Europe's Denial

Bruce Bawer, in this article, has an excellent introduction to Europe’s failure to face the Islamic threat.

“American immigration has worked on the whole, European immigration hasn’t. Why? The difference … boils down to American realism vs. European naïveté. Rather than learn from the spectacularly successful history of U.S. immigration, European policymakers—who viewed America as a cruelly materialistic nation that compels immigrants to shake off their identities and fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog economic system—pursued instead an approach they saw as humane and multicultural.”

He describes “young European-born men who were being drawn increasingly to Islamic fundamentalism and even terrorism; and of a mainstream European society too inhibited by political correctness to face up to any of it.” Those Muslims who praise Western values are betrayed by European intellectuals. Indeed authorities “motivated by a misguided, condescending romanticism about exotic foreigners, actively discouraged it to the point of chiding [Muslim-born] freethinkers.” Islam, of course, is exempt from critical analysis. “Religious-studies professors in the West ‘criticize every religion on the face of the earth’ except Islam.”

Bawer reviews the literature on Islam.

Bernard Lewis notes that “it’s not American imperialism or exploitation that provokes Islamists but rather the seductive appeal of American culture, their own attraction to which appalls” fundamentalist Muslims. He sees Islamists “heavily influenced by both Nazism and Communism.” Of course, Lewis doesn’t see this as susceptibility inherent in Islam but a deviation from historic norms.

Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq dissent from Lewis’ picture of Islam’s essential nature. They see Islam as fundamentally flawed. Warraq notes that Muslims, at times in the past, have slacked-off and failed to practice what they preach but the injunctions remain part of the canonical ideology of the religion. Western intellectuals, going back to Voltaire and Gibbon, have romanticized Islam—often as “a useful stick with which to beat Christianity.”

“But no book explains the European Muslim situation, in all its complexity, more ably than Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, in which an Egyptian-born Jewish writer who lives in Switzerland and calls herself Bat Ye’or … argues that the high immigration and low integration levels are the result not of European leaders’ well-intentioned naïveté but of an extensive pattern of political, economic, and academic collaboration between the left-wing European establishment and Arab governments that has been underway for decades”

Read the rest.