Book Review: While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer.

(note: this is a long one, so get a beverage. This is a book I highly recommend and I only scratch the surface here, I don't really lay out much of the book's argument here, just parts I particularly liked.)

I recently read the book While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer, and found it to be an interesting look at the European mindset. I saw Mr. Bawer interviewed on Bill Moyers' Journal a while back and had been meaning to read this book for a while. After reading some articles in European papers, I decided to finally check this book out. To give some background, Bruce Bawer is a gay Catholic who wrote the book Stealing Jesus, a critical look at the Religious Right in America back in the mid-nineties. In 1998, he moved to Europe to live with his Norwegian partner and to get away from the anti-gay attitudes he experienced from the far-right in this country. At first, he found living in Amsterdam to be a refreshing change. He could walk down the street holding hands with his partner without getting so much as a funny look from passers-by. However, he soon discovered that the outskirts of that city, like many large European cities contained large populations of Muslim immigrants that didn't share this "live and let live" attitude. In the book he talks about the ever-growing number of radical Muslims living in Europe, the ideologies of hatred being spread in the mosques, and the utter inability of the European elite to acknowledge, much less take steps to solve, this problem. I'm willing to bet that he is probably considered far-right in Europe, but on the American political spectrum he falls on the left side of the spectrum. (he seems like more of a Hillary or McCain Democrat than an Obama backer reading some of his articles) I think this is the part of the post where I'm supposed to give the politically correct disclaimer. ("religion of peace", "hi-jacking of Islam", "tiny minority","poverty causes terrorism", etc.) Well, sorry you won't get any such wishful thinking from me. We're always told about how the vast majority of Muslims hate the actions of the extremists, but for the last 7 years their silence has been deafening. I believe their are a couple of reasons for this. 1) This minority is not as small as people believe. Most estimates I've seen give a number around 10-15%, I'd be inclined to believe the number is a little larger. I have no evidence to back this up, so it's only speculation on my part (and should be taken as such), but I find it hard to believe that a "tiny" minority would be able to either frighten or influence those in the majority to remain virtually silent. 2) I think that many people around the world (the Muslim world in particular) may not care for the ideology of the Bin Laden's of the world, but hate the United States worse and view it as a bigger threat. With that in mind, a lot of people are probably willing to look the other way since it's for "a good cause". Just had to get that off my chest.

The book begins with Bawer's description of the problem of Islamic radicalism in terms of violence, sharia law, non-integration with native populations, etc. (This was worse than I'd imagined, but it wasn't really a shock. What came as a shock to me is how the European political elite is not only unwilling to acknowledge or deal with the problem, but in many ways are acting in ways complicit with the destruction of their own cultures.) At this point in most of 16 to 20% of children are Muslims. This number will only grow since the average birth-rate among native Europeans ranges from 1.2 to 1.8 (since it takes 2 people to make a baby, and since not all children will live to adulthood, the number must be at least 2.1 for a population to break even) while the birthrate among the Muslim immigrants is much higher. The open-borders policies in a lot of these nations has exacerbated this. These numbers wouldn't be bad if newly arrived Muslims were integrated into the cultures of the countries (as is the case in the U.S.), but there doesn't seem to be much desire for that on either side. In a lot of cases you have 2nd and 3rd generation native born people who don't speak the language of and have little or no loyalties or connection to the nation of their birth. America has an advantage in that being an American is not about your ethnicity or skin color as much as political philosophy and buying into our system of government. The elites don't seem to understand why this is a problem in part, Bawer claims, because of the secularization of Europe. In other words, in America we have enough religious extremists to recognize that it can be a dangerous thing. In Europe, they have no "Christian Right" to scare them. This has left them vulnerable to an even more dangerous form of extremism. As Bawer puts it "Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me." He also states: "I was beginning to see that when Christian faith had departed.....it left the Continent vulnerable to conquest by people with deeper faith and stronger convictions. What's more, no longer able to take religion seriously themselves, many Europeans were unable to believe that other people might take religion very seriously indeed". I've never thought of the religious right in this country as something that inoculates us from something worse. He also discusses this weird dichotomy where people don't want other races to integrate into their cultures, preferring to let them live in ghettos where extremism breeds like bacteria, but on the other hand don't want to be looked at as being racist so they won't speak out about any violent act carried out by Muslims. Here's one chilling example:

On September 6, 2001, it was reported that 65 percent of rapes in Norway were
committed by "non-Western immigrants" (a term that in Norway is essentially
synonymous with "Muslims"); asked to comment on this alarming statistic, Wikan
(a prominent professor) said that "Norwegian women must take their share of
responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress
provocative......."Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural
society and adapt to it."

