The suicide
bombing which slaughtered nearly two dozen concertgoers in Manchester last week
demonstrates yet again that terrorism is indeed becoming “part and parcel,” as
London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan declared, of European life. And yet the
continent’s elites continue to live in denial of the religious roots of that
terrorism. Few are willing to tell the truth about Islam and its impact on
Europe; even fewer have dared to tell that truth in the gripping way that only
fiction can. Controversial French novelist Michel Houllebecq’s bestselling Submission,
for example, recently struck a chord among readers with its chilling tale of
Europe’s embrace of sharia. And then there is Bruce Bawer’s new novel The Alhambra.
Critic, essayist,
and political journalist Bruce Bawer is the author of over a dozen books, most
notably While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying
the West from Within (2006), Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing
Freedom (2009), and The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity
Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (2012). He is a
native New Yorker who has lived in Europe since 1998, and who continues to
report on the continent’s decline and fall from the front lines. Full
disclosure: I am honored to say that Bawer is a friend of mine.
FrontPage Mag
readers are surely familiar with regular contributor Bawer’s incisive work. But
some may not know that Bawer has just released a self-published international
thriller that takes on the verboten topic of Islam’s infiltration and
subversion of Europe. The Alhambra is set in early 2001, while America
and Europe still slept, as Bawer put it in another book, prior to the September
11 attacks. It is the story of an American living in Amsterdam who overhears
jihadists planning an act of terrorism, and finds himself caught up in the deadly
intrigue.
The novel’s
protagonist is Steve Disch, a gay filmmaker pushing forty who moves impulsively
to Amsterdam after his once-promising Hollywood career stalls out. He immerses
himself in the city’s Old World charm but increasingly finds himself crossing
paths with the city’s dark, threatening subculture of Muslim immigrants:
Block by block, the neighborhood grew
shabbier. There was graffiti, garbage on the street. There were storefronts
with signs in Arabic… He passed a group of men who looked like Arabs or Turks
or Persians and who were standing on the sidewalk holding a loud,
angry-sounding conversation in some Middle Eastern tongue. As he walked by, they
all turned, every one of them, and gave him unfriendly, suspicious looks. One
of them said something to him. He didn’t understand the words, but he could
guess at the sentiment. Further down the street, he passed a woman in an
Islamic head covering who was pushing a baby carriage and was flanked by two
toddlers. Half a block later, he passed another woman, also covered; this one
was pregnant and pushing a child in a stroller.
Steve had spent quite a bit of time in
Amsterdam, but he’d never seen, or even heard of, a neighborhood like this.
Steve, like
countless Westerners prior to 9/11/2001, is clueless about Islam and taken
aback when his European friends express what he initially considers anti-Muslim
bigotry. “You need to read up on Islam,” one of them tells him. “But is it
worse than Christianity?” Steve counters, echoing the kneejerk response of
people who even today are still reluctant to draw a distinction between Islam
and other religions. “One piece of advice,” the friend urges. “Get a Koran. Read
it.”
But before Steve
can educate himself much further, he is chilled to the bone to overhear a group
of Turkish men beneath his apartment plotting a bombing of some kind.
Attempting to report it to the police, he gets an eye-opening dose of PC
multiculturalism from an officer who dismisses his concerns and who lectures the
American on Dutch tolerance. These Muslim immigrants here have been subjected
to enough prejudice, she tells him, and “one of our values is our belief in
helping the poor and weak people of the world.” It is Steve’s first encounter
with the shocking degree of colonialist guilt, self-loathing and willful
blindness toward Islam that afflicts white European authorities today.
Attempting to
eavesdrop again on the conspirators, Steve and a friend are discovered and end
up killing two of them in self-defense. The friend assures Steve that going on
the run is their only hope. “A thousand times more important than protecting
us,” he says of the authorities who are brainwashed by multiculturalism, “would
be not to offend the Mohammedan community. That’s how things work here. That’s
how people think here. Especially the people in power.” So they run, and Steve
simultaneously tries to defuse the bomb plot, which he now knows involves the
attempted assassination of a controversial, Geert Wilders-style rising
politician who has built a growing constituency of voters angry about the
country’s Islamization. The plot complicates as Steve reaches out to a former
lover in the CIA who may be covering up the Agency’s own agenda regarding the
country’s lone political voice against Islam.
Bruce Bawer’s The
Alhambra is a rarity: a literate yet cinematic page-turner of a thriller, with
urgent contemporary relevance, grounded in the unflinching reality of fundamentalist
Islam’s corrosive impact on Europe. It deserves more attention than it will get
without the widespread distribution channels of a traditional publisher. Get your copy here and spread the
word.
From FrontPage Mag, 5/29/17
