Author Bawer has done yeoman work in exposing the curtailment of free speech in the West and notably in the US in order not to offend Muslims. Sometimes this is as a result of overt threats by Muslims, sometimes it occurs due to self-censorship to ward off such threats and criticism. In any case it is cowardly, and ultimately self-defeating.
This work is replete with examples of such instances from beginning to end, but in spite of the author's courage in writing this book, I note that the publisher saw fit to omit the cartoons that brought the most direct threats from the Muslim world. It seems like self-censorship is alive and well. Frankly I have seen much worse anti-Christian "works of art" in the US, but these were allowed to be publically displayed. I guess Christians aren't willing to murder people over such issues.
Not only is the entire theme timely and important, but so are several side points. The author mentions "dhimmitude" -- a concept that should be loudly proclaimed on our Government-controlled media (NBC and its various outlets and affiliates) and taught in our schools until every American understands what it means. Non-Muslims are not merely 2nd class citizens in Muslim countries under Sharia law; they pay an tax for the privilege of not being a Muslim, cannot fight a Muslim, and their oaths are not valid. Frankly their status is much lower than that of blacks in the US during the Jim Crow years. One must remember that the Qur'an definitely states that non-Muslims must be subordinate to Muslims and are not equal to Muslims in any sense. So much for "All men are created equal." In addition, we in the US should also know that the Turkish word for non-Muslims is the same as "cattle." That supported the children tax that was levied on Christian towns in the Balkans to fill the Janassary Corps and harems of the Ottomans. Gee, no wonder the Serbs don't like the Muslim Bosnians. So why do we?
Nonetheless, political correctness in the West & the US is turning free speech into a mockery. Only the Muslims (and the radical leftists in the US) actually have free speech -- for the rest it is already a lost right. Bawer does well to prove this fact, and his scholarship is impressive. One would hope that more than a few are reading this book, but it doesn't look like it.
Highly recommended. The hour is late.
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Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom Hardcover – May 19, 2009
by
Bruce Bawer
(Author)
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There is a new form of jihad to fear—one that threatens the very values on which our freedom rests
Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept sounded the alarm about the dire impact of Muslim immigration in Europe. Now, in Surrender, he reveals that a combination of fear and political correctness has led politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders, and the media—both in the United States and abroad—to appease radical Islam at the cost of our most cherished values: freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And the cost could ultimately be even higher—the imposition of sharia law in places where liberty once reigned.
In Surrender, Bawer writes of a new form of jihad that began with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, a death sentence born of Muslim outrage over a work of literature. It marked the dawn of an era of pressure and intimidation designed to crush the ability of non-Muslims to resist Islamic encroachments on Western freedom. In a sweeping survey of recent history and current events, Bawer traces a pattern of heightened sensitivity to Muslim reactions and a reluctance to look honestly at the human-rights deficiencies of the Muslim world. This pattern can be seen in the widespread denunciation of the Danish cartoons and of the editors who printed them; in the glowing media coverage of the supposedly moderate Muslim icon Tariq Ramadan; in the decision of major newspapers to ignore or soft-pedal terrorist “dry runs” on American airplanes; in the international uproar over a single sentence about Islam in a lecture by Pope Benedict; and in attempts by certain parties to silence criticism of Islam by suing writers who have dared to speak forthrightly about the religion.
Bawer argues that people throughout the Western world—in reaction to such events as the Danish cartoon riots and the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh—are surrendering to fear. And he observes that Muslim extremists have found unexpected allies: non-Muslims who, motivated by the misguided doctrine of multiculturalism, refuse to criticize even the most illiberal aspects of Islamic culture. The resulting accommodation undermines the values of individual liberty and equality on which our nation was founded.
Fearless and excoriating, Surrender is an essential wake-up call for everyone concerned about the preservation of our most fundamental freedoms.
- Print length321 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication dateMay 19, 2009
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-10038552398X
- ISBN-13978-0385523981
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Bawer (While Europe Slept) argues that, in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism, critics of radical Islam are being silenced by left-leaning academics, politicians and journalists. He argues that self-censorship has become widespread in the Western press, referring to outcry following the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's 2005 publication of cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad, when many international news outlets debated whether the paper had the right to print them in the first place—an attack on freedom of the press coming from within its own ranks. While Bawer does an admirable job of rooting out hypocritical statements made by pundits and politicians, readers might wince at his pronounced anti-Muslim bias—he claims that Muslim immigrants to the West are in a war to snuff out free speech and equal rights. Bawer's thought-provoking arguments are overshadowed by his shrill condemnations and a cranky attack on those who paint him as a polarizing figure. The book would have been helped had the author remembered his own statement, made early in the book: Free speech doesn't mean immunity from criticism. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Narrowing his scope from While Europe Slept (2005) but retaining its theme of radical Islamic assault on Western civil liberties, Bawer files a hefty brief of case reports on Muslim campaigns against free speech, primarily in western Europe but also in Canada and the U.S. Official infatuation with political correctness (PC), the determination that no one ever be offended, and multiculturalism, the dogma that all cultural perspectives are equally and universally valid, undergird what Bawer believes amounts to a surrender of Western liberal traditions. What may seal the fate of free speech, he argues, are the apparent inabilities of Western ruling elites to be offended by Muslims rioting, threatening by fatwa, and murdering non-Muslims (Bawer fully presents instances of all three, many of them known, though insufficiently, by Americans) and to assert the priority of Western liberal values in the West. Since he continues to write about free-speech clashes, Norwegian resident Bawer says, he increasingly risks charges of violating Muslims’ legal right not to be criticized in more and more European countries. Moreover, because he is gay, and because radical Islam prescribes death for homosexuality, as sharia law becomes the law in Muslim-majority areas—a development well underway—his life is in burgeoning jeopardy, too. Sublimely literate and rational, Bawer is no crank, however angry he gets. This, like its immediate predecessor, is an immensely important and urgent book. --Ray Olson
Review
Praise for Surrender:
“The Fatwa against Salman Rushdie caught all by surprise. Since then, many Americans and Europeans know that their world of ‘live and let live’ has been declared ‘the House of War’ in the name of Islam. Surrender is written with an urgency and clarity that makes it hard to stop reading and re-reading it. It should be studied by all who wish to understand the forces at work that make an Islamic ‘House of Peace’ a brewing nightmare.”
