In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam
By PATRICIA COHEN
Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”
The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”
The fusillade of e-mail messages on the subject circulating among the Circle’s 24 board members mirrors a larger debate over a string of recently published books that ominously warn of a catastrophic culture clash between Europeans with traditional Western values and fundamentalist Muslims — books including “Londonistan” by Melanie Phillips, “The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion” by Robert Spencer, and “America Alone” by Mark Steyn.
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For Mr. Bawer, the condemnations are more evidence of liberals’ one-sided blindness. “One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one’s own children in the name of honor, etc., etc.,” he wrote on his own blog, www.brucebawer.com/blog.htm. In an e-mail message yesterday he said he did not have anything to add to his posts.
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“While Europe Slept” warns that “Europe is at a Weimar moment,” and that “by appeasing a totalitarian ideology” it “was imperiling its liberty.” “Political correctness”, he writes, is keeping Europeans from defending themselves, resulting in Europe’s “self-destructive passivity, its softness towards tyranny, its reflexive inclination to appease.” Reviews have offered plaudits and condemnations, acknowledging that Mr. Bawer has focused on a real problem, but complaining, as did a review in The Economist, that Mr. Bawer “weakens his argument by casting too wide a net.”
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J. Peder Zane, the book review editor and books columnist at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., was on the eight-member committee that nominated Mr. Bawer’s book. He said it “was not a contentious selection.” Mr. Zane was furious at the way Mr. Weinberger used the nominating ceremony on Jan. 20 as a platform for his views. “He not only was completely unfair to Bruce Bawer,” he said in a telephone interview, “he’s also saying that those of us who put the book on the finalist list are racist or too stupid to know we’re racist.”
Mr. Zane said he and four or five others booed when Mr. Weinberger, who was nominated last year for his 2005 collection of essays, “What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles,” made his comment to more than 200 people from the publishing world. Mr. Zane then threaded his way through the crowd to tell Mr. Weinberger he thought his comments in that setting were “completely inappropriate.” Mr. Zane recalled, “He flicked his hand at me like I was a flea and walked away.”
Mr. Weinberger could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Freeman, who said in an interview that he felt a “moral responsibility” to speak out about Mr. Bawer’s book, added that he expected further debate as more board members read the book before casting a final vote for the Circle’s award winner on March 8. Of the five nominees in each category, the book with the majority of board votes wins the award.
Well it appears that the "intelligentsia", as represented by Mr. Weinberger and Mr Freeman, do not appreciate their carefully masked & cultivated "unholy alliance" with the islamofreaks, begin to be fractured by books exposing the truth about islam and what is going on in Europe (I really should return to referring Europe as Eurabia, because I do think that continent is lost to the West...).
What is the "unholy alliance" you ask?!?
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FP: Unholy Alliance touches on a truly bizarre contemporary phenomenon: the Left’s partnership with militant Islam. Islamism is a totalitarian ideology that extinguishes women’s rights, gay rights, democratic rights, and numerous other rights that are supposedly at the core of leftist ideology. Yet the Left has enthusiastically embraced this fascist despotism. Illuminate for us a bit the ingredients of this leftwing mindset.
Horowitz: In a long section called "The Mind of the Left" I attempt to describe its evolution from the Communist heyday to the present. I deliberately did not pick an easy (because mindless) target like Michael Moore, but selected figures like Eric Hobsbawm, Gerda Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Eric Foner and even Todd Gitlin, a leftist despised by the radicals themselves for his decent instincts, to show how a broad and in many ways intelligent cross-section of the left could be of a common mind-set. This common mind-set is a view of their own (democratic) homeland in terms that allow them to lend their support to Saddam Hussein by obstructing America's war to overthrow him. Allow me to say here, before I go any further, that I do not put all critics of the war in this category. It is possible to criticize the war as tactically unwise, as risky over-reach and so forth. What the above named individuals have in common is a view of America that is so negative that it approximates the image of the Great Satan that motivates the terrorist savages who want to kill us.In describing the evolution of the left from Communist progressivism to contemporary anti-war progressivism I come to two conclusions. First that there hasn't been much of an evolution. The analysis of America that drives the left today -- even leftists as otherwise sensible and "democratic" as Todd Gitlin -- is remarkably similar to the views of America held by Stalinists fifty years ago (and of Hamas and al-Qaeda as expressed in their manifestos) . Of course they don't use quite the same language as the Stalinists or the Islamo-fascists. But the bottomline differences are really quite small. In all of their analyses of American history, there is the "genocide" of the Indians, the rape of the Africans, the oppression of the workers, and the imperialist crusade waged by evil corporations in quest of world domination -- in short the same mythology that one finds in Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Fidel and Osama bin Laden in their indictments of America and the West. And if this doesn't lead them to fly hostage filled planes into tall building, it does prompt them to find excuses for those who do, and for attempting to disarm the victims instead of defending them.
The second conclusion I come to is that the driving force of this leftism is a nihilistic assault on America rather than a positive agenda of socialist construction as was evident in the past. There is no unifying agenda or theme that solidifies the current leftist movement, a fact that often causes people on the left to claim that there is no left, absurd as that may sound. What actually unifies them is their hatred for the United States as it exists in the present. It is much like the election: they don't much like Kerry, but they passionately want to get rid of Bush. In the same way, they may not like the Islamic fascists (although many of them actually do), but they passionately want to get rid of the corporations whom they see as predators but who in fact organize what is the most prosperous, the most democratic, the most egalitarian societies that have ever existed.
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Pertinent Links:
1) In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam
2) Unholy Alliance Part I
3) Unholy Alliance Part II
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