Europe sleeps, Islam seethes

Muslim radicals count on terminal denial in the West

Scott C. Yates, Special to the News

Friday, February 24, 2006

When Islamist youth in France started rioting late last year, burning hundreds of cars every night, I read a quote from the National Police Chief via The Associated Press. On the day after 374 cars had been torched, down from 502 the previous night, the chief said, "Things could return to normal very quickly."

Normal, the AP pointed out, was about 100 cars torched on a Saturday night.

It was then that I got the sense that something major was going on in France, and that the AP stories were just scratching the surface. Recent violent Islamist protests over cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad have only added to that feeling. Sometimes, there are trends so big that you really need a book to understand what is going on.

Fortunately, that book just came out.

The sweeping and dramatic shift going on in Europe is chronicled to stunning effect in Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.

The title, I think, underplays the case made in the book that Western European governments are actively financing a mass migration of fundamentalists, and shying away from enforcing any laws against the immigrants, even laws against rape and murder. Those governments decry as racist any attempt to prosecute the offenders, thereby protecting the very society that has vowed to destroy them.

Why? Bawer illustrates at length the stunning degree to which European elite have their heads in the sand. With a centuries-long tradition of proclaiming themselves open-minded, while perpetuating their own flavor of a caste-system, the continent is mired in a fog of self-reverential group-think, unable to acknowledge - let alone deal with - their changing world.

This book is as enlightening as it is disturbing. In nearly every country of Western Europe there has been mass immigration of Islamists for more than 20 years, Bawer writes. Typically, the countries have ludicrously liberal immigration policies. If someone from, say, Morocco, flies to the Netherlands, for instance, that person only need tear up his passport and leave it on the plane, and then claim that he is a refugee with no identification.

That person can have plenty of relative wealth in his home country, but can claim indigence and immediately get cash from the government. The four bombers of London subways last July had collected more than a half-million pounds (about $850,000) in welfare and other government payments from the British government.

This person will likely worship in a mosque that has been, in many cases, built with government money. In that mosque, it's also likely that the imam will preach fervently for death to Jews, and attacks on Israel and the U.S. That man can then fetch a wife from his home country and make her a citizen.

This family will typically then have many children - the birth rate among recent immigrants is several times that of the Europeans. Then that child, never speaking a word of the local language, will be sent back to a Koran school in her parents' native country, and will sometimes still receive aid for the 16 years she's there. While in that country, she'll probably be subjected to genital mutilation from her spiritual leaders as part of her religious upbringing. (Even in Europe, genital mutilation is widespread in the Islamist ghettos.) When she's 17 or so, she'll be forced into an arranged marriage, and then any offspring will again be sent back to the Koran school in the home country.

That's if she's lucky. If she has any bit of independence, there's a decent chance she'll be killed. Bawer illustrates how widespread this problem is in Europe with statistics and also a few illustrative examples of women killed for wanting to pick their own spouse, or wear jeans. Scores of other women are killed after being raped, as a way of returning "honor" to the family.

These are not isolated incidents, and this is not a stretch of a hypothetical situation. Amsterdam is now more than half non-Dutch, Bawer notes, though you wouldn't know it in the historic districts. As with Paris and dozens of other major European cities, Amsterdam is surrounded by ghettos packed with fundamentalist Islamists, nearly all on the government dole. There are more flights every week between Oslo and Islamabad than between Oslo and the U.S.

And as Bawer points out, the immigrants are fully aware of the stunning demographic swing. He writes: "A T-shirt popular among young Muslims in Stockholm reads: '2030 - then we take over.'" They aren't talking about electing a member of parliament, either. When they say "death to Western Civilization," they aren't using hyperbole - they want so-called "sharia" law, complete with stoning women accused of adultery, etc.

Among a massive list of Bawer's unsettling facts about the immigrants is this: Islamist school children in France today are refusing to draw right angles in math class because it looks too much like a Christian cross.

Bawer is a gay academic who has primarily written about fundamentalists in the United States, along with travel articles and essays about homosexuality. He makes it clear that he opposes the U.S. religious right movement. That said, fundamentalists who want to ban gay marriage seem downright cuddly when compared to fundamentalists who harass, torment and kill gay people, and encourage others to do the same.

His perspective is informed by more than a half-dozen years of living in Europe. And as a writer who has freelanced work for The New York Times and many others, he analyzes the media in Europe with clarity. At first, he notes, he was delighted with the fact that the average person in Oslo, where he lives now, reads three papers a day. After a few years with those papers, however, he came to realize that the publications all have an unbending support of the left-wing government, except for a few that are more radical and call for the spread of socialism.

The debate in Europe, Bawer points out, is remarkable for the lack of a broad and vigorous discussion. The point of the publication of the cartoons that have sparked mass protests by Muslims was to illustrate how little discussion there is about Islam, and it's a good point: Other than this recent furor, there has been little print about the topic in Europe.

At the heart of non-debate are millions of people who aspire to the violent overtaking of modern society. Part of the reason the Islamists said they bombed Spain was that they are still mad about being kicked out more than 500 years ago. They want the country back.

This book is thorough, insightful and depressing. It does not end with any kind of silver lining of hope. That said, if you want to understand the car burnings, the killings over cartoons and films, and other outrages sure to come, you won't do any better than While Europe Slept.

Scott C. Yates is an entrepreneur and freelance writer living in Denver.