Perhaps James Woolsey is not quite as convinced that Bernard Lewis still embodies  the Last Word on Islam, and how to deal with it, as he once was. Perhaps others, once unswervable acolytes of  Lewis, including a Pentagon expert or two, are beginning to feel the same way.

Once Andrew Bostom's book on the view of Jews presented in the Qur'an and Hadith, and the historical record -- the real record -- of the treatment of Jews under Islam, appears,  it will no longer be possible for anyone of sense to  read Lewis's "The Jews of Islam" or "Semites and Anti-Semites" with  the respect once automatically accorded such works. 

Lewis still has a chance, over the next few months, to explain how he himself misunderstood the full ferocity, and the full menace, of Islam. He has a chance to explain exactly why he was wrong to support the Oslo Accords and the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations nonsense in Iraq. He has a chance, either when he receives the ISI "Western Civilization" award, or that other thing being put on at one of those well-heeled think-tanks, where the spouting-off of its "resident scholars" gives the Piazza Navona  a run for its watery money, way down in Washington town.

He can do this. He can deliver a speech entitled "Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong." Or he can continue to offer the mixture as before -- Never Apologize, Never Explain -- and continue to chip away at what is left of his own monument. A pity.