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“Looking at recent history and current events, it is all too clear that many people in Western societies are still blinded by the illusion of multiculturalism and don’t see the danger Islam poses to our way of life. Bruce Bawer has yet again written an excellent book that reveals just how critical the situation has become. To preserve our precious liberties, the Islamisation of the Western world must be stopped as soon as possible. This book is vitally important in the struggle to turn the tide and I truly hope that it will serve as an eye-opener for everyone.”
—Geert Wilders, member of the Dutch parliament, political leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV) and maker of the film, Fitna
“With courage and verve, Bruce Bawer builds the case for how ‘the West is on the road to sharia,’ or Islamic law. Drawing mainly on examples from Europe and North America, he shows how multiculturalists routinely appease Islamists, with freedom the inevitable loser. In response, Bawer rousingly and rightly argues that the West’s unwavering principle must be ‘a refusal to sacrifice or compromise liberty - no matter what.’”
—Daniel Pipes, Director, Middle East Forum
“Liberals should be in the forefront of the defense of free expression against the deeply disturbing threats Bruce Bawer documents.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars
"Narrowing his scope from While Europe Slept (2005) but retaining its theme of radical Islamic assault on Western civil liberties, Bawer files a hefty brief of case reports on Muslim campaigns against free speech, primarily in western Europe buy also in Canada and the U.S. Official infatuation with political correctness (PC), the determination that no one ever be offended, and multiculturalism, the dogma that all cultural perspectives are equally and universally valid, undergird what Bawer believes amounts to a surrender of Western liberal tradition. What may seal the fate of free speech, he argues, are the apparent inabilities of Western ruling elites to be offended by Muslims rioting, threatening by fatwa, and murdering non-Muslims (Bawer fully presents instances of all three, many of them known, though insufficiently, by Americans) and to assert the priority of Western liberal values in the West. Since he continues to write about free-speech clashes, Norwegian resident Bawer says, he increasingly risks charges of violating Muslims’ legal right not to be criticized in more and more European countries. Moreover, because he is gay, and because radical Islam prescribes death for homosexuality, as sharia law becomes the law in Muslim-majority areas—a development well underway—his life is in burgeoning jeopardy, too. Sublimely literate and rational, Bawer is no crank, however angry he gets. This, like its immediate predecessor, is an immensely important and urgent book."
—Booklist (starred review)
"Clash of civilizations? You bet—it’s Western civilization versus the multiculturalist abettors of al-Qaeda and the ayatollahs. Literary critic and cultural commentator Bawer (While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, 2006, etc.) opens with the well-known story of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s book that earned its author a death sentence courtesy of the Iranian mullahs. Rather than rise up to present a united front against censorship, many Western lit-biz types—from chain bookstores to Germaine Greer—opined that Rushie had it coming, a sentiment that plays out, by Bawer’s account, every time a newspaper editor censors a cartoon or column that might conceivably offend some fundamentalist Muslim anywhere on Earth. Bawer has a field day deriding the multiculturalists—academics, mostly—who would sooner consign their own culture to the flames than defend it against its many enemies abroad. 'Multiculturalism,' Bawer writes, 'means exalting non-Western groups, treating their collective values (however illiberal) as sacrosanct, and either choosing not to notice their lack of freedom or pretending there’s no such thing as freedom…' The author's work has drifted toward the right over the years, but his argument is often well-reasoned and to the point. It is beyond question that the imams would not brook cultural criticism of this or any other ilk in the unlikely event that they came to power in Washington, D.C., or London. Still, Bawer’s argument occasionally takes silly turns, as when he condemns the Dixie Chicks for “telling their critics to shut up” via the documentary Shut Up and Sing, and the State Department for doing away with the useless term 'Islamo-fascism.' Merits discussion, despite its shrill moments and its tendency to paint all Muslims with an enemy-of-democracy brush."
—Kirkus
Praise for While Europe Slept:
“A book of the utmost importance, full of deep concern for Europe and almost unbelievable revelations for most Americans.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A must-read book.” —Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
“A clarion call for the West to understand the radical threat to our freedoms from politicized fundamentalist Islam.” —Andrew Sullivan
“Indispensable … a portrait of a powder keg continent.” —J. Peder Zane, Raleigh News & Observer
“If you want to understand the car burnings, the killings over cartoons and films, and other outrages sure to come, you won’t do any better than While Europe Slept.” —Scott C. Yates, Rocky Mountain News
“Bruce Bawer reveals how self-acclaimed European morality proves abjectly amoral in its appeasement of radical Islamic anti-Semitism, homophobia, gender apartheid, and religious intolerance. A sensitive and sober portrait of an increasingly insensitive and reckless continent.” —Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of Carnage and Culture and An Autumn of War
“Bawer paints an alarming picture of a continent in deep trouble and deeper denial—but now, perhaps, on the verge of waking up. Some books are merely important. This one is necessary.” —Jonathan Rauch, senior writer and columnist for National Journal and correspondent for Atlantic Monthly
“Bruce Bawer has produced a book that is at once riveting, disturbing, fascinating, chilling, and shocking. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how militant Islam has insinuated itself into the heart of the West.” —Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us
“Bruce Bawer’s book is obligatory reading for everyone who wants to know what is happening to Europe today. And it is grim. This is perhaps the most important book written in many years. And as an observer from outside, Bawer can more easily see and diagnose what is going on.” —Henrik Gade Jensen, Jyllands-Posten (Denmark)
“Excellently written … a book that everyone in Europe should read.” —De Leestafel (Netherlands)
“Obligatory reading.” —José María Marco, Libertad Digital (Spain)
“The Fatwa against Salman Rushdie caught all by surprise. Since then, many Americans and Europeans know that their world of ‘live and let live’ has been declared ‘the House of War’ in the name of Islam. Surrender is written with an urgency and clarity that makes it hard to stop reading and re-reading it. It should be studied by all who wish to understand the forces at work that make an Islamic ‘House of Peace’ a brewing nightmare.”
