Bruce Bawer is entirely right about this. “Author warns of the ‘silent Jihad,'” by Dan Delmar for The Suburban, September 23 (thanks to James):
Bruce Bawer left his native New York City in favour of Amsterdam because he wanted to escape rampant homophobia in the U.S. Instead, he says he found a different kind of discrimination in Europe.
The author of a number of books on religious fanaticism, his most recent work is Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Bawer argues that Europe is currently falling victim to a “silent Jihad,” a hidden holy war perpetrated by radical Islamists on Western, social-democratic values. Speaking at a conference last week organized by Islamist watchdog group Point de Bascule, Bawer warned Canadians to not be as complacent as their counterparts across the pond.
Radical Islam “is a subject that a few years ago, wasn’t on my radar. My goal was to write a book celebrating The Netherlands and Amsterdam,” Bawer told the audience. What he saw in major European cities were enclaved communities, ghettos, where residents were “subject to seventh century Islamic law. They could barely speak the language of the country they were born in, thanks to the generosity of the European welfare state.”
In Bawer’s works, he documents cases of European mullahs preaching hate for the values of their home countries, even advocating violence. He pointed to the uproar caused by the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed and cases of judges giving lighter sentences to murderers who commit “honour killings,” because the killer was acting within a different cultural prism….
Bawer said that Europeans, and Canadians, who preach a “live and let live” philosophy are not being true to their liberal roots.
“People going after Islam most often are associated with the right (wing),” he said. “The left doesn’t seem to know what liberal values are anymore and don’t recognize a threat to liberal values when it’s staring them in the face.”