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We recall that old parlor game: if you could take ten books with you to a desert island, what would they be? Obviously, the list is something of a “moveable feast” and may be modified as our tastes and intellectual needs change over the years, but this is a time in which certain books have become essential to our understanding of the tumultuous era we live in. Jamie’s Glazov’s _Showdown With Evil_, a selection of FrontPage interviews that he has conducted for the site over the last eight years, is one of those “desert island” books, meant to illumine and accompany us in discretionary solitude.
Of course, in today’s wired (or wireless) world, which is also a world in which a “terrorist event” can detonate anywhere and at any time, there are really no more desert islands where one can disregard the burdens and confusions of the real world and pretend that one is not implicated in history. There is no doubt an Internet café on Bouvet Island and a terrorist lurking about on Tristan da Cunha. The world we now experience has banished solitude and turned it into a nostalgic reminiscence, leaving us awash in information and susceptible to the unpredictable irruption of violence. This is one of the principal tenets of Glazov’s politically incorrect chrestomathy, a book which is a “body of learning.” But although there may be no more islands where we can retire from the turmoil of the world, there are introspective oases we can find here and there in books like this one.
On the one hand, Showdown With Evil applies to specific contexts now very much in the news. For example, it is especially timely in the light of the Oklahoma amendment prohibiting the introduction of Shari’a law and CAIR’s legal suit to block its implementation. It is also relevant for anyone intent on clarifying the issues involved in the ongoing controversy over the Ground Zero mosque or the debate over the selective voyeurism of airport screening techniques. But in a larger sense, it supplies a panoptic overview of the preeminent struggle of the modern age between a resurgent and supremacist Islam and a deeply conflicted West whose survival instinct is being ruthlessly probed and tested.
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