Good analysis. Too bad the MSM seems incapable of similar rational thought.
"Islamists want to draw the limits of world freedoms, and Western liberals reject that limitation."
I think we should add that conservatives reject that limitation, too. In fact, the liberals seem to be prepared to swallow it, because with a few honorable exceptions most of them are spineless.
Only conservatives seem to be prepared to say that they refuse to let Muslim clerics dictate what they can say and do. Liberals, however, have shown that they are eager to retreat and to compromise.
No, he means Western liberals--he is writing in Europe. In America, where socialism never sold, American socialists have stolen the word 'liberal'. In terms of Western civilization, we American conservatives are conserving liberalism in its original sense: free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech.
Socialists (falsely called 'liberals' in America) aren't retreating, because they were never really committed to the defense of freedom. (Notice how the further left the faculty and administration of a university are, the more likely it is to have a 'speech code' or have adopted one only to have it overturned? That's because American liberals aren't liberal in the old, original sense of the word.) It's not retreat to support your tactical allies. The left thinks the Islamists are useful idiots, and the Islamists return the favor. It happens on this point, it is the Islamists who are correct--the left advances their cause far more than the other way around, because unlike the Caliphate, which worked as a tyranny for over a millenium, socialism can't work long-term (as Hayek and vonMises showed in argumentation as it was being implemented by force in Russia, and history has shown since.)
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the attachment of the map colors to parties after the 2000 election, rather than incumbent and challenger as traditionally, we 'liberated' the color red form the left. Now I want the word liberal back--it really is ours, not theirs.