Customer Reviews

The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance is a wake-up call for the West to recognize the dangers it faces from radical Islam. It draws heavily upon history and current events to illuminate this threat, makes its case convincingly, and concludes with a recommended course of action.

The author begins by exposing our disorganized and weak response which he attributes to a flaw of human nature: we tend to forget the past and focus on the present. The Islamic threat we face today is not just Osama and a few thousand followers; in the 15th century Islam overwhelmed Bulgaria, Serbia, Constantinople, Persia, Greece, and struck at the heart of Europe until King John Sobieski stopped them at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

He points out that the Protestant Reformation only became possible with the invention of the printing press, and that Islamic radicals are utilizing the internet to further their cause in a similar way. Now aspiring terrorists can train in virtual camps and learn terrorism without having to set foot in a physical training camp. I myself have read the Al-Qaeda terror training manual which is available through a quick internet search.

Blankley draws an intriguing parallel between our situation today, and that of the America Indians and the first European settlers centuries ago. The situation was similar; in both cases they were not formally at war and even cooperated with each other at times. The Indians, he points out, could have easily held on to their heritage if they had recognized the threat of Europeans to their lifestyle, because while there were only hundreds of Europeans at first, there were thousands of Indians with superior knowledge of the land. The Indians, however, didn't have a historical reference point on which to judge the situation and failed to act decisively. We, however, have plenty of historical reference points to judge the threats posed by radical Islam.

Another interesting parallel is shown: Evangelical Christians in the past didn't involve themselves in politics much for fear it might negatively taint their spirituality, but during the 1970's events arose (notably Roe v. Wade) that goaded them into becoming a strong political force. The same, he shows, is happening in Islam today.

The author points out that in 1920's and 1930's Germans were feeling humiliated and confused, susceptible to outside influences. The Nazis, although a tiny percent of the population, were aggressive, well-organized, and targeted German youth. Islam in Europe, he says, is in a similar situation. Radical Islamicists find a Muslim population humiliated by the dominance of foreign cultures, and young Muslims are increasingly disdainful of their parents' political passivity.

Blankley is careful to note that history is just a guide to possibilities, not a blueprint of the future.

Blankly points out many contemporary warning signs, one for example is a 2004 poll by the Guardian, a liberal British newspaper, in which 13% of Muslims polled publicly admitted to supporting more terrorist attacks on America. If 13% would admit this in public, how many more would admit this in private?

Blankley has a chapter on the actions America took during WWII - enlisting directors like John Ford and Frank Capra to make patriotic morale-boosting movies, censoring the broadcast of economic plans or criticism of physical equipment or troop morale, travel restrictions, etc, and in doing so shows how the Patriot Act is a fraction of what American once did to fight the enemy. He says that Americans during WWII were a little less concerned about rights, and more concerned about what the damage the enemy could inflict.

Concluding the book is a list of intelligent actions that should be undertaken. If the author is correct, and we do not heed his warnings, there could be a time some years into the future we look back and think, why didn't we take action when we still could?

Tony Blankley's "The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilization?" is a superb and long-overdue book. His portrayal of the challenge we face is both chilling and correct - "the mortal threat we face comes not merely from Osama bin Laden and a few thousand terrorists. Rather, we are confronted with the Islamic world - a fifth of mankind - in turmoil, and insurgent as it has not been in at least five hundred years, if not fifteen hundred years." The true threat spectrum encompasses not only radical Islamists, but a variety of fundamentalist Islamist groups, hell-bent on fulfilling what they passionately believe to be their most important religious obligation - establishment of a global caliphate, governed by Sharia law.
Blankley details how only very few media pundits, government officials or elite members in the West are willing to acknowledge the profound nature of this challenge. The problem is particularly acute in Europe, where several generations' worth of social and cultural policies of denigrating nationalism and Christianity - all driven by a mistaken belief that it was these forces that caused World Wars I and II - have "slowly morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that has denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense." The situation in the United States is not nearly as grave, although there is a concerted effort by the proponents of multi-culturalism and civil liberties absolutists to oppose all government policies that can be used to tackle the Islamist threat. In any case, if the Islamization of Western Europe, described by Blankley and a few other prescient scholars, succeeds, the U.S. would be facing the gravest geo-political threat in its history.
The book does, however, end on a position note, with the author arguing that with the appropriate U.S. leadership, both Europe and the United States can win this clash of civilizations.

