Time to Wake Up

The last time I visited Europe was in May of 2000. I spent most of my three weeks there in Spain with a short day-trip to Portugal while visiting friends in Galicia. The nice thing about having friends in a foreign country is that they can take you places off of the beaten path – places rarely visited by foreign tourists. Among such places I had the opportunity to see were Zorita de Los Canes and the Castelo de Faria. But one thing largely unknown to and unseen by most Americans visiting Europe before September 11, 2001 was a growing population of immigrants from the Islamic world – a population not only culturally and politically alienated from their host countries, but actively hostile toward them.

In While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, noted journalist and writer Bruce Bawer analyzes the consequences Europe may face with the growth of these immigrant populations (and their radical Islamist religious orientation) coupled with the declining birthrates of most native European peoples. Bawer's analysis, however, is not just an academic exercise. Bawer flavors his account of Europe's crisis with his own experiences living in Europe as an American expatriate during the past decade, first in the Netherlands and later in Norway.

When Bawer first visited Amsterdam and later moved there (from his native New York City) to live, he writes:

Culturally, I was awed by the Netherlands: its young people came out of high school fluent in four languages; it had gay marriage; its book-buying levels were the world's highest. The American novelist Richard Powers had lived in the Netherlands and described it as "one of the few places on the planet where Western Civilization almost works."

But yet, no matter how many Dutch friends Bawer made, no matter how well he learned to speak their language, he would never be able to fully integrate into their culture:

As I sought to ease my way into Dutch society, I felt the Dutch pushing back. I learned that if America was a melting pot, the Dutch had a history of verzuiling, or pillarization – the division of society into religious and ethnic groups, each with its own schools, unions, political parties, newspapers, and, in recent times, TV channels. There was a tolerance, yes; but it was a tolerance that regarded you not as an individual but as a member of a group; it took for granted not intermarriage and integration, but a persistent, generation-to-generation cleavage.

Thus, there is a fundamental difference between the United States and continental Europe regarding immigration and assimilation, for the concept of pillarization is not limited to the Netherlands. Later in the book, Bawer notes the existence of such cultural "push-back" in Norway as well.

In the United States, assimilation of immigrants, if not in the first generation then in later generations, is taken for granted. And while racial and ethnic interest groups do exist, there remains a strong cultural and political emphasis on the individual – his liberties, desires, and rights. By contrast, in many a European nation, Muslim immigrants are not only not expected to assimilate, but are actively discouraged from doing so.

Many Americans admire the sense of community that European peoples have, but such communitarianism often exists at the expense of individual liberties. Nowhere is the more evident that in European politics. In the United States, we are accustomed to great ideological diversity within both major political parties; from labor unionists to peace activists within the Democratic Party and from "national-greatness" conservatives and foreign policy hawks to economic libertarians among the Republicans. Not so in Europe, for there the political spectrum amongst the major parties tends to, in Bawer's words, "correspond not to the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States but rather to, say, the mainstream and radical wings of the Democratic Party."

And woe betides any European politician labeled with the term "populist." To describe a politician as a populist on this side of the Atlantic is generally a compliment. But on the other side of the Atlantic, "populist" is often employed as a euphemism for a more charged term: "fascist." The stigma is potent and with the exception of Italy, where a true populist coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi was recently voted into power, pro-liberty, anti-Islamist parties have struggled to maintain themselves within political systems that favor parties in line with the social democratic status-quo.

So on one side there is political inertia and a desire to reap the benefits of cheap immigrant labor while ignoring the growing problem that the radical Islamism of the immigrants poses to Europe's long-term stability. On the other, there are the Muslim immigrants themselves, who over the course of nearly three generations have grown ever more hostile to the cultures of their host countries. This festering problem was evident during the late 1980s when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against author Salman Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming against Islam in The Satanic Verses. And it has grown even worse as evidenced in the Netherlands by the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and death threats against such politicians as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, in Britain with the London Underground bombings of 2005, in Spain with the Madrid train bombings a year earlier, and in France with the riots in the Parisian suburbs in 2005.

Despite this, most European governments have responded half-heartedly to the problem and other leaders, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, have openly said that the adoption of Sharia law in the near future "seems unavoidable." Such political inertia and flaccidity, Bawer writes, results from a social ethos in which:

The average German politician, French journalist, or Swedish professor simply can't imagine a life directed by religious belief. Confronted with the fact 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.

Indeed, such misreadings as those by the Susan Sontags of the world, carelessly ululating that all the world's troubles are caused by the oft-derided white race – "the cancer of human history" – are prevalent, but factual analyses and workable solutions are not. One wonders if as Islamist violence in Europe worsens, Europeans will recover their steely resolve and face up to the deadly situation they have created. Some say yes, others say no, but one fact is certain: things are going to get ugly.