While Europe Slept - A Book Review

My friend and Pj advisor Adam Bellow handed me a book he just published for Doubleday, only an hour or so before I caught my flight home. Title: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying Europe from Within by Bruce Bawer. This subject is not exactly news to readers of this blog who are familiar with the views of Bat Yeor, Victor Davis Hanson and others who have bemoaned Europe’s inherent xenophobia and racism. This blog too has added its minor voice to the discussion. Yet I have read no argument or book more viscerally convincing on this subject than Bawer’s. Bawer is a gay American who married his lover in the liberal Oslo of 1999, a man of great liberal hope who then got to experience first-hand the homophobia of violent islamic youth in Olso and Amsterdam (where they also lived) and the curious apathy of the local Europeans towards these events. This book inspired a lot of ideas on my part about Europe (where I have lived only slightly less time than Bawer). But I have just taken that salvation of the jetlagged – Ambien – and will soon be out like a light. Tomorrow more… but buy this book. We’ll discuss it. The topic will be: can Europe be saved – and if so, is it worth it?

IN THE CLEAR VIEW OF (EARLY) MORNING: Yes, of course it’s worth it to save Europe for reasons we all know. But that will only happen if the Europeans start standing up from themselves – their values (our values). The problems of gay-bashing, spousal abuse, child abuse and female genital mutilation (all of which are apparently quite common in Europe’s muslim communities), must be taken with the utmost seriousness they deserve and not treated as local “custom” as they seem to be. (The huge racist contempt behind the smug mask of European liberalism can be seen from this – those “primitives” don’t know how to treat women anyway. Can’t do much about that.). Those crimes should be dealt with in a draconian manner – immediate expulsion to the home country. No exceptions. All incoming immigrants should know this and sign agreements that the laws of the state taken precendence over religious law. If they don’t follow this regulation they are not welcome and if they disobey they will be expelled. According to Bawer’s book, one country in Europe has gone so far as to allow “immigrant” girls to marry at lower age than their own. Don’t they realize that in their pseudo-liberal multi-culti idiocy they are being complicit in child abuse? What utter reactionaries. Well, you can see this book stirred me up. I hope it will get wide distribution and stir up a lot of other people as well. Otherwise the prediction being worn on t-shirts by Muslim youths in Stockholm will certainly come true. “Don’t worry. Sweden will be ours by 2030.”