatch posted the video on its website along with Spencer's comments of the debate here: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/12/spenc ... icals.html

You can watch the video directly from ABN here: http://abnsat.com/abnnew/index.php?opti ... deo_id=567