Can the West defeat the Islamist threat? Here are ten reasons why NOT!"

Prof. David Selbourne of Oxford, England- from the London Times (truncated):

1. The extent of political division in the non-Muslim world about what is afoot.

2. The strengths of the world community of Muslims are being underestimated, and the nature of Islam misunderstood. It is neither a “religion of peace” nor a “religion hijacked” or “perverted” by “the few”... It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems. It therefore holds that it is in mankind’s own interests to be subdued under Islam’s rule. Such belief therefore makes an absurdity of the project to “democratise” Muslim nations in the West’s interests, an inversion that Islam cannot accept and, in its own terms, rightly so. It renders naive, too, the distinction between the military and political wings of Islamic movements...

3. The low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States.

4. The contribution to the disarray of Western policy-making being made by the egotistical competitiveness, and in some cases hysterics, of “experts” and commentators on Islam.

5. The confusion of “progressives” about the Islamic advance- misunderstand(ing) the inner strength of Islam’s revival, which is owed not to victimhood but to advancing confidence in its own belief system.

6. The vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses. Others believe their refusal of support for the war with Islam, if there is such a war, is a righteous one. But the consequences are the same: Islam’s advance is being borne along by Muslims and non-Muslims together.

7. The moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system. Doctrines of market freedom, free choice and competition — or “freedom ’n’ liberty” — are no match for the ethics of Islam and Sharia, like them or not.

8. The skilful use being made of the media and of the world wide web in the service both of the “electronic jihad” and the bamboozling of Western opinion by Muslim spokesmen.

9. The West’s dependency on the material resources of Arab and Muslim countries.

10. The West is convinced that its notions of technology-driven modernity and market-driven prog- ress are innately superior to the ideals of “backward” Islam. This is an old delusion. In 1899, Winston Churchill asserted that there was “no stronger retrograde force in the world” than Islam.

David Selbourne is the author of "The Losing Battle with Islam"