I am not much for the many, many political talk shows that shower the TV landscape, but I do admit to being addicted to the weekly "Mclaughlin Group" show on PBS for the last 20 years. Many cast members have come and gone, but Tony Blankley has been a steady presence on there for years now. His views are clearly pro-Republican, pro-Bush, which clashes with some of the other, clearly pro-Democratic, anti-Bush members on the panel. It makes for great TV viewing.

"The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?" (232 pages) starts with the premise that at this very minute we are at the dawn of yet another "battle to the death" confrontation by Islam on the Christian-based societies of Europe and America. If you can't buy into that basic premise, this book will annoy you to no end. If, however, you buy into the premise, Blankley has a lot of interesting, if not provoking, theories. Thus Blankley says that the concept of the war on terror is deeply flawed, as "we are facing a challenge of immigration, cultural aggression, and a conflict of values, religions, and lifestyles." Blankley goes into detail on how the current Islam thread is akin to the rise of Nazi-fascism in the 30s: "Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas of their religious culture." Blankley also goes into detail about the many problems posed by the massive Islam immigration into Europe in the last several decades, describing as an example how Malmo, Sweden's population is now 25 percent Islam, and what it has done to the city. In the last part of the book, Blankley offers several potentially controversial ideas on how to win this battle. You'll want to read it for yourself...

This book should be required reading for high school and college students, whether one accepts the basic premise or not. Blankley establishes himself as an astute observer of history. Whether he is right or not, I guess we will find out over time.

Islam represents about 1/5 of the world's population, and during the Crusades got as far as Vienna (1682) in its attempt at world rule. In 1928 an aggressive form of Islam was born, and has been growing. Scholars have concluded that the Protestant Reformation would not have succeeded without Gutenberg's development of printing that allowed much greater dissemination of the Bible. Today's analogy is the Internet - Blakely sees it as making militant Islam's growth possible, and notes that militant Islam sites have grown from 12 to about 2,000 in only a few years. (Blankley also points out a parallel growth in the U.S. of Protestant evangelists since the Roe vs. Wade decision.)

Blankley believes Europe is in particular danger of being taken over by Muslim extremists. Islam already has about 20 adherents there - not all support violence, but extremists are focusing on recruiting the youth, following the Nazi's example prior to WWII. Europe initially welcomed the immigrants as a means of doing the "jobs they didn't want" - now the general population believes things have gotten out of hand and want it stopped. About 60% of European Muslims want to be governed by 'shia' - Muslim law - a radical departure from Christianity and existing laws within Europe; almost as alarming is the finding that an increasing proportion do not want to be assimilated into European society.

The U.S., while not having as great a population of Muslims nor problems with them (yet?), is not immune to future problems. Blankley sees major recruiting sources within U.S. prisons (blacks, drug users), and problems with our Mexican border.

Recommendations: Blankley suggests that the U.S. broaden its "War on Terror" to a "War on Islamist jihadists." Bush may have been reticent to do so initially for fear of alienating too many Muslims - however, by this point Blankley believes Bush couldn't do much worse than he already has. Ethnic profiling, securing our borders, and adopting national ID cards are other suggestions. Boosting Europe (prevent Eurabia from developing) is also a priority - Blankley would do this by encouraging religious prosletization by Americans (about 10% regularly attend church in Europe, vs. 50% in the U.S.

We all would benefit from reading Blankley's book. It is a serious matter and well thought out.

Blankley's thesis is quite simple: America has an enormous amount to lose if the West does not halt the slide of Europe into Eurabia. Eurabia is what many are calling the ongoing Arab (Muslim) takeover of Europe. Blankley argues that the transformation of Europe into an Islamic continent is every bit as worrying as the prospect of Europe being subsumed by the Nazis last century.

The transformation is mainly being fueled by population decline among ethnic Europeans, coupled with ongoing Muslim immigration. Muslim families of course continue to be much larger than European families, so demographic changes alone would seem to guarantee a Muslim majority in Europe perhaps by the end this century.

