Mr Dalrymple hits the nail

http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1339/article_detail.asp

"Steyn is right that the main struggle is one of ideas. Unfortunately, political correctness, which is to thought what sentimentality is to compassion, means that the intelligentsia of the West has disarmed itself in advance of any possible struggle. But I think Steyn is mistaken, or at least fails to make a proper distinction, when he says that Islam is ideologically strong and confident. Shrillness and intolerance are not signs of strength, but of weakness; fundamentalism is a response to an awareness that, if the methods of intellectual inquiry that were used to challenge Christianity were permitted in the Muslim world, Islam would soon fall apart. But if Islam fell apart in the Islamic world, what source of self-respect would be left to the population? Their backwardness and mental impoverishment would then be exposed in all nakedness."
Theodore Dalrymple

This is a thought that has struck me many times. Islam is the only export (apart from Oil) from many places in the 'Muslim lands'. Should it be discredited, they would be desperately forlorn places. And should the west develop nuclear fusion, even the oil would be surplus to requirements...