Wise words from Bernard Lewis.(Notes & Comments: April 2007)

Last month, the great scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis gave the Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Mr. Lewis's subject was Islam and Europe, and we thought it worth sharing some central bits of his sober assessment. Noting the many troubling signs of "a return among Muslims to what they perceive as the cosmic struggle for world domination" between Christianity and Islam, Mr. Lewis pointed out the extent to which recent U.S. actions--or rather inactions--confirmed radical Islamicists such as Osama bin Laden in the belief that America was a "soft" power unwilling to defend itself. "This belief was confirmed in the 1990s," Mr. Lewis wrote,

 
   when we saw one attack after another on 
   American bases and installations with virtually 
   no effective response of any kind--only angry 
   words and expensive missiles dispatched to 
   remote and uninhabited places. The lessons of 
   Vietnam and Beirut were confirmed by 
   Mogadishu. "Hit them, and they'll run." This 
   was the perceived sequence leading up to 9/11. 
   That attack was clearly intended to be the 
   completion of the first sequence and the 
   beginning of the new one, taking the war into 
   the heart of the enemy camp. 
 
      In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute 
   minority of Muslims, the third wave of attack 
   on Europe has clearly begun. We should not 
   delude ourselves as to what it is and what it 
   means. This time it is taking different forms 
   and two in particular: terror and migration. 

And what has been the West's response to this threat? In some ways, Mr. Lewis's answer to that question is even more ...