Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and their entirely predictable adventures with the NYT:
They claim that I said that “a young Barack Obama slept with ‘a crack whore,'” without mentioning that in that post I was making a point about unfair journalists (like these Times writers), constructing a reductio ad absurdum about media bias.
And that bit about my great-grandfather — the Times is implying that I am out for some kind of personal revenge, like some “Islamophobic” Inigo Montoya. In reality, the “family lore” I heard from my grandparents about growing up in the Ottoman Empire was uniformly and warmly positive. My great-grandfather was murdered in 1918; I never knew him, and his story was never part of “family lore.” In fact, I didn’t even know it had happened until two decades after my “interest in Islam” was in full swing.
So how did Anne Barnard find out about it? Because she asked me if anyone in my family had been killed at the time that my grandparents were exiled from Anatolia. I answered her truthfully. And she made that the linchpin of my interest in Islam. This is what they do.
