Is Europe finished?

I finished over the weekend Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept," which is probably the most depressing thing I've read in ages. I know that's not likely to make you pick up a copy, but oh, you really should. I had no idea things were as bad as they apparently are in Europe. I saw a Norwegian friend over the weekend, a guy who's been living and working here for at least a decade, and shared with him what I'd read in Bawer, who is an Oslo resident. I asked my friend if he thought Bawer was laying it on thick. "Oh no," he said. "My mother said that it's horrible there. She's so fed up with it. She says that we're handing over our liberties one by one, and the more we yield to the [Muslim] immigrants, the more they demand."

The real takeaway for me from Bawer's book was his line toward the end about how the real problem in Europe is not so much Islamic extremism but Europe's bizarre passivity in the face of the threat. Bawer cites an official 2005 French government report about the social disintegration happening as a result of Islamism (Olivier Guitta reported on it in English here) ... and nothing much happened. As my friend's mother said, they are losing their liberties right and left in an attempt to mollify the Islamists within. Bawer offers some particularly challenging observations about European conformity, saying that there is a big difference between the way the European elite (governmental, legal, academic, journalistic) relates to the broader population, and the way it works in the US. In Europe, he said, the elite see their role as guiding society, and society more or less yields to their judgment. This, Bawer fears, is setting the scene for a literal fascist takeover, once the populations come to understand the terrible position their elites have led them into vis-a-vis the Islamist threat within.

Bawer has an interesting insight here:

Indeed, it had become increasingly obvious to me that in understanding the Islamist threat, Americans have one big advantage: we're surrounded by religion. In the United States, even if one isn't religious oneself, one is likely to have friends, relatives, neighbors or coworkers for whom religious identity is not merely a matter of vestigial, nominal affiliation but of profound conviction; its' something that guides their major life decisions and shapes their conception of the universe. Since we know such people, we know how powerful (for better or for worse) religion can be. Few Western Europeans who aren't Muslims have this kind of firsthand knowledge. Most come from Christian backgrounds but don't go to church except for weddings and funerals. If they do belong to a denomination, it's because they were born into it and have never bothered to remove their names from the membership rolls. Their supposed religious identity has little or no meaning for them, other than perhaps being related in their minds to the broad ideals of universal brotherhood, equality, and peaceful coexistence -- ideals that they associate at least as much with the UN as with any church. It's difficult for them to conceive that someone can actually view this or that theological system as containing the ultimate key to the workings of the cosmos -- and can be capable of acting on that belief in earth-shattering ways. It's also difficult for them to grasp the idea that a religion might be devoted to something other than the ideals set forth in the UN charter.

This failure of imagination is especially pronounced among the Western European elite. The average German politician, French journalists, or Swedish professor simply can't imagine a life directed by religious belief. Confronted with the fact that it's indeed such belief -- albeit of a particularly dark and twisted variety -- that impels Islamists, their immediate impulse is to be dismissive: No, that can't be it. It must be something else. It must be something we can relate to -- poverty, oppression, colonialism. The neo-Marxist analyses come easily. And from these misreadings of reality spring a host of colossally wrongheaded responses.

I would only add to that that his analysis does not hold for American journalists, who are overwhelmingly secular, according to surveys. In my experience, their view of religion is skewed by their own politics: religion, especially non-Christian religion, is benign or positive, unless it is Evangelical or has anything to do with conservative politics, in which case it's as bad or worse than Islamic extremism.

The new issue of Reason contains a lengthy interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave apostate Muslim who fled the Netherlands and now lives in the US. Alas, it's not yet online, but it's definitely in a Baweresque vein. She pulls absolutely no punches. Like Bawer, she too blames the West for its craven passivity in the face of a violent threat. And she won't have any of the false equivalence among Abrahamic religions. Though she is now an atheist and wishes everyone would be, she said that if people have to accept God, she would rather that they become Jewish or Catholic because both religions have a much more humane concept of God than "the fire-breathing Allah who inspires jihadism and totalitarianism."

When the interviewer asked her if she thought Islam could bring about positive social change in the same way that religious Protestants helped end US slavery, and Catholicism helped end communism in Poland, she responded sharply:

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.

Reason: Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it's defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It's very difficult to even talk about peace now. They're not interested in peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world's 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, 'defeat Islam'?

She doesn't really answer, except to say that Islam must be resisted at every opportunity, "in all forms, and if you don't do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed." She said that she believes we are headed to that point "because the West has been in denial for a long time." We didn't deal with the problem when it was easier, and now it's much worse:

Hirsi Ali: ...There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don't all follow the rules of Islam, but there's really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There's nothing moderate about it.

Reason: So when even a hard-line critic of Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, "Radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution," he's wrong?

Hirsi Ali: He's wrong. Sorry about that.

Later in the interview, the Reason interviewer points out that she's in favor of civil liberties, but would appear to deny them fully to Muslims in the West. She responds by saying that to save civil liberties, you have to restrict them on those who would take them away from everyone. She even goes so far as to say that all Muslims schools should be closed down in the US. She says that the Western constitutions that allow freedom of religion are products of the Enlightenment, and were written at a time when no one could have conceived of the jihadi threat. She says passing constitutional restrictions on Muslims is going to happen because the problem of Islamic extremism is not going to go away, and in fact is going to get worse -- though sensibly, she acknowledges at length that there are some pretty strong reasons why America doesn't have the same problem as Europe (e.g., Muslim immigrants to America want to assimilate, there's not a welfare system for them to grow dependent on, white guilt is different in the US, etc.).

She concludes that the West's arrogance is its own worst enemy "because in the West there's this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway." And, she says, this mistaken notion that if we "indulge and appease and condone," everything will work out in the end.

"The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it's only going to get bigger."

That I get. But we once again get back to the question of what does that mean in concrete terms. The problem Bawer sketches out in Europe is very, very serious (we really do have nothing like it here). At this point, any attempt to confront domestic Islam in a serious, effective way would likely set off massive urban rioting. And yet, to do nothing much more than hoping for the best seems like an extremely foolish strategy. The crisis deepens.

Incidentally, here's a Reason interview with Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish newspaper that initially published those Muhammad cartoons. He highlights why I believe the Left has very little useful or illuminating to say about this crisis:

I think many people betrayed their own ideals. The history of the left, for instance, is a history of confronting authority—be it religious or political authority—and always challenging religious symbols and figures. In this case, they failed miserably. I think the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism. They somehow view the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and are willing to ignore everything else, as long of they continue to see the Muslims of Europe as a new proletariat.

Like during the Cold War, there is a willingness to establish a false equivalence between democracy and oppression—between a totalitarian ideology and a liberal ideology. When I look back at my own behavior during the "cartoon crisis," it was very much informed by my experience with Soviet Union because I saw the same kind of behavior both inside the Soviet Union and those dealing with the Soviet Union in the West.