Liberalism's suicidal tendencies

Big row going over the National Book Critics Circle jury nominating Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept" as a finalist for its year-end prize. Today's NYTimes reports on the resulting tempest, started by book critics who accuse the Bawer book of racism and "Islamophobia." You really couldn't ask for a better example of liberalism's suicidal tendencies.

Bawer is an openly gay man who lives in Europe, and who once wrote a book highly critical of fundamentalist Christianity (and has been critical in print of orthodox Catholicism). But the book in question: "Why Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within," warns that Europeans are in serious danger of seeing the liberties they enjoy eroded by their craven tolerance for Islamic extremism in their midst. Just making that claim is considered racist by some liberals -- and I believe explains why the American news media has done such a rotten job of reporting on the complexities within the American Muslim community. It's worth quoting Bawer's blog response at length:

As I and many others have pointed out a few million times, radical Islam is not a race. (Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali a racist? Is Irshad Manji? Is Chahdortt Djavann?) But it's easy – and, in some circles, highly effective – to fling the "R" word instead of trying to respond to irrefutable facts and arguments.

One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one's own children in the name of honor, etc., etc. These authors and intellectuals respond to every criticism of that chilling fundamentalist code – however cogent and correct the criticism may be – by hurling the "R" word.

I will not be cowed by such disgraceful, duplicitous rhetoric. Civilized, tolerant, pluralist values are at stake – values that affect freedom-loving individuals of all races.

And then, this arrow through the heart of his critics' case:

Some people think it's terrific for writers to expose the offenses and perils of religious fundamentalism – just as long as it's Christian fundamentalism.

This is how the left works: yell "bigotry" to silence critics who confront them with arguments they don't wish to have. In Holland, Pim Fortuyn -- an openly gay hedonistic libertarian with a wicked sense of humor -- ran for prime minister on a platform that in large part warned the Dutch that they were going to lose their liberal democracy if they didn't confront the growing forces of Islamic extremism within their country's immigrant population. The hysterical left -- which is to say, the media and academic establishments in Holland -- called him a fascist, and left it at that. Fortuyn was so far to the left he made Barney Frank look like the Queen Mother, but none of that mattered to the left-wing Dutch establishment.

I honestly don't get this. Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows.