The Redhunter

Book Summary

Education

Muslim children in Europe do not receive a European eduction. Some are sent abroad for their schooling, some to private Islamic academies, and others simply instructed at home after their day at public school. Either way, the brainwashing is completed and they are taught to hate the West and think that it should be replaced by the Caliphate. They're taught all the other Islamic values; that polygamy is acceptable, that women should be punished for adultery and if they are raped, but the men should mostly get off Scot-free. Homosexuals should be put to death.

The American Christian v the European Muslim "Religious Right"

Bawer recognizes the difference between what he calls Protestant fundamentalism and Muslim fundamentalism. As much as he hates the religious right in America, he realizes that while they don't want gay marriage, they have no intention of killing anyone. Muslims do. Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson are "unsavory characters," but he sees that they don't want to kill their daughters if they "dishonor" the family and of course don't want gays killed. What gets Bawer is that Europeans don't see that they have a religious right that is quite dangerous.

Because he hates Christianity in the United States, Bawer was at first glad to see that it was on the decline in Europe. But what he came to realize was that Christian faith wasn't replace by something that he could see as better, but with nothing at all. Not having any belief system of their own caused two problems for Europeans. First, they did not at all appreciate the religious fervor of Muslims. Two, they had no moral basis upon which to oppose it.

Why They Don't Get It

Most Europeans simply cannot grasp the ideological dedication of Islamists. They do not believe that Muslim radicals really mean to act on their radical rhetoric, or that any serious number of Muslims would follow them. They dismiss it all for one reason or another.

As stated above, Bawer thinks that the biggest reason for this is that Europeans lost their own religion a long time ago. It has been decades since Christianity was taken seriously by a majority of Europeans. As a result, religion itself is an oddity, an exotic concept. They cannot imagine a life directed by a religion.

Americans, on the other hand, are surrounded by religion. Even those who are not practicing Christians or Jews understand its power. We know full well what religion can do to unstable personalities, those who seek power for its own sake, or those who for whatever reason are susceptible to control by others.

The Media

Americans have an amazingly diverse media compared to Europe, where all outlets pretty much tell the same story the same way. In the United States we have robust liberal and conservative outlets; MSNBC v Fox News, The New York Times v The Wall Street Journal, National Review v The Nation v The New Republic, Rush Limbaugh v ... no one. For that matter we've also got Think Tanks all over the place; The Heritage Foundation v The Institute for Policy Studies v The Cato Institute.

In Europe you've got nothing of the sort. Sure, there are a few vaguely conservative outlets like the London Telegraphy, but the vast majority are best described as "establishment left" (my term, not Bawer's, but based on his writing). But for the most part they all take the same line on any issue; they all bash Israel, attack American-style capitalism and laud the European social-welfare state, and so on. They all pay attention to the same stories, and ignore the same stories. There simply is no journalistic diversity.

And they all pretend that Muslims are not a problem in Europe, and that anyone who does is a fascist.

Integration

We have a strong tradition of integrating immigrants into our society. There's a process of give-and-take, whereby we pick up some new things from them and they learn and adopt our language and customs.

Not so in Europe. The problem is on both sides; the Europeans don't want to integrate the Muslims and the Muslims don't want to be integrated. It's an entirely different psychology than in the States.

Europeans, or at least the elite, will give as their reason for not wanting to integrate newcomers is that they "respect their differences." The real reason, Bawer came to suspect, was "a profound discomfort with the idea of "them" becoming "us."" In other words, while anyone can eventually become an American, no one but a native can really become a German or Swede. For all their liberal piety, Europeans are really quick nativist in their outlook.

More, the European establishment has taken a condescending romantic view of their Muslim immigrants. They are "victims" of Western imperialism or some such, and so any criticism of them is racist or fascist. Any problem within the Muslim community must be due to racism of the white natives.

They view Islamic culture as "exotic" and something to be preserved in its entirety. It is impermissible to talk about any Islamic cultural trait that might be antithetical to Western values. Worse, any Muslim who tries to "break from the pack" and criticize any aspect of Islam or any Muslim leader is seen as a cultural traitor and is him or herself deemed more of a threat than Islam itself. Ayan Hirsi Ali is a pariah.

But as mentioned, integration is a two-way street. Until recently it was assumed that Muslim immigrants would intermarry with natives. However, statistics show that this has not been the case. More, under "family reunification" laws, European Muslims have traveled back to their country their families came from (Pakistan, Turkey, etc), married someone there, and brought him or her back to Europe.

And Narrow-Minded, Too

Although Americans tend to see Europeans as open-minded and sophisticated, and Europeans certainly see themselves that way, the truth is closer to the opposite. If anything, they are a "tribal society. For example, although few Norwegians attend church or think of themselves as Christian, they insist on following Christian rituals such as having their children confirmed. They also follow other national traditions "religiously," although there is absolutely no meaning behind any of it.

The Reaction to Sept 11

It is a favorite of American liberals to claim that George W Bush squandered or lost European sympathy over 9-11 with by invading Iraq or some such. "Everyone agreed on invading Afghanistan" we are told. Bawer shows how this is so much balderdash.