Consider the figures Blankley provides: A few hundred thousand Muslims lived in Europe thirty years ago. Today there are over 20 million, and the numbers are climbing fast. Right now 40 per cent of the population of Rotterdam is Muslim. Surveys of British Muslims in 2004 found that 61 per cent wanted sharia law; 26 per cent believed Muslims had already integrated too much into British society; and only about 70 per cent would turn in a fellow Muslim if he were a terrorist.

Anecdotal evidence also verifies the numbers. For example, there are today many European cities which contain no-go zones in which ethnic Europeans - even armed police - dare not enter.

But it is not just this rising wave of Islam that is transforming Europe. There is also the decline of the very heart and soul of Europe. Two thousands years of the Judeo-Christian heritage - and all its fruit, including democracy, freedom and human rights - is in jeopardy. Indeed, it is at risk of being replaced by sharia law and a rejection of democracy.

Europe's forty to fifty year experiment with multiculturalism, notes Blankley, has been a dismal failure. While some Muslims have integrated, many have not. Indeed, growing numbers of Muslims in Europe do not want to integrate but to dominate.

Indeed, there are deep divisions within the European Islamic community as to how they should proceed. Some do want to integrate fully, and that should be encouraged. But some want to remain separate, and some want to convert the West to Islam. And the separatists come in various varieties, including peaceful and violent. But of concern is the fact that while only a minority are resorting to violence, increasingly the majority are condoning or excusing the violence.

While these trends suggest that Europe is racing inevitably toward an Eurabian fate, Blankley suggests it is not a foregone conclusion, especially if the West has the will to turn things around. He says that now is the time for Europe to make a choice: what does it really value? Does it value more the granting of rights and tolerance to those who wish to destroy it, or does it value the survival of western civilisation?

Blankley sees signs of hope, especially since 2004. While the American wake-up call was September 11, 2001, it took three more years for Europe. That is because in 2004 three events woke up slumbering Europe: the Madrid train bombing in March, the Beslan, Russia massacre in September, and the assassination of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in November.

While Europe had been used to terrorist acts on their home soil, these three episodes opened the eyes on many Europeans, and sparked a raging debate about the nature of Europe itself, the success or otherwise of multiculturalism, and the religious clash of civilizations.

But Blankley rightly asks, can a largely secular Europe rally itself to the cause? A continent that has lost its own soul may be ill-equipped to stand up and fight. But he sees some hope here as well: Europe may not be quite as secular as many suppose, and small but encouraging signs point to a possible rebirth in religion and European identity.

Developing stronger ties with Europe, as hard as that may be, is in America's interests here. Blankley suggests other measures are needed in the war against terror. They include acknowledging that we are in a war; identifying the enemy (Islamic jihadists); making an official declaration of war; and making some painful decisions about internal security.

Just as America and Britain were willing to temporarily curtail some individual liberties in the face of the Nazi threat, so we too should be willing to do the same against the Islamists. This might include steps such as national identity cards; increased border protection; ethnic profiling, especially at vital areas like airports; and as a last resort, more possible military action in the Middle East.

These are the steps a reluctant West must take if it is to properly respond to the threat of Islamic terrorism. In all this Blankley is mildly optimistic. If we have the will to recognize and counter this new threat to the West, we can prevail. But that is the million dollar question: do we have that will? Reading this book might help to strengthen the necessary resolve.

With his timely and desperately needed new book entitled, "The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?," Tony Blankley has done all who care about the rights of the innocent, the rule of law, and the flickering flame of liberty, a huge favor.

With detailed research and insightful writing, this thoughtful and respected author points out what we all need to acknowledge: That, as of this moment, we are losing the clash of civilizations. Political correctness, ignorance, and complacency, are weakening our resolve to fight terrorism and preserve our way of life.

If you are going to buy one book this year, get this one. It will awaken you to a clear and present danger that already impacts your everyday life.

This is a must-read book to give anyone who thinks the Islamofascist terrorist threat is merely a persistent "nuisance" like prostitution (John Kerry) or a "bumper sticker slogan" (John Edwards), or that our response to the threat is so much neoconservative fear-mongering. Blankley convincingly raises the alarm against the West's complacency, political correctness and multiculturalism, especially in Europe, that blind us to the depth of the existential threat and anesthetize us from appropriate levels of response.

