Book Review: Bruce Bawer's “Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom”, Doubleday, May 2009.

Bawer's 2005 book, “While Europe Slept”, was a US national best-seller – which is why the entire corpus of left-wing media 'experts', and academic 'thinkers' ignored it. It was never reviewed by a major US or European publication since it convincingly detailed the eventual demise of European civilisation to Arab and Islamic culture and demography. Bawer's follow up 'Surrender' is just as poignant and just as obvious. And likewise it too will be ignored by grinning politicians and relativist cowards and fanatics. For its message is too bothersome for most to care about – that Europe and North America are erasing free speech, freedom of expression, and even freedom of thinking, in their collective appeasement and genuflection to the intolerance and totality which is Islam.

Bawer is a gay American writer, living with his lover in Norway. He is a 20 year journalistic veteran. His personal story and his profession hardly mark him out to be labeled the usual pejoratives – neo con; fascist; conservative racist; Bush-Hitler supporter etc. But his gay perspective and his American-European experiences are unique since Bawer understands better than most in his profession, that Islamic intolerance is not a 'minority' expression within Islam; nor is it something that 'right wing fascists' make up and intone to justify neo-imperialist slaughter in Iraq and elsewhere.

What makes 'Surrender' a necessary read is the corpus of information Bawer provides about political and media appeasement of Islam. Not one single large media organisation in either the US or Europe, has stood up for free speech in the face of Islamic intolerance, demonstrations, lobbying, whingeing, crying and myth-making about Islamophobia. Any single event one cares to name – murders, explosions, attacks on US soldiers, honor killing, slave trading, female mutilation, or the lack of Western rights within Islamic countries – is always white-washed and presented with a pro-Muslim story line. Even Fox News that supposedly Bushitler channel supporting gestapos, the end of speech, and the creation of a 4th Reich has never demonstrated on any key event, anything approaching a critical examination of Islam.

Bawer aptly sums up this appeasement narrative [p. 75]; “..throughout the Western media establishment, that if social harmony is to be achieved between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West, it's necessary for non-Muslims to undergo a radical shift in views and values.”

How true. Cultural Marxism at work. It is the 'West' which is wrong. It is the evil axis of whites, Jews and capitalists, not to mention the Crusaders which have exasperated the better spirits within Islam and caused 13450 terrorist attacks since 9-11. Who can blame Muslims for killing innocents in their outrage over the printing of cartoons depicting Mohammed, published in Denmark ?

Islam is not to be criticised. As Bawer laments, [p. 98] “Now, every day in the Muslim world, politicians, clerics, teachers, and others spew out the most abominable lies and calumnies about the West, America, Israel, Jews, Christians, Hindus, homosexuals, democracy, and so forth on TV news and entertainment programs, in the press, and in mosques, schools, and sundry venues. Only a tiny fraction of this ocean of slander is ever reported in even the most out-of-the-way Western media.”

For Western news readers and watches, Islam is re-positioned as civilised, peaceful, tolerant and kind. The reality is simply ignored.

As Bawer explains in punishing detail Western journalistic cowards did not stand up to Muslims when Theo Van Gogh – a Dutch film maker and enfant terrible who sneered at the platitudes and holies possessed by the Eurocratic elite – was murdered in a street in West Amsterdam which is a Muslim enclave. Neither did the media defend the slaughtered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn a gay and noted critic of Islamic culture murdered by a fanatical eco-fascist. Nor would they re-publish the Danish cartoons for fear of Muslim violence and terror. The media were even largely ambivalent about the Madrid and London bombings portraying these acts of Islamic terror as mere rearguard actions and derivatives over an 'illegal' war in Iraq. The media also never reports the Islamic demonstrations, mosque speeches, or public pronouncements adjuring Jihad, the destruction of the West, or the erasure of Israel.

As Bawer relates all Muslims and their mouthpieces in various Islamic organisations are always portrayed as moderates even when they belong to fascist groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or front groups supporting Al Qaida. The lack of analysis and insight is simply staggering.

What is at issue is freedom and Western civilisation. If you can't criticise and analyse an ideology than what type of society do you have ? If the multi-cult, pc fascists won't let bloggers, journalists and lay people question Islamic fundamentalism, whilst Muslims and Arabs are free to roam North American and European streets, universities, and lecture halls denouncing the West, declaiming against Whites and Jews and promoting Islamic supremacism, than what type of world are you living in ? Bawer puts this question well, “At least one thing seems certain: against people who are ready to die in the cause of destroying freedom, people who are not willing to speak up for freedom for fear of being called a racist or an Islamophobe don't stand much chance of victory."

Can you imagine Churchill calling the fundamentalist totality of Nazism a 'religion' ?

Many of us don't want to live under Sharia Law and a politically-correct fascist society where freedom to think is not permitted. It remains to been seen how many of us are left. It is good to read a book by a man who is on the right side of this divide. Too bad those in power don't share his views.