This is a common thread that runs throughout the book. Radical Muslims do something bad, so the government issues a report about how the victims basically deserve it, due to the inequalities in those nations. That said, many of these same "impoverished victims" are paid taxpayer dollars not to work (and, I should add, they are paid more money per month by the governments than I make). The prevailing idea among the left in Europe, as in this country is that terrorism's greatest root is poverty. This may be true of Palestinians, but doesn't hold up when looking at 9/11, the Madrid bombings, the 7/7 attacks in London, etc. There is a connection in all of these instances, but it's the one we're not supposed to talk about. Examples of this mind-set in Europe make appearances all through the book. At one point to summarize this difference between Americans and Europeans he says (paraphrasing) "Americans were taught to believe that their opinions about the world should (ahem) have their foundations in the world's sociopolitical reality, many Europeans were taught to be "sophisticated"-which meant holding opinions that had little or no connection to observable reality. (later) For them, the Milosevics of the world, however monstrous, are also, quite simply, a fact of life. They think of themselves as realists-but this isn't realism; it's fatalism. And it can shade into a strange, disturbing respect for dictators." No where is this more evident than in the romanticisation that has occured with regard to communism. Bawer powerfully illustrates this by recounting his experiences in Berlin. He took a train ride to East Berlin shortly after the wall fell. When he crossed from West to East, he saw a transformation from a vibrant modern city to a dilapidated place where many buildings sported 50 year-old bullet holes and looked untouched since the fall of the Nazis in 1945. Even more stark was the contrast between the people. The East Germans all looked gaunt and gray with hopeless looks on their faces. Another passenger on the train flinched at the sight of a man in a uniform, who turned out to be the conductor checking tickets. Fast forward 15 or 16 years. This same spot is now one of the most beautiful areas in Europe. He is sitting at a Starbucks near the Brandenburg gate. Gone are the gaunt, gray faces. A group of teenage boys walk by who must have been infants when the wall fell. He thought: "This is what it was all for. It was for them- for the sake of these then unborn young people- that the West had stood up to Communism for so long and at such risk and expense. It was for them that JFK had come to Berlin and said, 'Ich bin ein Berliner'; it was for them that Reagan had come and said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' Yet what had these kids been taught about that history?" Right after thinking this Bawer got his answer as a bunch of them were wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. (For those of you who don't know, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a murdering thug who was Castro's second in command and presided over firing squads along with founding Cuba's "labor camp" system, he is now a romantic hero to leftist morons the world over.) Bawer soon realized that a souvenir shop next to the Starbucks carried a huge assortment of Che T-shirts. Some of which also had red stars on them or read "Hasta la victoria siempre" (ever onward to victory), in Berlin of all places, home of one of those nightmarish victories. Bawer then relates a story about a friend of his in junior high school whose father had been a journalist under Batista. "When Castro and Guevara came to power they arrested Jose's father, tortured him, and put his eyes out." He talks of the first time he met Jose's father in his home and concludes: "Ever since then, every time I've seen a Che T-shirt on some clueless young person, I've thought of Jose's father sitting in his living room, surrounded by books he could no longer read." Damn.

Here are a few more (but by no means all) quotes from the book that stuck out to me.

-"...for Islamists there are no nuances. In a war between people who had rock solid beliefs and people who are capable of nuancing away pure evil, who has the advantage?"

-"After Israel did the world the favor of getting rid of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, the British House of Commons observed a moment of silence in his memory. He was repeatedly referred to as the 'spiritual leader of Hamas' which is rather like calling Hitler the 'spiritual leader of Nazism'."

- When talking about the motive for terrorism: "Such acts are not a normal reaction to desperation and poverty. There are people in China and India and South America who are far poorer than most Islamic terrorists but who would never do such things. Atrocities on the scale of Beslan are the result of intense indoctrination in a life-despising ideology."

- In the wake of the London bombing "Tony Blair named Tariq Ramadan (banned from the U.S. and France and Inayat Bunglawala (who'd called Osama Bin Laden a "freedom fighter") to a task force for tackling Muslim extremism."

- "That a silent majority of Europe's Muslims believed in democracy and despised terrorism was by now a truism. Observers found themselves thinking, however, that if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever."

- "It's the absence of a patriotism as powerful as America's- the absence that is, of a life-or-death belief by individuals in their country's essential goodness and in their people's future- that's helping Western Europe to slip toward its doom"

- "In the end, Europe's enemy is not Islam, or even radical Islam. Europe's enemy is itself- its self destructive passivity, its softness toward tyranny, its reflexive inclination to appease, and its uncomprehending distaste for America's pride, courage, and resolve in the face of a deadly foe."

He concludes by pointing out that Europe's problems require some common sense solutions about immigration and how to integrate Muslim populations into the various countries. Public opinion is starting to turn around and some (minuscule) reforms have taken place since the book was written. But given the fantasy-world the political elite live in, it's likely that the problem will continue to get worse and either a) nothing is done until it's too late. b) the people will revolt and put in far right nationalists, which could involve a lot of brutality on both sides, and probably won't work due to the shifting numbers. He ends by asking where the leaders are who will lead them out of this mess. And he quotes Churchill (which is what I'm about to do, 'cause you've made it this far and since when does a guy need an excuse to quote Churchill?)

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

Bawer concludes:"To read Churchill's wartime speeches is to experience an attitude and a
rhetoric that, in today's Europe, seem alien or antique...the stark
difference between the unwavering moral conviction that led to Allied victory in
World War II and the unprincipled spirit of compromise and capitulation that is
guiding today's Europe, step by step, to the gallows."