But the book is surprisingly upbeat in many instances. For example, Blankley argues that 2005 was a turning point in Europe, especially with the brutal daylight murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, a Dutch film maker and enfant terrible who offended Muslims with a short movie exposé of the constant cruelty meted out by most Muslims against women, and not just by the crazy jihadists (e.g., "honor" killings, wife beatings, forced marriages, house-bound slavery, genital mutilations of little girls, stonings-to-death for adultery). Blankley sees a silver lining in the French and Dutch rejections at the polls of the proposed EU constitution in 2005, coupled, as most of those votes were, to a rejection of allowing Muslim Turkey to enter the EU. He also predicts there will be more European restrictions on Muslim immigration and deportations of incendiary jihadist imams, predictions that have come true in the UK, Holland and Denmark.

My only reservations about the book (not significant enough to deny it 5 stars) are that Blankley can get a tad politically correct himself when analyzing Islam, and for all his passion about how Islamofascism needs as robust a response as the West gave Nazism and Japanese imperialism, he pulls his punches.

On the subject of endless jihad, he makes the same fundamental, erroneous assumption that many in the commentariat make: that the fundamentalist frontline terrorists are some sort of aberration from mainstream Islam, which is somehow, by contrast, passive and pacific. This is the Big Lie that Muslims have so far been very successful at propagating, with Tony Blankley just another victim. An honest assessment is that the Islamist terrorists' actions are not based on some sort of poison injected into Islam by Whahabbists or the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, everything they say comes straight from the Koran. They don't have to make any of this stuff up about killing the infidels wherever they may find them, or that even the trees call out for the killing of Jews. It's all right there in the Koran. Mohammad was the Ur-Terrorist, misogynist, and yes, pedophile (a 54-year-old man for whom Allah took a moment out of all Eternity in the Koran to tell Mohammad it was OK for him to marry and bed a 9-year-old girl; for further on this and more, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, Infidel, by a courageous ex-Muslim who exposes the core of Islam for what it is).

On the second point, some proposed Western offensives in this war, Blankley's book ends with some very good, concrete suggestions about how we can be more ruthless and aggressive in fighting Islamic attacks against the West. But if we are truly in an existential war as grave as WWII, and I agree with Blankley that we are, then I wish I had also seen in his book the following recommendations for future action that would be commensurate with the threat:

1. An immediate end to all Saudi funding of jihadist groups, including the madrassas and mosques they build worldwide and fill with extremist imams espousing the most virulent forms of aggression against the West. If necessary, we should engineer a coup d'état that puts the current corrupt princes out of business and replaces them with people of our liking, perhaps a military junta. That could be combined with pre-emptive military action by U.S. troops already in Iraq to occupy the predominantly Shiite eastern part of Saudi Arabia where most of the oilfields are and to take over those oilfields and the revenues from them to help pay for the West's war effort for as long as it takes to win that war. That move would no doubt find favor with Shiite Iraq and Iran to the extent it defangs the major source of the Sunni threat. Analogous moves in the past: the 1954 CIA-led coup in Iran against socialist Mossadegh, and the scuttling of the French fleet in WWII rather than seeing it fall into the hands of the fascist Vichy French; only in this modern version we would use the equivalent of that fleet for our own ends. Saudi Arabia is the Number One Enemy of the West, with Iran coming in second. So far, all the Islamic terrorist acts against the West have been Sunni, and either Saudi-inspired or Saudi-funded.

2. Making a Manhattan Project out of increasing our independence from foreign oil. A start would be to open up ANWAR in Alaska to drilling, as well as a more robust program of exploiting offshore resources; building more refineries and nuclear power plants; and enforcing conservation by increasing taxes on gasoline at the pumps, gas guzzler SUVs, boats and private airplanes, and using that money to fund alternative energy research and exploration. The only way self-indulgent Westerners, especially Americans, are going to stop wasteful energy use is to make it too expensive for them to continue doing so.

3. Institute a "national service" draft. For now - and hopefully into the foreseeable future - the all-volunteer armed forces are all we need or want for national defense and security; having uncooperative or disgruntled draftees in those services could be counter-productive. But if we are really at war - and I agree with Blankley that we are - then the only way to overcome widespread complacency among the public is to make people feel they have a role to play. We have not been asked in the "global war on terror" to make any personal sacrifices; instead, we are told "to go about our business as usual" in order to deny the terrorists their goal of terrorizing us. But why can't all of us be involved in the fight? And with or without terrorism, the goal of national service - however that should take form, e.g. as support help in hospitals or tutors for students with special needs, in the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, or as civil defense coordinators in times of disasters - is a way for young Americans (and new immigrants) to develop a sense of patriotism. The Germans have universal "national service" conscription - why don't we?