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“Looking at recent history and current events, it is all too clear that many people in Western societies are still blinded by the illusion of multiculturalism and don’t see the danger Islam poses to our way of life. Bruce Bawer has yet again written an excellent book that reveals just how critical the situation has become. To preserve our precious liberties, the Islamisation of the Western world must be stopped as soon as possible. This book is vitally important in the struggle to turn the tide and I truly hope that it will serve as an eye-opener for everyone.”
—Geert Wilders, member of the Dutch parliament, political leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV) and maker of the film, Fitna
“With courage and verve, Bruce Bawer builds the case for how ‘the West is on the road to sharia,’ or Islamic law. Drawing mainly on examples from Europe and North America, he shows how multiculturalists routinely appease Islamists, with freedom the inevitable loser. In response, Bawer rousingly and rightly argues that the West’s unwavering principle must be ‘a refusal to sacrifice or compromise liberty - no matter what.’”
—Daniel Pipes, Director, Middle East Forum
“Liberals should be in the forefront of the defense of free expression against the deeply disturbing threats Bruce Bawer documents.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars
"Narrowing his scope from While Europe Slept (2005) but retaining its theme of radical Islamic assault on Western civil liberties, Bawer files a hefty brief of case reports on Muslim campaigns against free speech, primarily in western Europe buy also in Canada and the U.S. Official infatuation with political correctness (PC), the determination that no one ever be offended, and multiculturalism, the dogma that all cultural perspectives are equally and universally valid, undergird what Bawer believes amounts to a surrender of Western liberal tradition. What may seal the fate of free speech, he argues, are the apparent inabilities of Western ruling elites to be offended by Muslims rioting, threatening by fatwa, and murdering non-Muslims (Bawer fully presents instances of all three, many of them known, though insufficiently, by Americans) and to assert the priority of Western liberal values in the West. Since he continues to write about free-speech clashes, Norwegian resident Bawer says, he increasingly risks charges of violating Muslims’ legal right not to be criticized in more and more European countries. Moreover, because he is gay, and because radical Islam prescribes death for homosexuality, as sharia law becomes the law in Muslim-majority areas—a development well underway—his life is in burgeoning jeopardy, too. Sublimely literate and rational, Bawer is no crank, however angry he gets. This, like its immediate predecessor, is an immensely important and urgent book."
—Booklist (starred review)
"Clash of civilizations? You bet—it’s Western civilization versus the multiculturalist abettors of al-Qaeda and the ayatollahs. Literary critic and cultural commentator Bawer (While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, 2006, etc.) opens with the well-known story of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s book that earned its author a death sentence courtesy of the Iranian mullahs. Rather than rise up to present a united front against censorship, many Western lit-biz types—from chain bookstores to Germaine Greer—opined that Rushie had it coming, a sentiment that plays out, by Bawer’s account, every time a newspaper editor censors a cartoon or column that might conceivably offend some fundamentalist Muslim anywhere on Earth. Bawer has a field day deriding the multiculturalists—academics, mostly—who would sooner consign their own culture to the flames than defend it against its many enemies abroad. 'Multiculturalism,' Bawer writes, 'means exalting non-Western groups, treating their collective values (however illiberal) as sacrosanct, and either choosing not to notice their lack of freedom or pretending there’s no such thing as freedom…' The author's work has drifted toward the right over the years, but his argument is often well-reasoned and to the point. It is beyond question that the imams would not brook cultural criticism of this or any other ilk in the unlikely event that they came to power in Washington, D.C., or London. Still, Bawer’s argument occasionally takes silly turns, as when he condemns the Dixie Chicks for “telling their critics to shut up” via the documentary Shut Up and Sing, and the State Department for doing away with the useless term 'Islamo-fascism.' Merits discussion, despite its shrill moments and its tendency to paint all Muslims with an enemy-of-democracy brush."
—Kirkus
Praise for While Europe Slept:
“A book of the utmost importance, full of deep concern for Europe and almost unbelievable revelations for most Americans.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A must-read book.” —Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
“A clarion call for the West to understand the radical threat to our freedoms from politicized fundamentalist Islam.” —Andrew Sullivan
“Indispensable … a portrait of a powder keg continent.” —J. Peder Zane, Raleigh News & Observer
“If you want to understand the car burnings, the killings over cartoons and films, and other outrages sure to come, you won’t do any better than While Europe Slept.” —Scott C. Yates, Rocky Mountain News
“Bruce Bawer reveals how self-acclaimed European morality proves abjectly amoral in its appeasement of radical Islamic anti-Semitism, homophobia, gender apartheid, and religious intolerance. A sensitive and sober portrait of an increasingly insensitive and reckless continent.” —Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of Carnage and Culture and An Autumn of War
“Bawer paints an alarming picture of a continent in deep trouble and deeper denial—but now, perhaps, on the verge of waking up. Some books are merely important. This one is necessary.” —Jonathan Rauch, senior writer and columnist for National Journal and correspondent for Atlantic Monthly
“Bruce Bawer has produced a book that is at once riveting, disturbing, fascinating, chilling, and shocking. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how militant Islam has insinuated itself into the heart of the West.” —Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us
“Bruce Bawer’s book is obligatory reading for everyone who wants to know what is happening to Europe today. And it is grim. This is perhaps the most important book written in many years. And as an observer from outside, Bawer can more easily see and diagnose what is going on.” —Henrik Gade Jensen, Jyllands-Posten (Denmark)
“Excellently written … a book that everyone in Europe should read.” —De Leestafel (Netherlands)
“Obligatory reading.” —José María Marco, Libertad Digital (Spain)
About the Author
