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A warning that goes against the flow

a book review by Eric Jackson

While Europe Slept:

How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within

by Bruce Bawer

Doubleday, New York (2006)

247 pp, $23.95 in hardcover

ISBN  0-385-51472-7

Bruce Bawer has his work cut out for him. An American expatriate in Norway and a partner in a gay marriage, his politics appear to roughly correspond to the right wing of the Log Cabin Republicans. A lesser but recurring theme of his book is support for an Iraq War that most Americans have turned against and most Europeans never supported in the first place, and the best hope for continuation of which after the 2008 US elections is that voters will set aside their qualms about the war and vote Republican based upon their hatred of homosexuals like Bawer.

This reviewer has stark political differences with this author, in case you haven't noticed. Much of While Europe Slept is, quite frankly, an annoying if well written read. But this is not one of these "you must read what the enemy is writing so as to better understand and defeat him" reviews. You see, this book is a discourse on a studiously ignored subject that may or may not be profound in its understanding of various aspects and may or may not be wise in its conclusions, but is nevertheless a provocative and intelligent start on a conversation that ought to be engaged and moreover can be fruitfully expanded to consider some more general questions that go well beyond Europe and Islam and into public policy considerations in the United States and Panama.

As Bawer recounts, he left the United States a bit annoyed by the influence of right-wing Christian fundamentalists, only to encounter in tolerant Amsterdam and later in Oslo --- and indeed across much of Europe --- a far more intolerant Islamic religious right (or is it left?). As in mosques where hatred of gays is preached and young men acting on those ideas attack homosexuals on the streets. As in the subjugation of women, including by beatings, rapes, female circumcision, forced marriages, confinement to the home and "honor" killings. As in growing immigrant communities that don't assimilate, many of whose members explicitly reject their adopted European countries' languages, customs and laws. As in frightened political, media and academic elites who would suppress freedom of expression about such matters in order to placate belligerent Muslims. The setting forth of the severity and dimensions of these problems is the strong point of While Europe Slept.

The rule of law, the sovereignty and self-identity of nations, precious freedoms won through long, repeated and bitter struggles (which Bawer seems to barely understand) and, on the bottom line, the peace and public order in Europe, all really are at stake. This book begins a discussion about certain salient features of the problem.

One aspect is how a free and open society responds to those within it who use their freedom of expression to advocate an unfree and closed society. It was a problem that Weimar Germany faced without much success, was a double-edged dilemma through which the United States muddled in the Cold War, and is in our time a challenge to every democracy within which a theocratic element of any religious confession operates politically.

Make no mistake about it, although Bawer apparently does: the problem of militant Islamic intolerance is something more universal, with its mirror images in Judaism, with its fanatical and trigger-happy Israeli settlers; in Hinduism, in which a religious coalition that includes the political heirs of Gandhi's assassin at one time formed the nuclear-armed government of India and today forms the main opposition; and in Christianity, where the likes of Jerry Falwell are wimps compared to the Northern Ireland Protestants who ran the infamous romper rooms during the Troubles and who vote for Ian Paisley today.

But then, it's militant Islam that has colonized contemporary Europe. Religious radicals of other faiths, if they emigrate, usually go to places where people of their tradition are in the majority.

So why is that? And why is it that most Muslim immigrants to the United States and Canada more quickly assimilate than their counterparts in Europe? Bawer has his explanations, which this reviewer doesn't entirely buy.

And what should a country do about immigrants from another culture? That's a current hot button issue in the United States and a topic that the ongoing influx of Americans is bound to raise once again in Panama.

Bawer, a conservative if others on the right will allow a gay man to be such, has his insights and conclusions about a particular immigration issue in Europe. You need not agree with his ideas to benefit from his book or to appreciate his effort to broach what can be a taboo subject in polite company.

Do understand that this is a polemic that celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall, dismisses the notion that anti-immigrant violence is a problem in Europe, and only at the end makes a fleeting reference to the post-unification rise of neo-Nazi gangs who attack foreigners in eastern Germany. Do recognize that this discourse touches upon Western European traditions of tolerance and freedom but seems not to be informed by a knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition or the religious wars of the Reformation and how these helped to form certain European attitudes that Bawer criticizes. Do notice that this book misrepresents the systematic use of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib as the isolated errors of a few individuals, that it tries to torture the fiasco in Iraq into something noble that it's not, that it's selective and superficial in its takes on ancient and recent history in the Muslim world.

Do not, however, join the lemmings who only read, watch or listen to stuff by people with whom they already agree. The intellectual tribalization that has divided Americans into those who only watch Fox and those who only watch CNN is not only reducing US political discourse to two factions shouting epithets past one another, it's turning a lot of otherwise worthy individuals into boring ignoramuses. Don't be one of those. Read widely. Read critically. Include this book on your reading list.

Theater, I Hate Hamlet
Books, Huellas Chinas en Panamá

Books, While Europe Slept