“If Islam is terrorizing the West today, that is not because it can, but because the West allows it to. For no matter how diminished, a still swinging Scimitar will always overcome a strong but sheathed Sword.” Those are the very last two sentences of my 352-page book, Sword and Scimitar, which chronicles fourteen centuries of warfare between Islam and the West.  They were meant to contrast how premodern Europeans -- chief among them the Crusaders -- took a manly stand and fought back against a then powerful and expansionist Islam, whereas their more decadent descendants in the modern West are eager to capitulate to a now weakened but still aggressive Islam in any which way possible. Although that last sentence about  “swinging scimitars” and “sheathed swords” was clearly symbolic, even the symbolism itself was recently validated:  The owners of a famous sports team have just discarded their longtime logo -- a...(Read Full Article)