Bruce Bawer is one of our leading cultural critics. Described by Kirkus Reviews as “a literary essayist for the ages,” he has published several volumes of criticism, including Diminishing Fictions, The Aspect of Eternity, and Prophets and Professors, as well as one of the most influential books ever written about homosexuality, A Place at the Table, and Stealing Jesus, which Publishers Weekly called “a must-read book for anyone concerned with the relationship of Christianity to contemporary American culture.” His most recent book, While Europe Slept, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Bruce Bawer's latest book comes wrapped in the American flag or, more precisely, wrapped in a jacket depicting the Statue of Liberty gagged with an American flag. It's an arresting image meant to convey an alarming message: Muslims on a "cultural jihad" intend to stifle free speech in the United States and destroy our liberty. They may succeed, Bawer warns, because they receive aid and comfort from liberal dupes flying the banner of "multiculturalism." Bawer, an accomplished literary critic, has addressed this subject before, in a book published in 2006 called "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within." There he wrote about the increasing tension between majority populations in cities such as London, Paris and Amsterdam and their often alienated Muslim immigrant neighbors. Bawer stirred controversy by painting Muslims with crude brushstrokes suggesting ubiquitous and intrinsic Islamic extremism. Much of "Surrender" merely updates that earlier volume. In his new book, Bawer indulges in such unsubstantiated declarations as: "While there are such things as moderate and liberal Christianity, there is no such thing as a moderate or liberal Islam." And: "To put it briefly and nakedly, the West is on the road to sharia," or the rule of Islamic religious law. Forgoing the temptation to dismiss Bawer's latest work as a polemical retread (because most of it actually deals, again, with events in Europe), one might focus on his depiction of Muslims in America. "Surrender" 's cover, after all, advertises a book about the United States, and the author expends considerable energy extolling the First Amendment in contrast to less tolerant-sounding words from the Koran. Training his gaze on the United States, Bawer produces a muddled picture. He neglects to take note of the fact that, on average, the American Muslim population is better educated, better off economically and better integrated socially than its Western European counterparts. Not surprisingly, American Muslims have been implicated in far fewer terrorist plots since 9/11 -- and no successful ones. This is not to say that the toxic mixture of religious zealotry and anti-Western ideology that poisons some European Muslim enclaves is altogether absent from the United States. Bawer could have looked at the tiny minority of American Muslims who harbor real hostility to the mainstream: men like the three Muslim brothers from Albania who were sentenced to life in prison in April for conspiring to kill American soldiers at the Fort Dix, N.J., military base or the four men arrested in New York last month in an alleged plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx. Instead, he implies that innocuous Muslim social and spiritual organizations favor religiously inspired violence. One he singles out for condemnation as an extremist "front group" is the Islamic Society of North America. I happen to have interviewed numerous members of ISNA and attended their gatherings. Bawer provides no evidence that he has first-hand experience with the group, but, in any event, his attack seems wildly misleading. ISNA has tens of thousands of members who are led by middle-class immigrant engineers, physicians, academics and entrepreneurs. Its current president is Ingrid Mattson, a moderate-minded scholar born in Canada who years ago converted to Islam. Most ISNA members, it's fair to say, disagree with most American Jews on relations with Israel. But by and large, these are Muslims seeking a constructive role in American society. They adhere to various strains of Islam: some orthodox, some less so. They are increasingly engaged politically. Many supported George W. Bush in 2000; in 2008, they rallied to Barack Obama. Bawer veers into self-parody when he asserts that Muslims have cowed skeptics into self-censorship and inaction: "Artists and writers avoid Islamic themes and settings; police officers avoid Muslim neighborhoods." His own work shows that critics of Islam have no trouble publishing. I counted references in "Surrender" to more than 15 of his allies: prominent columnists, bloggers and authors. As for the notion that the police, FBI and immigration authorities steer clear of Muslim neighborhoods, one need only consider the thousands of Muslims who have been arrested and deported from the United States since 9/11 -- some justly, some unjustly -- to verify that Bawer has lost his bearings on this topic.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I
"Send him to hell"
We in the West are living in the midst of a jihad, and most of us don't even realize it--because it's a brand of jihad that's barely a generation old.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War. It's called the House of War because it, too, according to the Koran, is destined to be governed by sharia, and it will take war--holy war, jihad--to bring it into the House of Submission.
Jihad began with Muhammed himself. When he was born, the lands that today make up the Arab world were populated mostly by Christians and Jews; within a century after his death, those areas' inhabitants had been killed, driven away, subjugated to Islam as members of the underclass known as dhimmis, or converted to the Religion of Peace at the point of a sword. The Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not wars of conquest by Europeans but attempts to take back what had once been Christian territory. America's very first foreign conflict after the Revolutionary War was with the Barbary pirates, who, sponsored by the Muslim governments of North Africa--just as terrorist groups today enjoy the sponsorship of countries like Libya, Iran, and Syria--had for generations been preying on European ships and selling their crews and passengers into slavery. (Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, over one million Europeans--including people like Cervantes, Saint Vincent de Paul, and French playwright Jean Francois Regnard--became chattel in North Africa, a minor detail that rarely makes it into Western history textbooks, perhaps because it would compel textbook writers to accord jihad a major role in their narratives of Western history.)
In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassadors to Britain and France respectively, met in London with the Tripolitanian envoy to Britain and asked him why his pirates were preying on American ships; he explained, as Adams and Jefferson reported afterward to the Continental Congress, that the pirates' actions were "founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."
In their own eyes, in short, as well as in the eyes of the Muslim governments of the day, the Barbary pirates were engaged not in criminality but in jihad (or, more specifically, al-jihad fil-bahr, "the holy war at sea"). For a time the young United States of America joined European governments in shelling out "tribute" to the pirates--that is, paying them off--to keep them from plundering ships and enslaving sailors. But once America had built up seagoing forces that were up to the job, it sent in the Navy and Marines to put an end to this brigandage in what became known as the First and Second Barbary Wars (1801-05, 1815)--thus the line in the Marine Corps hymn about "the shores of Tripoli." (These wars, too, fail to merit a mention in many American history textbooks.)
After their defeat in the Barbary Wars, the pirates left U.S. vessels alone. But the spirit of jihad, like a hardy virus, survived--quiescent, yet lethal--only to manifest itself, in later generations, in different forms. Today, piracy; tomorrow, terrorism.
In the late 1980s, a brand-new mutation of the virus appeared. The news came, most famously, in the form of an announcement made on Valentine's Day 1989 by the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini, who in 1979 had succeeded the overthrown Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as Iran's supreme leader (thereby earning a nod as Time's Man of the Year) and promptly subjected that country to sharia, was a mufti--an Islamic scholar who is qualified under sharia law to issue a fatwa, an authoritative opinion that settles a question of faith. In this case the question was whether the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie should be killed for having insulted Islam in his recently published novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini's answer? Iranians heard it over the radio: "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them." Days later, Iran officially put a bounty on Rushdie's head. The author went into hiding. He has been guarded day and night by British police ever since.
