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

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THE WEST'S LAST CHANCE: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? by Tony Blankley Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005 Hardback: 232 pages Rec. retail price: AUD$54.95

A few months ago Tony Blankley, former senior policy analyst for President Ronald Reagan and currently editorial-page editor of the Washingon Times, published The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? Henry Kissinger called it "extremely controversial, thought-provoking"; Bob Dole hailed it as "exceptional, a must-read". So it is. This is a valuable book because it does more than offer yet another analysis of the terrorist threat from radical Islam; it proposes what we in the West, and especially in the United States, should do to protect ourselves and our children from it. Like John Stone's recent and important address to the June 2006 Quadrant dinner, which focussed on the same problem in its Australian dimension, (1) it is very specific in its proposals. What follows is a review of this interesting book and a consideration of some of those proposals.

The book opens with a "Nightmare Scenario" set in 2007. Some of this seems unlikely, at least so soon. I would have set it in 2011. In London, and then quickly in copy-cat fashion all over Europe (the future Eurabia), a wave of attacks on statues, starting with the nude Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and on paintings deemed decadent or immoral, is followed by calls from European Muslims for the institution of sharia law within their communities. (This is likely--in fact, sharia law already operates de facto in parts of Britain, France and the Netherlands, and one day, when those in the Muslim banlieux of Paris decide to project their force to the centre, the Louvre may even burn, since representational art is a Muslim taboo.)

Meanwhile in the United States, according to the author's scenario, there has been a co-ordinated series of catastrophic bomb-blasts in supermarkets across several states (bombs in easily-accessible airport check-in halls would have greater economic impact, I'd have thought). The female Democratic presidential candidate (Hilary Clinton?), out to win by appearing tougher than the Republicans on the issue, adopts a very hard line against internal Islamists, promising that her administration will register all American Muslims and place them under curfew. (One can easily imagine this happening in the next few years, and it would happen at once, of course, if a nuclear suitcase-bomb went off in an American city.)

The Republican candidate counters by an appeal to the Muslim vote, traditionally Democrat but now alienated by that party's new hard line. At a massive Muslim rally he announces, to the jubilation...