A quote from Lawrence Auster at his blog, 19 May 2008

[Andrew] Bostom in this book [The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism] appears to have performed on Islamic anti-Semitism the same indispensable operation he performed on Islamic jihad in his previous collection, The Legacy of Jihad. That is, he shows how the demonization of Jews – and the mandate to demonize Jews – have been central to the most authoritative Islamic writings from the start, and that Muslims in their hatred, oppression, dehumanization, and killing of Jews during the 1,400 years since then have simply been following the sacred dictates of their religion.

And Bostom’s analysis remains true, even though it is also the case, as [Cornell historian Robert] Kaplan argues near the end of his article, that Koranic-dictated Jew-hatred has been intensified over the last century by Nazi, Communist, and Eurabian propaganda emanating from Europe. Bostom and Kaplan thus make mincemeat out of [Bernard] Lewis’s anti-European, anti-Christian argument that Islamic anti-Semitism is only a modern export from Europe, and that Christian anti-Semitism is uniquely wicked and indeed the only real anti-Semitism. Lewis’s rationalization of Islamic anti-Semitism is analogous to his rationalization of Islamic jihadism and extremism generally. Islamic extremism, he has said over and over, has nothing to do with the core teachings of Islam, but is Muslims’ understandable response to the traumatic experience of having been “left behind” by the modern West. Since, according to Lewis, the poor Muslims’ extremism is the result of their having lost their previous power and dominance, the cure for their extremism must be ... to restore them to power and dominance. You know. Bring back those glorious days when Islam had lots of power and was conquering and subduing half the world and almost conquered Europe.

In any case, for Lewis, everything seriously bad about Islam is ultimately a result of, or a response to, the West.

It’s great that Andrew Bostom and Robert Kaplan are bringing out the truth about Islam and about Bernard Lewis’s cover-up of same, so that now for the first time in my knowledge, Lewis’s role as an Islam apologist is being critically discussed in a mainstream conservative publication.