4. We should have learned from Hurricane Katrina that most major U.S. cities are unprepared for disasters. See Ted Koppel's NPR commentary, "Grass-Roots America Isn't Prepared for Catastrophe" at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5597968. If the jihadists use a dirty radioactive weapon or bioterrorism as their next act, we all need to be individually better prepared to cope with the (literal) fallout. We should be exhorted to have emergency food, water, first aid, batteries, toilet paper, pet food, a portable radio and prescription medicine supplies in our homes. We ought to know from our local governments the emergency road routes and radio stations to tune into in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack. Nobody is paying any attention to that right now.

5. London has taught us the value of video cameras everywhere in a major urban area, and not only to find the culprits after terrorist attacks, but to prevent the attacks as well. We need many more surveillance cameras in urban areas.

6. We need the equivalent of the Voice of America beamed at all the Iron Curtain countries during the Cold War, sending out to the Muslim world the broadcasts of imams to our liking (or of our own making, if need be), doing what they can to reform Islam from an 8th Century monster to a modern, truly tolerant and compassionate religion. The politically correct attitude about our government's not getting involved in religion has to be abandoned to one where the government is seen as getting involved in fighting a mortal enemy. If it was OK to exterminate the Waco Branch Davidians in a firefight, why not blast propaganda at a religion that is far more dangerous? Whether you see Islam as a religion or a death cult, as presently constituted (and led) it is a mortal threat to the Western way of life. It needs to be reformed, and if not, subverted. If that doesn't work, it needs to be destroyed. If this is truly an existential war, then it is either "them or us" who survive.

7. What is undermining Europe today, moving it in the direction of "Eurabia," is the huge population of Muslim immigrants, mostly from North Africa and Turkey, who refuse to assimilate and have an Islamist agenda of their own to take over Europe (and then, the world). One solution to Europe's need for young immigrant labor to offset their native populations' drops in birthrates would be to import Hispanics with their Christian culture. Instead of Mexicans pouring into the U.S. illegally, why not have them legally exported to work in Europe and to replace the hostile Muslim populations living in their "no-go-zone" ghettos, who should be paid incentives to leave Europe voluntarily for any Muslim country of their choice. The cost to import Mexican labor would be offset by the reduction in policing Muslim ghettos and the reduction in unemployment benefits and crime.

8. Remove the non-profit status of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and other U.S. apologist, seditious pro-jihadist groups.

9. Block Internet jihadist web sites and jam and otherwise disable Al Jazeera and other conduits for the propaganda of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

10. Announce to the world that if there is another 9/11 attack, all of Islam, which until now has been either silent about jihadist atrocities or approving of them, can expect the sacred black Kaaba rock at the heart of Mecca to become highly radioactive for decades to come, thus making one of the 5 pillars of Islam, the hajj to Mecca, a suicidal act. If they want to bring us to our knees by attacking us at our vulnerable foundations, then, in a ruthless do-or-die war, we need to be prepared to respond in kind. A small, targeted nuke on Mecca would be less disastrous than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and just a credible threat of our willingness to do it would have far more effect. Sure, such an announcement would infuriate millions of Muslims. But aren't they already infuriated with us, anyway? How much more infuriated can they get? Isn't about time that we got just a little outrageous and crazy ourselves?

The foregoing no doubt will strike many as wildly extreme as responses to extremism. But war is in its very nature extreme. It usually means killing lots of people, including innocents. In WWII the Allies bombed entire cities, mostly filled with non-combatants, killing millions of people, and accepted that as the price of a war we did not start.

And inasmuch as Blankley counts on a European backlash to current Islamofascist terrorist acts to get them on a counter-offensive, he "ain't seen nothing yet" as to the next American backlash if the Islamofascists succeed in surpassing 9/11 in their next attacks on U.S. soil. For openers, the current crop of thumb-suckers in Congress will be swept away from power in droves. Sadly, though, it will probably take another 9/11 or worse to get America to focus on the real dangers in this world instead of the next Paris Hilton mishap.

