Years ago as I was awakening from my long Democrat
slumber and educating myself about Islam, one of the most eye-opening books
that I read was a 2006 page-turner titled While
Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within, by a gay American
living in Western Europe. Not only was it enlightening, but it made me an
instant fan of Bawer’s compelling storytelling. In addition to following his
subsequent books such as Surrender:
Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, The
Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the
Liberal Mind, and even a thriller about Islamic terrorism called
The Alhambra, I was fortunate and
honored to become friends with Bruce through our mutual work for the David
Horowitz Freedom Center.
Now Bawer has
released a new volume with a stark black cover titled Islam:
The Essays, a massive collection of well over three hundred of his articles on
this crucial subject dating from the fall of 2002 through the summer of 2018. Though
he suggests that the reader undertake the book chronologically in order to
understand the evolution of his understanding of the topic (“Early on, for
instance, I refer to ‘fundamentalist Islam’; soon enough, I drop the word ‘fundamentalist,’
having realized that Islam itself, properly understood, is fundamentalist.”), Bawer
is such an engaging, perceptive writer that one can open the book at random to
literally any page and find it impossible to stop reading. A chilling chronicle
of the Islamization of multicultural Europe over the last 17 years, Islam:
The Essays is a must-have for FrontPage Mag readers and for others in need, like
I once was, of awareness and insight into the Religion of Peace™.
Bruce Bawer was able
to find time to answer a few of my questions about the book and about the Islamization
of Europe today.
Mark
Tapson: Bruce,
you note in your opening essay that it wasn’t until you moved from your native New
York to Western Europe in ’98 that what you then called “fundamentalist” Islam
became a daily reality for you. How was that daily reality different, and how
long did it take you to fully grasp what the Islamization around you meant for Europe
and the West? Was there any particular incident that showed you the writing on
the wall?
I’d been in that
flat only a couple of weeks, however, when the landlord, claiming that the guy
who had sublet it to me had no legal right to do so, sued both of us, forcing
me to relocate pronto to less felicitous quarters in a neighborhood called the
Oud West, just west of downtown. From my first day there, every time I looked
out the window I’d see one or more women in hijab, each pushing a stroller or
baby carriage, and each accompanied by one or more small children. A few doors
down from my new place was a storefront establishment with a sign over it
reading “neighborhood association” and with a Turkish flag flying over the
door. When I walked up and looked inside – I wrote about this in While
Europe Slept (2006) – a bunch of nasty-looking non-Dutch faces glared back
at me.
Obviously there
was something major happening on the outskirts of Amsterdam – something that
wasn’t reflected in the newspapers I read and the news programs I watched on
Dutch TV. And if this was happening in Amsterdam, I surmised, it was probably
happening in other major European cities. Eager to find out more, I hightailed
it to the library, where I found a book by some English guy outlining – and
celebrating – the recent rise of Islam in Europe, his argument being that
Europe, having grown too secular, needed a spiritual component. I
already knew enough about Islam – although within the next few weeks and months
I learned a lot more – to realize that introducing Islam to Europe on a mass
scale would not enhance the native’s spiritual lives but would present them
with a host of challenges, some of them potentially insuperable.
MT: You write often about the scourge of
multiculturalism and how it aids and abets Islam while inculcating Westerners
with a loathing of their own culture. What is the antidote to multiculturalism?
What will it take to reverse this indoctrination?
BB: I’ll get back to you on that one after I
finish curing cancer. Seriously, it’s tough. What to do when kids across the
Western world are being indoctrinated with multiculturalism from the moment
they first enter a classroom? Multiculturalism has captured the schools and universities
and mainstream media. Kids are fed a Howard Zinn version of history that, if
you were brainwashed with it and never exposed to any other version, would make
you hate your country, too. I do see a glimmer of hope in the fact that
multiculturalists have gone so far that more and more young people are starting
to see through it. I would like to think that writers like you and me can sway
a lot of uncertain young minds, but the people who are succeeding at that task
on a big scale are people closer to their own generation who give talks at
campuses (if allowed) and post videos online (if not deplatformed) that debunk
the multicultural narrative. For a lot of young people, moreover, personal
exposure to the ugly realities of Islam, which are so utterly at odds with the
propaganda they’ve been fed, can help them snap out of their multicultural
reveries.
MT: You mention that this collection of essays
“reflects certain lamentable developments in the mainstream media” – meaning,
of course, its reflexive defense of Islam. Do you see any hopeful sign that
either the American or European mainstream media is waking up to the Islam Problem,
or are they even more stubbornly entrenched than ever in their denial?
BB: The latter. The New York Times gets worse and
worse. Even Fox News punished Jeanine Pirro recently for daring to suggest that
Ilhan Omar, hijab and all, might actually be a devout follower of her own
religion’s dictates. Part of the problem is that the old-fashioned type of
journalist, the street-smart working-class guy who had a healthy suspicion of
all elites and a well-developed BS detector and used to be played in movies by
guys like Spencer Tracy, has long since died off and been replaced by
privileged kids from fancy colleges and journalism schools who have been
marinated for years in identity-group ideology and who are often clueless about
the real world. In the last couple of years websites that were receptive to
articles critical of Islam have seemed to back off from the topic. Why? Cowed
by advertisers? Afraid to offend the GOP establishment? Who knows?
MT: Through their immigration policies and willful
blindness about Islam, the political and media elites have betrayed the
citizens of Europe. Do you think the recent rise of European populism can stem
the tide of the continent’s Islamization, or is it “too little, too late”?
BB: The so-called “populists” are winning big
scare headlines in the leftist mainstream media, but not enough votes to make a
difference. In this year’s European elections, Germans, apparently having
forgotten the mass rapes on New Year’s Eve 2015-16, went for the Greens. In
France, the weekly street protests bv gilets jaunes seem barely
connected to concerns about rapid Islamization. Belgium? Forget it. Sweden?
Lost. In Denmark’s 2019 elections, support for the Islam-critical Danish
People’s Party dropped like a rock. In the UK, the success of Nigel Farage’s
Brexit Party was a step forward, but if Brits want to save their country
they’ll need to overcome Farage’s silence on Islam. In the Netherlands, Thierry
Baudet’s Islam-critical party, founded three years ago, is doing OK, but
largely because it’s taking voters from Geert Wilders. And in Norway the
once-promising Progress Party, now in government for six years, has long since
gone mainstream, leaving critics of Islam without a real home.
The brightest
glimmer of hope in Western Europe is in Italy, where Matteo Salvini’s victory
last year, like Trump’s in 2016, encouraged serious people across the continent
who want their own countries to take such steps. Many also look with admiration
to the governments in Hungary, Poland, and other Eastern European countries
that have withstood EU demands that they take in Muslim migrants. But is there
any real hope for Western Europe? I have to admit to being baffled and
frustrated by the continued refusal of these countries’ voters to stand up for
their children’s futures, but I have to add that other informed observers are
more optimistic than I am.
From FrontPage Mag, 7/22/19