Nothing quite like this, it's safe to say, had ever happened before.
Khomeini's fatwa reflected the recognition that jihad's proper targets don't just include Western vessels and buildings. They also, and more fundamentally, include Western freedoms--above all, the foundational freedom: freedom of speech. What has emerged from this recognition is a new phase of jihad whose advantages include not requiring jihadists to engage in combat to the death but only in such low-risk activities as the writing of letters of complaint to government officials, participating in "intercultural dialogue," and the occasional rally, march, riot, flag-burning, or act of embassy vandalism. Not only do the participants in this modern brand of jihad take virtually no chances (there is little likelihood of arrest and even less of conviction), but they also enjoy the assistance of non-Muslims who, when not supporting these New Age jihadists out of a misguided sense of sympathy or outright fear, are motivated by ideology--namely, the pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism, which teaches free people to belittle their own liberties while bending their knees to tyrants, and which, as we shall see, has proven to be so useful to the new brand of cultural jihadists that it might have been invented by Osama bin Laden himself.
In Khomeini's singling out of Rushdie, there was no little amount of irony. A son of Muslims, Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and educated at Cambridge. More to the point, though he resided in Britain and lived essentially as an Englishman, he was no knee-jerk critic of Islam or defender of the West. Far from it: at the time of Khomeini's fatwa, Rushdie's politics could be fairly described as more or less standard-issue British literary intellectual leftism. "It was ironic," the Islam expert Martin Kramer has noted, "that Rushdie, a postcolonial literary icon of impeccable left-wing credentials, should have been made by some Muslims into the very personification of orientalist hostility to Islam." Indeed, Rushdie had opposed the Shah and supported the Islamist revolution that brought Khomeini to power. Anyone familiar with his books at the time of the fatwa would have said that he harbored considerably less animosity toward Islam, radical or otherwise, than toward America and Britain, which he tended to identify not so much with freedom and human rights as with colonialism and imperialism. He was particularly hostile to Britain's then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher--upon whose government's protection, after the fatwa, his well-being entirely depended. (Rushdie's positions on Western values and Islamic revolution, to be sure, would shift somewhat as a result of his post-fatwa experiences.)
The Satanic Verses was Rushdie's fourth novel. Its title was taken from the commonly used name for certain passages that had supposedly been inserted into the Koran at an early date and later declared inauthentic and removed. Long, muddled, often surrealistic, and consistently overheated, the novel (which, like most of Rushdie's fiction, I personally find all but unreadable) was meant to be understood as a reflection on the experience of South Asian immigrants in the West. As Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review, it "deals only incidentally with Islam." Yet Khomeini and others managed to convince the Muslim world otherwise.
Khomeini was the most powerful person to charge Rushdie with blasphemy, but he wasn't the first. Three months before the fatwa, in October 1988, the New York Times ran an article about India's ban on The Satanic Verses, and published an open letter from Rushdie to that country's prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, charging that the prohibition was meant to mollify "two or three Muslim politicians" who hadn't even read the book. Yet Khomeini's fatwa was the decisive act, persuading Muslims worldwide that killing Salman Rushdie would be a holy act of jihad. The Union of Islamic Students' Associations in Europe, for example, declared its solidarity with the ayatollah. Mellow-voiced pop singer Cat Stevens, who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam, said that if Rushdie turned up at his door, he'd call Khomeini personally "and tell him exactly where this man is." British Muslim leader Iqbal Sacranie, who would later be awarded a knighthood, said of Rushdie: "Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him . . . his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to [sic] Almighty Allah." On May 27, 1989, Rushdie was burned in effigy at a gathering of at least fifteen thousand Muslims in London.
The Satanic Verses was banned in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sudan, South Africa, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Singapore, and even Venezuela, but not in any North American or European countries. There were those in the West, however--some of them in positions of enormous influence--who would doubtless have forbidden its sale if they had the power to do so. When asked about the fatwa, for example, former president Jimmy Carter didn't call for greater Muslim sensitivity to other people's ...
"Send him to hell"
We in the West are living in the midst of a jihad, and most of us don't even realize it--because it's a brand of jihad that's barely a generation old.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War. It's called the House of War because it, too, according to the Koran, is destined to be governed by sharia, and it will take war--holy war, jihad--to bring it into the House of Submission.
Jihad began with Muhammed himself. When he was born, the lands that today make up the Arab world were populated mostly by Christians and Jews; within a century after his death, those areas' inhabitants had been killed, driven away, subjugated to Islam as members of the underclass known as dhimmis, or converted to the Religion of Peace at the point of a sword. The Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not wars of conquest by Europeans but attempts to take back what had once been Christian territory. America's very first foreign conflict after the Revolutionary War was with the Barbary pirates, who, sponsored by the Muslim governments of North Africa--just as terrorist groups today enjoy the sponsorship of countries like Libya, Iran, and Syria--had for generations been preying on European ships and selling their crews and passengers into slavery. (Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, over one million Europeans--including people like Cervantes, Saint Vincent de Paul, and French playwright Jean Francois Regnard--became chattel in North Africa, a minor detail that rarely makes it into Western history textbooks, perhaps because it would compel textbook writers to accord jihad a major role in their narratives of Western history.)
In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassadors to Britain and France respectively, met in London with the Tripolitanian envoy to Britain and asked him why his pirates were preying on American ships; he explained, as Adams and Jefferson reported afterward to the Continental Congress, that the pirates' actions were "founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."
In their own eyes, in short, as well as in the eyes of the Muslim governments of the day, the Barbary pirates were engaged not in criminality but in jihad (or, more specifically, al-jihad fil-bahr, "the holy war at sea"). For a time the young United States of America joined European governments in shelling out "tribute" to the pirates--that is, paying them off--to keep them from plundering ships and enslaving sailors. But once America had built up seagoing forces that were up to the job, it sent in the Navy and Marines to put an end to this brigandage in what became known as the First and Second Barbary Wars (1801-05, 1815)--thus the line in the Marine Corps hymn about "the shores of Tripoli." (These wars, too, fail to merit a mention in many American history textbooks.)
