While Europe Slept

Various bloggers are starting to notice a new book by Bruce Bawer called While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer is not exactly a right-wing Bush fan. He is an openly gay leftist with no sympathy for Republicans, conservatives, or Christians.

Bawer sees what most on the political left do not: Radical Islam is not friendly to liberal secularism. Quite the opposite: look at what Bawer recently said in his blog:

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. These authors and intellectuals respond to every criticism of that chilling fundamentalist code – however cogent and correct the criticism may be – by hurling the "R" word...

By "R word" he means "racism," the only Crime That Cannot Be Forgiven in our culture. The attitude he cites is both ignorant (Islam is a religion, not a race) and suicidal. Leftists defend a movement that will, when and if it succeeds, wipe out the so-called freedoms leftists hold so dear. Rod Dreher sums up this illogic well.

I honestly don't get this. Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows. MORE