The truth is that Europeans, especially the elites, didn't want us to invade Afghanistan at all. We were supposed to wallow in our misery after the attacks, morn our dead, and possibly apologize to the Arabs for our alleged imperialism, but not much else.

It wasn't a simple disagreement over tactics or strategy, either. A vicious America hatred the likes of which Bawer said he had never seen before and certainly thought impossible took hold. The shift didn't take weeks or months, either, but less than two days. The answer to violence, they said, was not more violence.

To many Europeans, America was the enemy, and Osama bin Laden (and by extension all Muslims) was the victim.

No Idealism

Most Europeans, certainly the ones Bawer ran into, were unable to comprehend a country where people were willing to die for things like freedom and liberty. It was a difficult enough concept for them to grasp that one might die for your country's own freedom, but that one might die for anothers was truly mind-blowing. This the notion that we thought it honorable to die so that Iraqis might be free was dismissed as a cover for wanting to steal their oil or some such.

Even basic talk about freedom and liberty is dismissed as so much emotional, overheated, rhetoric. To most Europeans, all such rhetoric does is provide a cover for the evils of American-style capitalism and imperialism.

It took President Clinton, for example, to do in the former Yugoslav republics what the Europeans should have done themselves. To be sure, part of their problem was their pathetically weak militaries, but mostly it was lack of will. Americans generally want to get rid of the Milosevics of the world, the Europeans don't see the point.

Why the Muslim Rage?

What else should we expect, Bawer says, from young Muslims who have been educated to believe that they are superior and are made to rule over the infidels? They're told that Western women are whores, the West is corrupt and seeks to destroy Islam, and democracy is a joke. They know their rights under Western law perfectly well, and as such know that they will be well treated no matter how badly their behave.

Because the Europeans do not wish to integrate them (and they don't wish to be integrated), they congregate in their own communities, ghettos if you will. In France they're called cites (with the apostrophe above the "e").

The elites say that the causes of Muslim alienation are racism and poverty, but it's not that simple. Yes the natives don't want to integrate them, but that's not racism unless you're reaching. Modern Europe is about as anti-racist in philosophy as you can get. On average their incomes aren't that great, but they all have cell phones and dress fashionably enough. It's certainly not the poverty of the Third World.

These young Muslims present a huge challenge, and it's one that most Europeans want to ignore. Only the older generation remembers a time when manners and good behavior were not only expected but demanded.

Rising Anti-Semitism

Parallel to an increasingly assertive Islam in Europe is the rise, or re-rise, of antisemitism. While Muslims are not the only guilty parties, as a group they are certainly the largest offenders. Muslim adults routinely harass Jewish children, while the reverse never happens. Bawer relates incident after incident, some quite violent and appalling, to drive home the point.

In 2004 the EU ordered an investigation into the matter, and the resulting report was titled "Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union". But the report was never released, "presumably because it points out significant Muslim involvement in European anti-Semitism." Under pressure, the EU did finally issue a report, but spun it to downplay the role of European Muslims.

European elites assume that anti-Semitism by Muslims, while officially deplorable, is "understandable" because of Israeli oppression, poverty, the legacy of colonialism; in other words, the standard liberal-guilt list.

Perhaps Laurence Weinbaum of the World Jewish Conference summed up the European attitude best when he said that "in Western Europe there is sympathy for dead Jews, it's the live ones they cannot tolerate."

Indeed, the situation is such that Bawer wonders whether any Europeans at all would try and save Jews as they did during World War II if another holocaust loomed. As one of his friends put it, "They've been reeducated." If Muslims started rounding up Jews for concentration camps, "It would be racist to resist." Such is the degree to which "racism" has been perverted.

A Few Europeans Who Get It

A few European politicians get it. Unfortunately, most are either dead or in exile.

Pim Fortuyn was an openly gay Dutch politician who spoke openly and plainly about the danger to Western freedoms from an intolerant Islam that he saw holding sway in his country. Thrown out of the Dutch Labor Party party for his views, he formed his own, the Pim Fortuyn List. He was murdered in 2002 by Volkert van der Graaf, who said that he did it because of Fortuyn's views on Islam.

Theo van Gogh, a descendant of artist-painter Vincent van Gogh, was another. Theo was a filmmaker, columnist, actor and author. In 2004 he worked with Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce a 10 minute film calledSubmission, which was critical of how Islam treated women. Theo too was murdered in 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim immigrant from Morocco, because of his criticism of Islam.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali escaped assassination, but after a contrived controversy about her citizenship status in The Netherlands moved to the United States. She now has a position with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. (Wikipedia says she has temporarily moved to the Netherlands but intends on moving back to the U.S.)

Although many Europeans were deeply shocked by the murders of Fortune and van Gogh, others said the fault was their own for their harsh criticism of Islam. Many presented their murders as "isolated events" and said that it was insulting to think that Islam in Europe could pose any sort of threat.

The Best and the Worst Countries

As of the publication date of 2006, Denmark was making strides toward reforming it's policies so as to mitigate the threat of radical Islam. Queen Margrethe took the lead and set the tone when she said that the West had to take the threat of fundamentalism islam seriously and that "there are certain things of which one should not be too tolerant" i.e. we're not going to be tolerant of a fundamentalist Islam that is antithetical to Wester values.

