Eurabia is coming

Shame on me for not picking up Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within" until the publisher today sent me a paperback copy. The book was very well reviewed in hardcover, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I've just finished the first chapter, and it's extremely discouraging. Bawer is a gay man, and a liberal Christian, who left America to live in Europe with his partner, in part because he'd had it with fundamentalist Christianity. He and his partner moved to Amsterdam initially. He writes:

Finally, I'd rejoiced in the fact that Western Europeans weren't Bible-thumpers. But I was beginning to recognize that certain elements of the Continent's ever-growing immigrant population epresented even more of a threat to democracy than did fundamentalist Christians in the United States. In Western Europe, not too put too fine a point on it, were on the march. Their numbers -- and power -- were large and growing rapidly. and the ultimate objective of many of their leaders was far more than a ban on abortion or gay marriage.

They want nothing short of a sharia state. The incidents and pervasiveness of violent Islamic radicalism and chauvinism in Europe that Bawer documents in just this short introductory chapter are astonishing. Then he says:

Given what I'd seen and heard of evangelical Christianity in American, I hadn't been terribly upset that Christian belief in Western Europe had declined precipitously since World War II and that the churches were now almost empty. But I was beginning to see that when Christian faith had departed, it had taken with it a sense of ultimate meaning and prupose -- and left the Continent vulnerable to conquest by people with deeper faith and stronger convictions. What's more, no longer able to take religion seriously themselves, many Europeans were unable to believe that other people might take religion very seriously indeed.

The situation was alarming. The very things I most loved about the Netherlands -- and about Europe -- were the things most threatened by the rise of fundamentalist Islam. Yet the Dutch did nothing. Why did they refuse to deal with something that obviously endangered their freedom?

The answer, of course, is that it would require jettisoning multiculturalist dogma, and recognizing that there are some belief systems which cannot be reconciled -- and that some are superior to others. Europeans aren't prepared to do that, and neither are many Americans, so on we go. Here's the latest from Holland, via Brussels Journal. This from a Dutch government press release. Emphases are mine:

Government Advisors: Dutch Should Adapt to Muslims AMSTERDAM, 22/09/07 - The Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) says the Dutch must adapt themselves more to Islam. It also advises the elimination of the word 'allochtoon', the most common term used to describe residents with a foreign background.

The WRR itself thought up the word allochtoon in 1989. In a report at the time it was suggested this neutral-sounding word was less stigmatising than, for example, immigrant or foreigner. The WRR advice was successful; today, media, schools and politicians all use allochtoon.

Now the WRR however advises using the word allochtoon as little as possible. The word "is no longer neutral" and is stigmatising, the Council says in a report to appear Monday under the title Identification with the Netherlands.

The WRR also considers the Dutch must be prepared to adapt their standards to that of newcomers, for example in the area of religion and sexuality. Tolerance for Islam is too low and question marks on the sexualisation of Dutch society are justified, in its view.

In the report, the WRR also says that the integration debate is not helped by the fixation on the concept of 'national identity'. The report says that there is nothing wrong with the dual nationality held by most immigrants in the Netherlands.

The WRR already produced a controversial report last year (Dynamics in Islamic activism) when it complained that many Dutch politicians are involved in "Islam-bashing" and urged dialogue with "moderate movements such as Hamas."

You think I'm making this up. I wish I were making this up. Read Bawer's brave and urgent book.