At his blog, Bruce Bawer, author of the stunning and essential book While Europe Slept, responds to a typically irresponsible and silly review of his book in the Washington Post, aka the Bandar Beacon. A sampling (first the review, then Bawer’s comments):
The presence of imperfectly integrated communities of highly traditional Middle Eastern and North African Muslims in Europe, as well as the chasm that separates many European Muslims from the cultural norms of their adopted countries, were familiar well before Bawer arrived,
“Familiar” to whom? Not to most Americans, certainly. It was all but impossible to find mention of the situation in the European or American media.
even if Christian Europeans had no idea how to cope with them.
Indeed, Bawer’s complaint was vividly and conspicuously personified by
the populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. A proud homosexual, he was
assassinated by an animal-rights activist in 2002.An “animal-rights activist,” that is, who was infuriated by Fortuyn’s stance on Islam, and who killed him after having been brainwashed by Dutch media and politicians into viewing Fortuyn as a dangerous, racist extremist.
His right-wing, anti-immigration stance rested on the insistence that
Islam was too socially retrograde to be integrated into liberal Dutch
culture.For the millionth time, Fortuyn was not “right-wing.” His concern about the influx of Muslims into the Netherlands was based on the fact that many of them were incorrigibly right-wing — and not just right-wing, but reactionary to a degree beyond the imagination of most Westerners.
So there’s not much new here,
“Preaching to the converted,” “not much new here” — move along, folks. Don’t worry. Be happy.
No, not much new. Funny, then, how I keep getting emails — from extremely intelligent people who read newspapers like the Washington Post every day and consider themselves well-informed — and yet have been stunned by what they’ve learned from this book.
Read it all.