Keep in mind that the book was published between the London terrorist bombings and the Muslim riots in France. Got that?
Now, fast forward to the riots over the cartoons, keeping in mind that the cartoons were originally published after the London bombings and about the same time as the riots in France, but no one paid attention to them until French and German papers reprinted them.
And now Muslim clerics want British laws to protect their religious traditions.
Now, read the first chapter.
It's not the future. It's starting to happen.

I write this review in early November 2005. The French have just experienced two weeks of violent rioting in the largely Muslim- inhabited suburbs of Paris, and in other heavily Muslim populated regions throughout France.
Blankley is not the first to suggest that Europe and in fact Western Civilization as a whole is threatened by a resurgent Islam. Bat- Yeor provided a most forceful statement of this thesis in her 'Eurabia'. Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn, many others are now writing on this subject.
Blankley however provides his own insights and his own suggested remedies, including curbs on 'immigration' and a transformation in the whole conception these societies have in his view mistakenly adopted. 'Multiculturalism and tolerance of autonomous Muslim areas is a major mistake.
Blankley in speaking to individual Muslims heard this not uncommon opinion.
"Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We [Muslims] will say what we want. We'll live how we want. It's outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture" (The West's Last Chance, page 75).
Blankley says that unless these societies begin to defend themselves they soon will be finished.

This book is a key part of the puzzle of how to defeat radical Islam and save Western civilization. It's certainly not a one stop source that explains all about our current situation, but is definitely worth reading for its ability to put our situation into historical context, remind us of how WWII was fought at the home front, and to suggest measures to improve our chances for victory.

The book starts with a slightly awkward and not terribly realistic sounding hypothetical of what could happen in the future if the West doesn't take the threat of radical Islam seriously enough. Nonetheless this hypothetical is important in driving home the point of what is at stake.

Much of the book centers on Europe as the bellwhether battleground in the Clash of Civilizations. First about the clash. This is not so much a conventional war: Radical Islam does not have the ability to defeat us conventionally. Hence the war is on our homefront and is waged there with terror and propaganda. If the West withdraws from confronting radical islam it can claim the entire religion, re-establish a Caliphate headed by the likes of Usama Bin Laden, and continue to wage jihad on the west from a vastly stronger position. Europe is the bellwhether for several reasons. First Europe chose to demographically support its welfare state with imported North African, Turkish, and Middle Eastern immigrant labor. The stagnation of the European economies (10% unemployment being common) has hit the young particularly (as high as 25%) and Muslim young perhaps the hardest. This gives the Europeans a built-in, easily radicalized Muslim sector which can ignite like wildfire in response to the spark of fundamentalist Imams, which are in plentiful supply. Second, Europe is least inclined to defend itself both on the homefront, and on the battlefield. While Islam suffers from a superiority-inferiority complex as a result of their religious beliefs, their historical decline, and their perceived tide-turning victory in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Europeans simply suffer from an inferiority complex. The European lack of faith in Western society's benefits and strong points does its part to encourage and embolden radical islam. Islam is simply taking the path of least resistance in inflitrating Europe and playing it off against the United States. Gaullist delusions of grandeur, witness Chirac, are also conveniences for the terrorists. As a result of all this some of the statistics about how European Muslims feel about terror in their own countries and in America is truly astonishing, and often not relayed in the news.

Civilizational clashes are slow. The rise and fall of great powers and civilizations are not recorded in the same few year time frames as conventional wars, but in decades and centuries. A Europe that has become a radically islamicized continent in several decades, or even a hundred years from now, will simply overwhelm an America standing alone.

Despite the threat on the homefront Blankley makes the convincing argument that we are lax in securing ourselves from radical Islam's methods. (I say radical islam because we are at war with radical islam, not all of islam. However, it is frightening how much radical islam appears to be winning the "hearts and minds" of most Muslims.) Being relatively young I was never fully aware of the steps the Allies took to win WWII on the homefront and the reasons why, largely because WWII is barely even taught in school anymore. This book strongly lays out what was done and how it helped win the war, and convincingly argues that similar measures would help us tremendously today.

Although this is not the only book you should read about terrorism, the War on Terror, Islam's crisis, What Iraq has to do with it all, it is one you would do well to read.