Since 2006, when Bruce Bawer wrote his illuminating book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, the situation has worsened tenfold. Not surprisingly, when his book was first published, Bawer was accused of Islamophobia. Yet as early as 1998, Bawer noted the widening divisions between the liberal and democratic policies of the Netherlands and the fact that “Dutch Muslims kept that society at arm’s length, despising its freedoms[.]”
In the late 1990s, Bawer and his male partner decided to live in Amsterdam because it seemed to him to be “the one place [he’d] ever been where homophobia really seemed to have disappeared.” He felt that the Netherlands had moved from the “foolishness of [American] fundamentalism,” and although he loved America “not because of its wealth or power, but because of its culture and values,” he wanted to really know what it meant to be an American by living elsewhere as a means of contrast.
Once in the Netherlands, Bawer began to appreciate “American virtues” that he’d always taken for granted – most importantly a “belief in the future.” He found that while he enjoyed the culture of Europe, he also saw that much of Western Europe was “bound up with a stifling conformity, a discomfort with excellence and an overt disapproval of those who strove too visibly to better their lot” – in short, “mediocrity.” He saw that France and Germany were “plagued by low growth and rising unemployment, a direct consequence of welfare state policies.” He also realized that Europeans “had been fed a zero-sum understanding of economics.”
In addition, he perceived that “fundamentalist Muslims were on the march and their numbers and power were large and growing rapidly – and the ultimate objective was far more than a ban on abortion or gay marriage.” A sea change was overtaking Europe that involved female genital mutilation, viewing women as property, and subsidies from the Dutch state as well as from Islamic governments that taught hatred of Jews, Israel, America, and the West. The very countries that these Muslims were living in were to be scorned, since they were meant to be replaced by a Muslim caliphate governed according to sharia law.
But surely, Bawer believed, this could not be permitted. He naively presumed that such contempt for pluralism, open-mindedness, democracy, and sexual equality would not be tolerated. Instead, political correctness, spineless leaders, and Islamic intimidation worked their magic so that in 1998, “Europeans were clueless” as to what was occurring under their very noses.
