Bruce Bawer - While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within

Contents

I
Before 9/11: Europe in Denial

II
9/11 and After: Blaming Americans and Jews

III
Europe's Weimar Moment:
The Liberal Resistance and Its Prospects

FOR TOR ANDR

Acknowledgments

I'M DEEPLY GRATEFUL to my agent, John Talbot, and my editor, Adam Bellow, for their extraordinary commitment to this project and their diligent work on its behalf. Copious thanks to Daniel Feder at Doubleday for his skillful contributions and many kindnesses; to Lars Hedegaard and Helle Merete Brix for sharing their time and thoughts; to the Norwegian Nonfiction Writers and Translators Association for its generous support; to Paula Deitz and the late Frederick Morgan for their steadfast loyalty and encouragement; and to Harry T. Cleven, Hege Storhaug, Rita Karlsen, Janniche Brustad, and Suman Lahiry for helping in various ways. Weblogs by Leif Knutsen, Marten Barck, Gunnar Nyquist and Hans Rustad, Jan Haugland, Michael Moynihan and Billy McCormac, Mikkel Andersson, Lars Hvidberg, Kim Mller, Arjan Dasselaar, Pieter Dorsman, David Kaspar, and Marten Schenk pointed me to materials I might otherwise have missed. Thanks also to my aunt, Ruth Thomas Cook, who not only provided moral support but even came up with the title. My greatest debt is reflected in the dedication.

None of the above persons, needless to say, is responsible for my opinions or errors.

I

Before 9/11: Europe in Denial

ON THE MORNING OF November 2, 2004, I sat at my mother's kitchen table in Queens, New York, drinking instant coffee and thinking about George W. Bush and John Kerry. It was Election Day, and I was irked that since I was flying back home to Oslo that evening, I'd miss the vote count on TV.

The phone rang. Hello? Oh, yes. Just a moment. My mother held out the phone. It's Mark. I took it.

Mark?

Hi, Bruce. Have you heard about Theo van Gogh?

No, what?

He was murdered this morning.

You're kidding.

Mark, like me, is an American with a Norwegian partner. But though he moved back to New York years ago, he still starts the day by checking the news at the Web site of NRK, Norway's national radio and TV network. Switching into Norwegian, he read me the story. Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker and newspaper columnist, had been shot and killed in Amsterdam. Shortly afterward, police had arrested a twenty-six-year-old Dutch-Moroccan man.

Later, I'd learn more. Van Gogh had been bicycling to work along a street called Linnaeusstraat when Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-born son of Moroccan parents and a member of a radical Muslim network, had shot him, knocking him off his bicycle. Bouyeri, wearing a long jellaba, pumped up to twenty additional bullets into van Gogh's body, stabbed him several times, and slit his throat. He then pinned to van Gogh's chest with a knife a five-page letter addressed to the filmmaker's collaborator, Parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali, quoting the Koran and promising her and several other Dutch leaders (whom he named) a similar end:

I know definitely that you, O America, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Europe, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Netherlands, will go down. I know definitely that you, O Hirsi Ali, will go down.

According to witnesses, van Gogh had said to his murderer (who at the time was living on welfare payments from the Dutch government): Don't do it! Don't do it! Mercy! Mercy! And: Surely we can talk about this. The blunt, outspoken van Gogh had been an unsparing critic of European passivity in the face of fundamentalist Islam; unlike most Europeans, he'd understood the connection between the war on terror and the European integration crisis, and had called America the last beacon of hope in a steadily darkening world. Together he and Hirsi Ali had made a short film, Submissionhe'd directed, she'd written the scriptabout the mistreatment of women in Islamic cultures. Yet at the end, it seemed, even he had grasped at the Western European elite's most unshakable article of faiththe belief in peace and reconciliation through dialogue.

At first glance, Hirsi Ali might have seemed an unlikely ally for van Gogh: a vivacious Somali-born beauty who'd forsworn her native Islam, she was devoted to the preservation of Dutch democracy and the rescue of her country's Muslimsespecially womenfrom the tyranny of their subculture. I'd read a good deal about her in the Dutch press and hoped to write about her myself; in fact, a friend of mine who worked for an Oslo think tank had arranged to meet her in The Hague the following Monday and had invited me to go along. I'd already booked the flight.

Van Gogh's murder came as a shock, even though I'd seen something like it coming for years. In 1998, I'd lived in a largely Muslim neighborhood of Amsterdam, only a block away from the radical mosque attended by Bouyeri. There I'd seen firsthand the division between the native Dutch and their country's rapidly growing Muslim minority. That division was stark: the Dutch had the world's most tolerant, open-minded society, with full sexual equality, same-sex marriage, and libertarian policies on soft drugs and prostitution. Yet many Dutch Muslims kept that society at arm's length, despising its freedoms and clinging to a range of undemocratic traditions and prejudices.

Did Dutch officials address this problem? No. Like their politically correct counterparts across Western Europe, they responded to it mostly by churning out empty rhetoric about multicultural diversity and mutual respectand then changing the subject. I knew that by tolerating intolerance in this way, the country was setting itself on a path to cataclysmic social confrontation; yet whenever I trieddelicatelyto broach the topic, Dutch acquaintances made clear that it was off limits. They seemed not to grasp that their society, and Western Europe generally, was a house divided against itself, and that eventually things would reach the breaking point.

Then came 9/11. Most Americans were quick to understand that they were at war and recognized the need for a firm response (though there was, and continues to be, much disagreement as to whether the response decided upon was the right one). Yet while most Western European countries participated in the invasion of Afghanistan and several helped topple Saddam, America's forceful approach alienated opinion makers across the continent and opened up a philosophical gulf that sometimes seemed as wide as the Atlantic itself.

Why was there such a striking difference in perspectives between the two halves of the democratic West? One reason was that the Western European establishmentthe political, media, and academic elite that articulates what we think of as European opiniontended to regard all international disputes as susceptible to peaceful resolution. It was therefore ill equipped to respond usefully to sustained violence by a fierce, uncompromising adversary. Another reason was Western Europe's large immigrant communities, many of them led by fundamentalist Muslims who looked forward to the establishment in Europe of a caliphate governed according to sharia lawthe law of the Koranand who viewed Islamist terrorists as allies in a global jihad, or holy war, dedicated to that goal. A fear of inflaming minorities who took their lead from such extremists was one more reason to tread gently. Few European politicians had challenged this passivity. The Dutchman Pim Fortuyn had done so, and been murdered for it. Not even the March 2004 bombings in MadridEurope's 9/11had fully awakened Europe's sleeping elite.