Circling Their Wagons

The Islamophobophobes have returned.

There's a brawl brewing over the nomination for the National Book Critics Circle award of Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. A previous finalist called the book "racism as criticism." News to me that Islam—or, as the title scrupulously specifies, radical Islam—is a race, but it's a helpful signal of the sloppy thinking we're about to encounter here. Mr. Bawer tries to set the record straight:

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.

Mr. Bawer’s book jacket is covered with admiring blurbs from well-known conservatives, but he does not fit the typical red-state mold. An openly gay cultural critic from New York who has lived in Europe since 1998, Mr. Bawer has published books like “Stealing Jesus,” a harsh critique of Christian fundamentalism. “Some people think it’s terrific for writers to expose the offenses and perils of religious fundamentalism — just as long as it’s Christian fundamentalism,” he wrote on his blog.

So all fundamentalisms are equal, but some are more equal than others. (Where have we heard that recently?) It's fun to lay into Christian fundamentalists because they never smash out your shop windows or interrupt your bike ride across town with a slit throat. But from the sounds of things, there's another reason why so many are unwilling to permit any criticism or concern that smacks of Islamophobia:

Imam Fatih Alev, a board member of the Islamic-Christian Study Center in Copenhagen, has not read Mr. Bawer’s book, but referring to the general level of tension, he said in a telephone interview, “I think there is of course a legitimate concern with regard to the differences of culture.” But he added, “The real problem is that the ones who ought to know better, who are well educated and well informed on the diversity of culture,” are manipulating the debate.

The ones who should know better! If that isn't real bigotry, leaps and bounds beyond the kind that has to be teased out by the National Book Critics Circle, I don't know what is. Muslim immigrants in Europe, should they take any interest in their new surroundings, have plenty of access to the "diversity of culture." Back when countries had the confidence to expect some measure of assimilation, it would have been the immigrants' responsibility to be "well educated and well informed"—and it would have been their pleasure, too.

Why expect a greater finesse and sensitivity on the part of people like Bruce Bawer than you'd ever expect of the genuinely dangerous elements he's worried about? Perhaps it's not fear. Perhaps it's a craving for a frisson of superiority that, in a time so worried about "phobias," you could never indulge out in the open. We know ours is better than a culture that, as Bawer puts it, "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." But there are better ways of showing it than giving that culture a free pass.