At the other end of the spectrum was Sweden. Crime rates are (again as of 2006, anyway) going up every year, with most perpetrators being Muslims. Sweden now has a murder rate twice that of the U.S., many of them "honor killings." One of it's biggest cities, Malmo, is now 40 percent Muslim, a city where the number of rapes and robberies had skyrocketed. Anti-Semitism is rampant. Meanwhile, the official position of the Swedish government is that the fault is racism on the part of native Swedes.

"Hate Speech" Laws

Many European countries have taken steps to limit free speech in a way that would violate our First Amendment and would undoubtedly be struck down 9 - 0 by the Supreme Court. For example, in April of 2005 the Norwegian legislature passed a law that prohibited saying anything "discriminatory" or "hateful" about someone's skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. Violators could face fines and prison time. What was most remarkable is that there was virtually no public debate on the law. No one seemed to care.

In 2005 British House of Commons passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Fortunately, the House of Lords killed it, but had it taken effect it would have made it a crime to criticize the very radicalism that had killed 56 Britons in the "7/7" bombings.

Just as bad as the wave of anti-free speech legislation is self-censorship. Not only is this practiced in the monolithic media, but among artists and writers. Plays are canceled, movies not shown, "offensive" works of art not included in exhibits, on and on. So much for the idea of the brave artist, unafraid to challenge the establishment.

Moderate Muslims?

For all the talk about "moderate Muslims" they seem amazingly scarce. While surveys showed that most did not approve of violence, they didn't carry that opinion any farther. When it came to opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq they would turn out by the thousands for large demonstrations, but demonstrations against Muslim terror turned out only a few dozen.

The fact is that there is a sizable number of "silent Muslims" who on the one hand deplore the violence committed in their name, yet refuse to speak out against it. Worse, they refuse to accept that Islam might have anything to do with creating terror or violence. And worse than that, they reserve their real vitriol for anyone who would dare to criticize Islam. Religious solidarity keeps their heads low.

Upon examination most "moderate" Muslim leaders aren't so moderate. Bawer goes through several supposedly moderate Muslim leaders whose views turned out to be quite appalling.

Finally, there is a system of intimidation within Islam that the extremists use to keep critics within their ranks silent. The intimidation doesn't just use the threat of violence, but other things such as job loss and exclusion from the community and Mosque.

The Future

Bawer is quite pessimistic about the prospects for Europe. Although a few extremist Imams are deported and a few groups banned, for the most part native Europeans are acting like dhimmis. European Imams still preach hate and get away with little or no criticism, much less legal action. European governments still subsidize Islamic Mosques and schools, and Islamic "councils" and "associations" are given quasi-official status as government advisory bodies. Worse, sharia law courts are being set up as a parallel legal system for some issues.

The Europe of today is philosophically 180 degrees from the Europe of Winston Churchill. His speeches today would be dismissed as the rantings of a warmonger.

European anti-Americanism would not be a danger into itself, but what it breeds is the danger within from Islam. Making the problem worse are those Americans who denigrate their own country while in Europe. Whether they do so because they are anti-Bush/Republican/conservative liberals or just want to ingratiate themselves with their hosts (or some combination of the two) is irrelevant. They are doing damage far beyond their personal situations. Bawer calls them traitors; not to the United States per se, but to the West and all the good things it stands for.

In the "Afterward to the paperback edition," evidently written a year or so after the hardback, Bawer laments that far from awakening, most of Europe is still fast asleep. A few get it, but most are still oblivious to the danger

My Take

While Europe Slept is a depressing and at times maddening book to read. The anti-Americanism is not just on this or that policy, more often than not it is just loony-tunes stuff. The aggressiveness of Muslim leaders and the timidity native Europeans is overwhelming. It is good that we in the U.S. argue and debate over whether things like The Patriot Act is an infringement on our civil liberties; in Europe they give up their liberties at the drop of a hat in order to appease the Islamists.

Because Bawer is a traditional liberal taking what can be called a conservative position on Islam and the situation in Europe, he is in the same genre, or the same type, as Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is much admired by the American right for his stance on the Iraq war and Islam in general. Bawer is less-well known, but I have heard him interviewed by conservative radio-talk show hosts such as Dennis Miller.

Bawer isn't as clever as Mark Steyn, whose 2006 America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It remains one of the most entertaining and informative books of the decade. On the other hand, his writing holds you much better than Walter Laqueur, whose writing in The Last Days of Europe was rather dry. In short, you will not be bored by Bruce Bawer.

The biggest criticism of While Europe Slept is no doubt that Bawer relies almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence. While much of the book deals with big newsworthy events we have all heard of like the "cartoon jihad," much of it is his personal observations and interactions. The counter to this is that Bawer is well traveled and read himself, is a professional writer who spends all of his time on this sort of thing, speaks several European languages (at least well enough to get along), and lots of anecdotal incidents do add up to something when you add to them the daily news.

As such, this book comes highly recommended, and despite it being several years old, is well worth your time.