Somebody just tried to poison one of my friends.
You may know him. He’s Robert Spencer, the director of the news-and-commentary blog JihadWatch and author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammed. He appears pretty regularly on cable news as an expert on Islamist terrorism, and he’s led seminars on jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, among others. Robert also gets a lot of speaking engagements. His most recent event was in Reykjavik, Iceland, and that’s where someone laced his drink with something nasty.
Last week, Robert spoke on the threat of jihad to an audience of several hundred people at Reykjavik’s Grand Hotel. Afterward, he and some friends went to a restaurant for dinner. In the course of the meal, two men approached his table. One introduced himself as a big fan. The other shook Robert’s hand and said, “F*** you.” In a piece published in Frontpagemag.com, Robert described what happened when he returned to his hotel room.
“I began to feel numbness in my face, hands, and feet. I began trembling and vomiting. My heart was racing dangerously. I spent the night in a Reykjavik hospital.”
Art Moore, writing for World Net Daily, reports that doctors at the Reykjavik hospital found Robert tested “positive for amphetamine and MDMA.” MDMA is a synthetic drug commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly. A high dose of MDMA can cause liver, kidney, or heart failure and may even be fatal. The drug is commonly available in tablet or capsule form, but it is also available as crystals, a powder, or a liquid. Those last three options would be the easiest to slip into someone’s drink.
At the hospital, the attending doctor said Robert had been drugged but that it was not a “serious poisoning.” Robert asked, “How much poison must one be given for the poisoning to be ‘serious’?”
After he was released from the hospital, Robert was ill for several days, but he did get to a police station to file a complaint. The reaction of Reykjavik police is encouraging. “The police official with whom I spoke took immediate steps to identify and locate the principal suspects and obtain the restaurant’s surveillance video,” Robert said.
Among our friends on the left, Robert Spencer is not a popular guy. For years, he has been exposing Islamist extremists who have launched terror attack after terror attack across the globe. And he has made the case that in the eyes of the terrorists, they are doing Allah’s work because there are verses in the Koran and other sacred Islamic texts that approve of attacking infidels. Christians and Jews and every other non-Islamic religion fall into the infidel category. But as we continue to see in Iraq and Syria, ISIS also targets Muslims who, from the terrorists’ point of view, are the wrong kind of Muslims.
Nonetheless, Robert has been denounced as a hate monger by the Southern Poverty Law Center, his books are banned in Muslim-majority nations, and in 2013 the British Home Office barred Robert from traveling to the U.K. for any speaking event. When he appealed the ban in court, the British Court of Appeals dismissed his case, arguing that “this was a public order case where the police had advised that significant public disorder and serious violence might ensue from the proposed visit.”
It’s only May, but already we’ve seen some ugliness directed at conservatives who were invited to speak at various colleges. At Middlebury College in Vermont, protesters mobbed conservative social scientist Charles Murray, injuring a professor who was trying to escort him to safety. At NYU, provocateur and actor Gavin McInnes was rushed by protesters who physically tried to stop him from holding a seminar for College Republicans (police arrested about a dozen demonstrators). And at Berkeley, chaos erupted, even before conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos got to the university. Berkeley’s administrators blamed the riot, which caused $100,000 worth of damage, on “150 masked agitators,” who egged on about 1,500 anti-Milo demonstrators.
It appears that rioting, or howling down, or physically attacking a conservative speaker are not enough. Now we have to worry that some “progressive” might slip an overdose into a conservative’s drink.
