Diana West is always on target.  Here, some cogent remarks on anti-semitism’s roots in the Islamic world:

[Excerpt...]As it happens, I began the calendar year thinking about this subject - exonerating Islam - while discussing a PBS documentary on anti-semitism in the Islamic world. The show’s conclusion: What isn’t Israel’s fault is that of the West. 

Well, you can’t expect much more from (lefty) PBS. What was startling about the message, however, was one of the messenger’s: none other than the eminent historian Bernard Lewis. He declared that anti-semitism didn’t even exist in the Middle East until European Christian colonizers brought it. You don’t need to be a scholar of Mr. Lewis’ stature to know that European colonization of the Middle East didn’t begin until some 1,100 years after Islamic anti-semitism got going in the Koran, the canonical commentaries on the Koran and in a long and painful (for Christians also) historical record.

Because Mr. Lewis is probably the most influential voice on Islam in our time — particularly for the U.S. foreign policy establishment — this pronouncements are more than significant. Right or, in this case, wrong, they become the conventional wisdom, or reinforce it.

This comes to mind because Mr. Lewis has done it again — holding Europe responsible for unpalatable traditions of Islam. Writing at The American Thinker blog, Andrew Bostom, author of “The Legacy of Jihad” and, forthcoming, “The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism,” quotes a recent speech in which Mr. Lewis said: “The authoritarianism present in the Middle East region is not part of the Arab and Muslim traditions, but it has been imported from Europe.”

Mr. Bostom goes on to cite copious chapter and verse - including earlier writings by Mr. Lewis himself - demonstrating that “the Arab and Muslim tradition” needed no lessons from Europe on authoritarianism.[...]

Please read her entire piece.  Lewis and Bostom are both enormous assets, and Bernard Lewis is a founding father of the scholarship that has exposed the Islamist threat to the West.  West respects him as do we all, and her concerns about his recent writings are also completely to the point.

The Andrew Bostom book that analyzes this further can be advance-ordered (it comes out in January 2008): The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History .  The advance reviews all look great, from Steven Katz, Victor Davis Hanson, Michael Ledeen and others.

Bernard Lewis has published so widely on Islam, and his many books are  foundational.  Of interest in light of this discussion is his latest speech Europe and Islam, available here in pamphlet form, from the 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture, delivered at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., on March 7, 2007.