Tony Blankley’s book “The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?” is out in paperback this week.
The question mark in Blankley’s subtitle reflects his belief that the issue still lies in the balance.
His theme is that the jihadist threat (“far closer than most people realize to taking over Europe”) is as great as was that of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.
One Jerusalem organized a bloggers’ conference call with Blankley yesterday to discuss the book and other issues. The recording of the call is posted here. The blogs on the call were American Thinker, Boker tov, Boulder!, Gateway Pundit, Grandaddy Long Legs, In Context, Israpundit, Jewish Current Issues and Mere Rhetoric. Click on the blog names to read the posts, particularly Omri Ceren’s stellar analysis and Anne Lieberman's autobiographical reflection.
There is a particularly good colloquy on the recording between Blankley and Lieberman about the division between those who see a threat and those who deny it, and whether bloggers are simply preaching to their own choirs. Blankley’s theory is that people tend to see things through the prism of other issues (including an obsessive Bush hatred) that can cloud their judgment and perception, but that the cumulative effect of many individual blogs -- like that of many individual votes -- is significant, and impacts both opinion leaders (his weekly column this morning cites three different blogs) and politicians. And one never knows, he said, the ultimate impact of a single article or a single post once it enters the Ethernet.
And vice versa I think: As a result of the bloggers call, and the collective impact of the above posts, more people will now know of an important book the MSM has largely downplayed or ignored, and it will have an effect. Kudos to One Jerusalem for the medium, and to Tony Blankley for the message.
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