Robert Bruce Spencer is an American anti-Muslim author and blogger. Spencer describes himself as "the 'good' kind of Islamophobe". His published books include two New York Times bestsellers.
In 2003 he founded and has since directed Islamophobe blog Jihad Watch. He co-founded the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of America (American Freedom Defense Initiative) with blogger Pamela Geller. Reports that two of Spencer's books were listed in FBI training materials and that he had given seminars to various law enforcement units in the United States stirred controversy. He has frequently appeared on Fox News. In 2013 the UK Home Office barred Spencer from travel to the UK for 3 to 5 years for "making statements that may foster hatred that might lead to inter-community violence".
Spencer was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and joined the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in 1984. In a 2006 interview, Spencer stated that his grandparents were forced to emigrate from an area that is now part of Turkey because they were Christians. According to a 2010 interview in New York magazine, Spencer's father worked for the Voice of America during the Cold War, and in his younger days, Spencer himself worked at Revolution Books, a Maoist bookstore in New York City founded by Robert Avakian.