Nothing To Fear - Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe BOSTON REVIEW

[grassfed]

If you want to read a European book decrying Islam and Muslims, you have many to choose from. The dominant style on the continent is memoir, recounting the horrific experiences of a Muslim (or formerly Muslim) woman in her Islamic milieu. Infidel and The Caged Virgin, by former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are the most familiar in this genre. The best-selling French titles speak for themselves: Dishonored; Mutilated; The Sold Ones and The Fatiha (both on forced marriages); Disfigured; Souad, Burned Alive; and Latya, Her Face Stolen.

Europe’s anti-Islam sentiment may be expressed most visibly in memoirs because Europeans have been reticent to condemn Islam—or religion more generally—outright. Americans, however, seem to prefer a less subtle approach. In the United States, alongside the autobiographies, we find two kinds of direct attack on Islam: as a “gutter religion” (Robert Spencer’s The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran) and as a threat to our fundamental values—a threat that has already overrun Europe and is now heading this way.

I am interested in the second style. They’re asleep; we’re next—so we are warned in Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. We hear a similar message in his Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom; in Brigitte Gabriel’s They Must Be Stopped; and Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

Perhaps these books are innocent, less about an animus against Islam than an expression of Americans’ secret delight in knocking weak-kneed French and English politicians. Or maybe we simply prefer displacing our anxiety about Islam from the nice Pakistani surgeon next-door onto jihadists invading European cities.

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