SIXTH COLUMN: While Europe Slept -- A Cautionary Tale for America

David Forsmark reviews two books at FrontPage. Readers at this site overlooking the references to religion, can come away with the lessons of the parallels of the invasion by Muslim immigrants into Europe and that of other cultures into the United States.

Islam is a special case because Islam will assimilate and, the invasion into Europe is creating rapid deterioration because of vast numbers of immigrants coming in a short space of time, because European governments traded oil for security and other concessions, over the objections of ordinary citizens.

The invasion of the United States has been going on for decades but the deterioration has been slower because most aliens are Christian with some cultural similarities.

In some of the most decadent liberal areas of Western Europe, where tolerance is considered the greatest (and often, alas, the only) virtue, non-Muslim women wear a hijab when they go out to avoid harassment by aggressive young Muslim men. In the suburbs of major cities of Old Europe that have large and expanding Muslim populations, such as Amsterdam and Paris, honor killings, forced marriages and spousal abuse are on the rise.

Such trends are at least a decade old. But for the European media and political elites, the symbol of dangerous cultural changes is not a crescent but Golden Arches. That's right -- McDonald's, although anything else that's quintessentially American will do.

In Europe's supremely politically correct climate, Christianity has all but disappeared, but it is still fashionable to bash practitioners, particularly fundamentalists. On the other hand, it is considered racist and culturally oppressive to negatively talk about anything that is even peripherally related to
Muslim immigration. Some countries, including the Netherlands and Norway, are even passing laws to restrict such speech.

Interestingly, two writers from vastly different backgrounds - Bruce Bawer, a conservative homosexual who moved to Europe to escape what he considered the stifling influence of fundamentalist Christianity in America, and Claire Berlinski, a secular Jewish female academic - come to the same conclusion in their strikingly similar books about Europe's decadence and failure to stand up for its historical culture.

In the introduction to The Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's, Too, Berlinski baldly asserts that even though she is "a secular Jew who is delighted never to have faced The Inquisition," she believes the primary reason for Europe's "hopelessness and the void" is "the death of Christianity" on the western half of the continent.

This, she states, is why Europe has been susceptible to the dark appeals of everything from fascism and communism to anarchism and radical Islam in recent decades. This loss of faith, accelerated by World War I, was also one of the factors that made the slaughter of World War II possible, she writes.

That Bawer comes to essentially the same conclusion is even more startling, and his path to writing While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, is nearly as interesting as his reporting.

Bawer had spent a decade decrying what he saw as the dominance of Christian fundamentalism in public discourse and wrote two books on the subject. He eventually moved to Amsterdam to "marry" his Norwegian partner.

Soon, however, Bawer found out that the famed Dutch "tolerance" (which Berlinski cleverly labels "Self-Extinguishing Tolerance") really means they tolerate anything -- including radical Islamism -- except Americans and capitalism. In fact, Dutch toleration includes the funding of radical mosques, forcing citizens to accept Islamic customs and condemning anyone who objects to the huge numbers of immigrants or dares to mention the Muslims' own intolerances.

As Bawer points out dryly, there is no comparison between Jerry Falwell "not wanting me to marry" and the fastest-growing - though increasingly politically favored - part of the population of a continent that thinks he should suffer death by stoning.

Bawer's experiences reminded me of Keith Richburg, a black American reporter who thought that when he was assigned to Africa it would be a spiritual reawakening of his roots but returned to write Out of America after finding out that he was not a hyphenated American after all. Richburg decided he was glad to be an American – no matter how it came to be. Similarly, jazz great Wynton Marsallis tells black jazz musicians that if they think there is a better place to be a person of any color than America, they haven't been out much.