After their defeat in the Barbary Wars, the pirates left U.S. vessels alone. But the spirit of jihad, like a hardy virus, survived--quiescent, yet lethal--only to manifest itself, in later generations, in different forms. Today, piracy; tomorrow, terrorism.
In the late 1980s, a brand-new mutation of the virus appeared. The news came, most famously, in the form of an announcement made on Valentine's Day 1989 by the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini, who in 1979 had succeeded the overthrown Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as Iran's supreme leader (thereby earning a nod as Time's Man of the Year) and promptly subjected that country to sharia, was a mufti--an Islamic scholar who is qualified under sharia law to issue a fatwa, an authoritative opinion that settles a question of faith. In this case the question was whether the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie should be killed for having insulted Islam in his recently published novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini's answer? Iranians heard it over the radio: "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them." Days later, Iran officially put a bounty on Rushdie's head. The author went into hiding. He has been guarded day and night by British police ever since.
Nothing quite like this, it's safe to say, had ever happened before.
Khomeini's fatwa reflected the recognition that jihad's proper targets don't just include Western vessels and buildings. They also, and more fundamentally, include Western freedoms--above all, the foundational freedom: freedom of speech. What has emerged from this recognition is a new phase of jihad whose advantages include not requiring jihadists to engage in combat to the death but only in such low-risk activities as the writing of letters of complaint to government officials, participating in "intercultural dialogue," and the occasional rally, march, riot, flag-burning, or act of embassy vandalism. Not only do the participants in this modern brand of jihad take virtually no chances (there is little likelihood of arrest and even less of conviction), but they also enjoy the assistance of non-Muslims who, when not supporting these New Age jihadists out of a misguided sense of sympathy or outright fear, are motivated by ideology--namely, the pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism, which teaches free people to belittle their own liberties while bending their knees to tyrants, and which, as we shall see, has proven to be so useful to the new brand of cultural jihadists that it might have been invented by Osama bin Laden himself.
In Khomeini's singling out of Rushdie, there was no little amount of irony. A son of Muslims, Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and educated at Cambridge. More to the point, though he resided in Britain and lived essentially as an Englishman, he was no knee-jerk critic of Islam or defender of the West. Far from it: at the time of Khomeini's fatwa, Rushdie's politics could be fairly described as more or less standard-issue British literary intellectual leftism. "It was ironic," the Islam expert Martin Kramer has noted, "that Rushdie, a postcolonial literary icon of impeccable left-wing credentials, should have been made by some Muslims into the very personification of orientalist hostility to Islam." Indeed, Rushdie had opposed the Shah and supported the Islamist revolution that brought Khomeini to power. Anyone familiar with his books at the time of the fatwa would have said that he harbored considerably less animosity toward Islam, radical or otherwise, than toward America and Britain, which he tended to identify not so much with freedom and human rights as with colonialism and imperialism. He was particularly hostile to Britain's then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher--upon whose government's protection, after the fatwa, his well-being entirely depended. (Rushdie's positions on Western values and Islamic revolution, to be sure, would shift somewhat as a result of his post-fatwa experiences.)
The Satanic Verses was Rushdie's fourth novel. Its title was taken from the commonly used name for certain passages that had supposedly been inserted into the Koran at an early date and later declared inauthentic and removed. Long, muddled, often surrealistic, and consistently overheated, the novel (which, like most of Rushdie's fiction, I personally find all but unreadable) was meant to be understood as a reflection on the experience of South Asian immigrants in the West. As Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review, it "deals only incidentally with Islam." Yet Khomeini and others managed to convince the Muslim world otherwise.
Khomeini was the most powerful person to charge Rushdie with blasphemy, but he wasn't the first. Three months before the fatwa, in October 1988, the New York Times ran an article about India's ban on The Satanic Verses, and published an open letter from Rushdie to that country's prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, charging that the prohibition was meant to mollify "two or three Muslim politicians" who hadn't even read the book. Yet Khomeini's fatwa was the decisive act, persuading Muslims worldwide that killing Salman Rushdie would be a holy act of jihad. The Union of Islamic Students' Associations in Europe, for example, declared its solidarity with the ayatollah. Mellow-voiced pop singer Cat Stevens, who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam, said that if Rushdie turned up at his door, he'd call Khomeini personally "and tell him exactly where this man is." British Muslim leader Iqbal Sacranie, who would later be awarded a knighthood, said of Rushdie: "Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him . . . his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to [sic] Almighty Allah." On May 27, 1989, Rushdie was burned in effigy at a gathering of at least fifteen thousand Muslims in London.
The Satanic Verses was banned in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sudan, South Africa, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Singapore, and even Venezuela, but not in any North American or European countries. There were those in the West, however--some of them in positions of enormous influence--who would doubtless have forbidden its sale if they had the power to do so. When asked about the fatwa, for example, former president Jimmy Carter didn't call for greater Muslim sensitivity to other people's ...
Product details
- Publisher : Doubleday; First Edition (May 19, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 321 pages
- ISBN-10 : 038552398X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385523981
- Item Weight : 1.32 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,552,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,735 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Bruce Bawer is a highly respected author, critic, essayist and translator. He is the author of several collections of literary and film criticism and a collection of poetry. His political journalism is widely published in print and online journals and he reviews books regularly for the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, and Wall Street Journal. Visit his website at www.brucebawer.com. He lives in Oslo with his partner.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2009
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 19, 2009
I was deeply impressed with Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept and was delighted to hear him sensitively interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS. This latest book "Surrender, Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom",is a tour-de-force of excellent, even gripping writing style. I finished the book in a single night. For me the most powerful part of the book is the first half where he details how secular multiculturalism and political correctness now control most main stream media. He does an excellent job of illustrating how this mentality is gradually conceding both freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The events at Ft. Hood which I believe were the result of direct PC bumbling on the part of the military shows you where this mentality is taking us. Bawer details many similar events that didn't lead to tragedies but could have. This is a disturbing book but a must read. Bawer is no red-state conservative, but he is among a small but growing group of liberals who have understood what the issues really are. This book will not be reviewed in the New York Times. We need to help it get distributed. If you are reading this, I plead, buy the book and read it. Then copy one of these positive reviews and send it to everyone on your email list. As Bawer notes about the internet, it has opened the door for alternative views to get out into the public eye. Let's all give this book a boost. If 1000 of us do this to just 10 people we have opened up the eyes of 10,000 people to what is really going on. Eventually the New York Times will not be able to ignore it.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 2, 2017
This book is uncomfortable for Americans to read, invested as we are in the ideas of freedom of religion and freedom from religion, which when taken together provide a reasonable degree of separation of Religion and the State. Western democracies also have the right of free speech, and are generally in favor of the acceptance of new immigrants. None of those values are acceptable under Islam, which seeks to control everyday life in a rather fascistic way. There is a prescription for every phase of one's life and one should simply submit to the religious/political authorities, who after all, are our bettors. The book catalogs the multiple serious offenses that have occurred in Europe while journalists, growing up under generations of multiculturalist indoctrination, spewed out misinformation in an attempt to hide the facts, and deflect the ire of native Europeans. The book catalogs the many serious offenses that have occurred in the name of Islam. Taken all together these revelations, now a decade old, inevitably produce the feeling that Islam and the Western liberal democracy are incompatible.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 25, 2017
I have read this and his other book While Europe Slept, both excellent books that our religious, academic, media and political leaders need to read. I'm commenting now to call attention to a new book: Stealth Invasion, by Leo Hohmann. We urgently need to know and understand Islmamic thinking. Our political leaders pretend to know, and don't. They make terrible decisions out of ignorance, destroying the Middle East. Read the Koran, first, and see the strong emphasis on punishment of unbelievers, and conspicuous lack of love and grace. The basis of Isis and terrorism is there, and we can't deal with it unless we know.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 26, 2009
This is one of the best books on the subject of Islam and stealth jihad that I have ever read. Mr. Bawer explains in detail exactly what's going on in our country and thoroughout the rest of the world with regard to cultural jihad (or as Robert Spencer calls it, stealth jihad) and why and how the Muslims are managing to succeed with their evil plans. I highly recommend this books for all those who truly care about our country, who want to learn the truth about Islam and who want to learn what they can do to fight against the Islamization of America and the West.
Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible read
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 3, 2017
A fantastic book. Bawer knows this issue inside and out. As he did in 'While Europe slept', he uses sober, philosophical arguments to make his case. My only complaint is that he briefly dwells on matters Paul Berman explored in 'The flight of the intellectuals'. Still an incredible read. Subject matter is mostly pre-Obama, but Bawer shows how the assault on language and reason by the Islamists and their fellow travelers was already under way.
Mark Anderson
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Title Says It All
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 28, 2012
There are a number of books currently available on the threat fundamentalist Islamist ideology poses to Western societies. Bawer is one of the better writers on this topic and this book is up to his usual standards.
The title accurately describes what the book is arguing. By appeasing Islamists and their demands, Western societies are sacrificing and surrendering the freedoms, rights and liberties Westerners have long taken for granted.
This is a soberly written, and sobering, book. Well worth reading.
The title accurately describes what the book is arguing. By appeasing Islamists and their demands, Western societies are sacrificing and surrendering the freedoms, rights and liberties Westerners have long taken for granted.
This is a soberly written, and sobering, book. Well worth reading.
2 people found this helpful
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Mel Mackinnon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 4, 2016
Everybody should read this book.
Caped Crusader
5.0 out of 5 stars
Appease Now, Pay Later
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 24, 2013
With the brutal beheading of Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London this last week, it is an event we shouldn't really be surprised by any more. Muslims have wanted to execute
Salman Rushdie
in a similar manner, as Bruce Bawer writes, as far back as 1989. Rushdie, the Indian/British author (of Muslim descent) was sentenced to death by Iran's
Ayatollah Khomeini
for Rushdie's book the Satanic Verses. Upon issuing the Ayatollah's fatwa, there were scenes we're now all too familiar with: violent protests worldwide with Muslims outraged over some book they'd never even heard of and certainly not read.
Looking back, what was strange about the Rushdie episode was not just the fatwa (religious ruling) itself, but the controlled reaction to it. Despite the many column inches dedicated to the problem, not a word was said about the underlying justification for the death sentence, the religion. More specifically, Islam.
A little over a decade later, and with a far higher Muslim immigrant population in Europe both Theo van Gogh and Pym Fortyn were murdered for their anti-Islamic opinions. As a result of this, Geert Wilders , Ayaan Hirsi Ali , and many more are in hiding needing around the clock protection for having expressed anti-Islamic views or simply written about subjects which the Muslim community considers taboo. What is painfully obvious is that not only is free speech is under attack in a way in which has never been experienced before, but there is a fundamental transformation of our culture and values being forced upon us. Yet to glean your information about today's world from the mass media, you wouldn't have a clue that anything significant is wrong.
Bruce Bawer, a gay conservative writer first came to prominence with While Europe Slept . In it, he wrote about his travels having left 'fundamentalist Christian America' to come to 'enlightened Europe', only to discover things were not as he'd been led to believe. Now in Surrender, Bawer essentially continues his essay but from a slightly different angle and argues that what has now emerged from our capitulation to the `religion we dare not speak of' is a perfect model of how non-Muslims should behave when under Muslim rule (dhimmis) in Islamic countries. There is now a `threat-culture', a self-censorship surrounding anything in print media, cinema, art galleries or universities; anything which attempts to question Islam, or give a differing opinion, or speaks out against some of the more barbarous aspects of Islamic culture.
As Bawer points out, the West had heard about the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Iranian revolution, a variety of terrorist actions by Palestinian guerrillas back in the '70s (including air plane hijackings) so it's not like we'd never encountered Islam before. All of these events kept the Muslim world in the headlines for years, but no one ever felt compelled to learn more about Islam . Bawer identifies the media as having a lot to do with that.
What Bawer does best, and why I find I can't get enough of his writing, is the way he explains the real stories behind the headlines, and his comebacks to the brainwashing BS of many of today's journalists when talking about Islam. Bawer's insights are one of the things I most enjoy about his writing. But the book is also highly entertaining because of the sheer amount of issues included. Among them is the history of jihad and the West, Islamic slavery of whites, and how the concept of freedom evolved in Britain and Europe.
Bawer explores the bizarre thinking possessed by the left as always thinking they are on the fringes of society, fighting to maintain their beliefs against the oppressive majority. Bawer points out that these people are now the university professors; the politicians, civil servants, artists and musicians; they staff social and cultural institutions, they are now the mainstream.
With Europe, Bawer shows the British and French media doing their part not to be out-dhimmied by the Americans, with the BBC's shocking series `Don't Panic, I'm Islamic' broadcast only two months before the 7/7 attacks (which, rather unsurprisingly, saw 5 of the Muslims featured in the documentary later charged in the July 7th attacks). But the French seem to win outright with their complicity in the Muhammad al-Dura affair.
Today we're in a utopian-dominated world in which a war is raging all around us. There are endless Muslim-terror stories being reported in the online media and blogs (look hard and you'll find tens per week, amounting to thousands per year), but completely ignored in the headlines as if nothing is happening. The events in Woolwich and the Boston bombings occasionally burst through to shatter this stupor the media work so hard to lull us into.
In Bawer's Surrender, much like While Europe Slept, I was surprised and outraged at just how much news I'd missed because of media silence. In an age of 24hr news, and a media with a supposedly insatiable appetite for the next story, we're reduced to reading yesteryear's news only when it's published in a book - which is only available online, because most bookshops won't sell it for fear of violence from Muslims. Thankfully, Bruce Bawer continues to fill the void left by the `free' world's media, informing voters of the facts which our news services have long since given up responsibility for. It is at least some small comfort (!) that Bawer is by far the enjoyable writer, tackling the issues that should be of greatest concern to those worried about the state of our democracies.
Cannot recommend this enough.
Looking back, what was strange about the Rushdie episode was not just the fatwa (religious ruling) itself, but the controlled reaction to it. Despite the many column inches dedicated to the problem, not a word was said about the underlying justification for the death sentence, the religion. More specifically, Islam.
A little over a decade later, and with a far higher Muslim immigrant population in Europe both Theo van Gogh and Pym Fortyn were murdered for their anti-Islamic opinions. As a result of this, Geert Wilders , Ayaan Hirsi Ali , and many more are in hiding needing around the clock protection for having expressed anti-Islamic views or simply written about subjects which the Muslim community considers taboo. What is painfully obvious is that not only is free speech is under attack in a way in which has never been experienced before, but there is a fundamental transformation of our culture and values being forced upon us. Yet to glean your information about today's world from the mass media, you wouldn't have a clue that anything significant is wrong.
Bruce Bawer, a gay conservative writer first came to prominence with While Europe Slept . In it, he wrote about his travels having left 'fundamentalist Christian America' to come to 'enlightened Europe', only to discover things were not as he'd been led to believe. Now in Surrender, Bawer essentially continues his essay but from a slightly different angle and argues that what has now emerged from our capitulation to the `religion we dare not speak of' is a perfect model of how non-Muslims should behave when under Muslim rule (dhimmis) in Islamic countries. There is now a `threat-culture', a self-censorship surrounding anything in print media, cinema, art galleries or universities; anything which attempts to question Islam, or give a differing opinion, or speaks out against some of the more barbarous aspects of Islamic culture.
As Bawer points out, the West had heard about the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Iranian revolution, a variety of terrorist actions by Palestinian guerrillas back in the '70s (including air plane hijackings) so it's not like we'd never encountered Islam before. All of these events kept the Muslim world in the headlines for years, but no one ever felt compelled to learn more about Islam . Bawer identifies the media as having a lot to do with that.
What Bawer does best, and why I find I can't get enough of his writing, is the way he explains the real stories behind the headlines, and his comebacks to the brainwashing BS of many of today's journalists when talking about Islam. Bawer's insights are one of the things I most enjoy about his writing. But the book is also highly entertaining because of the sheer amount of issues included. Among them is the history of jihad and the West, Islamic slavery of whites, and how the concept of freedom evolved in Britain and Europe.
Bawer explores the bizarre thinking possessed by the left as always thinking they are on the fringes of society, fighting to maintain their beliefs against the oppressive majority. Bawer points out that these people are now the university professors; the politicians, civil servants, artists and musicians; they staff social and cultural institutions, they are now the mainstream.
With Europe, Bawer shows the British and French media doing their part not to be out-dhimmied by the Americans, with the BBC's shocking series `Don't Panic, I'm Islamic' broadcast only two months before the 7/7 attacks (which, rather unsurprisingly, saw 5 of the Muslims featured in the documentary later charged in the July 7th attacks). But the French seem to win outright with their complicity in the Muhammad al-Dura affair.
Today we're in a utopian-dominated world in which a war is raging all around us. There are endless Muslim-terror stories being reported in the online media and blogs (look hard and you'll find tens per week, amounting to thousands per year), but completely ignored in the headlines as if nothing is happening. The events in Woolwich and the Boston bombings occasionally burst through to shatter this stupor the media work so hard to lull us into.
In Bawer's Surrender, much like While Europe Slept, I was surprised and outraged at just how much news I'd missed because of media silence. In an age of 24hr news, and a media with a supposedly insatiable appetite for the next story, we're reduced to reading yesteryear's news only when it's published in a book - which is only available online, because most bookshops won't sell it for fear of violence from Muslims. Thankfully, Bruce Bawer continues to fill the void left by the `free' world's media, informing voters of the facts which our news services have long since given up responsibility for. It is at least some small comfort (!) that Bawer is by far the enjoyable writer, tackling the issues that should be of greatest concern to those worried about the state of our democracies.
Cannot recommend this enough.
11 people found this helpful
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M. M
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well written, for those alreay doubting appeasment.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 24, 2016
Should scare the life out of you. if you are British. Recommend "The Islamic republic of Dewsbury ' if you don't believe this book. Written as a polemic, but it does describe events that elite liberals want to be lightly brushed under the carpet. Since publication, about 500 or so more people have been murdered because of the appeasement.
One person found this helpful
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