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memo from europe
(continued)

Well, it is not bigoted and it is not racist, and it is so vital a book that I run the review here in this blog, where all reviews go to die.

Well, thank you, Mr. Miller, and thank you, Tampa Tribune.  The treatment of Surrender by most of the mainstream media simply confirms everything I say in the book about the way the media choose to handle these issues.

Monday, June 15, 2009, 4:10 P.M. CET: My City Journal piece "Heirs to Fortuyn" has been published in Dutch in the newspaper Trouw.  While I'm at it, I've been meaning to mention that I have a review essay about the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in the spring issue of the Hudson Review (not available online).


Monday, June 15, 2009, 1:45 P.M. CET: Worth a look: a terrific commentary by Wafa Sultan on Obama's Cairo speech, and an illuminating non-debate between Ezra Levant and some Canadian Human Rights Commission flunky.  Also, my friend Paul Andrew Lucre has written a thoughtful piece for Pajamas Media recounting his experience in Rotterdam. 

I'm also at Pajamas today with, well, something completely different from the usual.  Meanwhile, at the Dagbladet website, I'm one of several contributors to a "debate" about Islam in Norway.  The summing-up article is here; my contribution, a response to three questions from Dagbladet, is here.

Many gays are shocked that Obama's Justice Department has not only defended the Defense of Marriage Act but has used language that is outrageously insulting to gay people.  I can't say I'm very surprised.  I voted for the guy, but it wasn't an easy choice, and on November 3 I wrote the following on this blog: "Unlike many gays, I don’t see any reason to be certain that Obama would prove to be more kindly disposed toward gay rights than McCain would; at times it has seemed to me that McCain, deep down, may well be the more gay-friendly of the two.  I hope that’s not true."

It will be interesting to see how Mr. Hope and Change chooses to respond to events in Iran.
 

Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 6:12 P.M. CET: On Monday Dennis Miller interviewed me on his radio show; yesterday Pajamas Media ran my reaction to the Washington Post's "review" of Surrender.  After reading my reaction, a friend of mine offered his own thoughts by e-mail:

[The Post review was] unbelievably inappropriate and a total conflict of interest....I have to think the NBCC nomination brought you to the attention of a lot of reviewers who now think it's their heroic duty to ambush your book. These people are pathetic and deluded. They have a limited worldview (deep down everyone is just like me!) and cling to it with ferocious illogic and rationalization. They are just not tight, clear, logical thinkers. They also drip with hatred and contempt.

I assume that many of these nasty reviewers are relative peers of ours, so my question is, when did they all become such haters? I grew up with MLK as my role model, with Christian ideals (even in the 20 years during which I was an atheist), and prizing rationality and science. I just don't understand what happened. Did the hippies of the "love generation" who I considered my older brothers and sisters become haters, or is it younger people, their kids, or both? But more importantly, WHY? And also, why are they not focused on the true killers of the world, the real spreaders of illogic and hate, i.e. Islamists and terrorists? Is the horror simply too great for them to comprehend? Do they not think it's their business to stop or at least condemn kidnappings, killings, beheadings, wife beatings, honor killings and gay beatings and killings? Is it that they don't know history? Have any of these people, do you think, read great works of history such as THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, out of which current patterns can be discerned?

Sometimes I fear we're in the real-life version of LORD OF THE RINGS, and we're surrounded by ever growing numbers of Orcs. Or, as I've long thought, that the world is depressingly full of Quislings and Vichy French. Who will stand up with us for peace (the real kind) and justice?! Honestly, these people have inverted the world, and it disgusts me. They should know better -- they should know enough to feel ashamed.
 

Friday, June 5, 2009, 11:45 P.M. CET: So the Washington Post assigns its review of Surrender to the author of a book that, judging by its reviews on Amazon, is precisely the kind of sugar-coating nonsense that my book criticizes.  And he comes through with flying colors, totally dismissing 276 pages of hard facts that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares a lick about freedom.  What a time we live in!
 

Friday, June 5, 2009, 9:17 P.M. CET: Congratulations to Geert Wilders, whose PVV (Freedom Party) went from zero to four seats in the European Parliament in yesterday's Dutch elections, putting it only one seat behind the leading party.
 

Friday, June 5, 2009, 2:35 P.M. CET: More than two weeks have gone by, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say a few words here about the Oslo Freedom Forum, which I was honored to attend on May 18-20.  The organizer, Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation, brought together an extraordinary collection of speakers at the Grand Hotel and Oslo Nye Teater.  I’ve been to a lot of conferences, but this one was a standout.  There was no PC nonsense, no gratuitous America-bashing, no obscene moral-equivalence rhetoric.  To experience such a thing in the middle of downtown Oslo, of all places, was weirdly disorienting. 

In these parts, talking about human rights inevitably means talking, above all, about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and other U.S. abuses and about Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.  Powerfully, the Oslo Freedom Forum reminded us just how much officially perpetrated evil there is out there and just how horrible it can get.

Among the victims of persecution, torture, and unjust imprisonment we heard from were Buddhist monk Palden Gyatso, who spent 33 years being beaten and tortured in Chinese prisons, and Armando Valladares, whose anti-Communism won him 22 years under lock and key courtesy of Castro.  The personal accounts of these and other long-term prisoners of conscience were at once unnerving and inspiring, testifying graphically to the stubborn endurance of human iniquity and the stirring resilience of the human spirit.

There was more, much more.  Author Jung Chiang talked about Mao.  A teenage Venezuelan activist recounted his involvement in the struggle against the brutally oppressive Hugo Chavez.  Elena Bonner, on videotape, read out a powerful J’accuse about the rise of anti-Semitism in today’s Europe.

The cumulative effect of all this was breathtaking, eye-opening, gut-wrenching.  It’s one thing to have a general awareness of various governments’ offenses against human rights; it’s another to hear, one after another, testimonies by people who have undergone unimaginable torments simply for speaking their minds or living out their faith.

Among the major journalists and commentators who flew in from the U.S. and Britain for the forum were Tammy Bruce, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, Richard Miniter of the Washington Times, Jamie Kirchick of the New Republic, Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute, and Jonathan Foreman of Standpoint.  Yet the Norwegian media and socialist government gave the event short shrift.  You’d hardly know that the offices of Norway’s largest newspaper are barely a minute’s walk from the Grand Hotel and that the Parliament building is right across the street.  But of course when you’ve spent your career painting the likes of Castro and Chavez as heroes, you don’t want to hear from people who’ve been beaten and tortured at those men's orders.

In the forum’s closing session I planned to discuss the current erosion of freedom in Europe as a result of pressure by Islamists and appeasement by cultural elites.  I especially looked forward to giving my fellow participants a glimpse of the Muslim riots that had taken place in January right outside the hotel where we were meeting – riots which were almost entirely overlooked by the international media.  As fate would have it, however, I suffered a devastating personal loss that day which made it impossible for me to give my talk.  Thor is the busiest of men, but he took time to express his understanding and sympathy in a way that showed he has as much sensitivity as he has intelligence, wit, moral courage, and organizational genius.  I want to take this occasion to thank him for having put together such a monumental event and for inviting me to be a small part of it.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009, 12:01 P.M., CET: My op-ed responding to Marte Michelet is in Dagbladet today.
 

Monday, June 1, 2009, 2:39 P.M., CET:  So here's a nice little example, folks, of how the political correctness Thought Police operate in the Norwegian media.  As I noted the other day, Knut Olav Åmås, culture and opinion editor of Aftenposten, wrote a piece in last Wednesday's paper about my book, Surrender.  "Bawer," wrote Åmås, "maintains that Norwegian and other Western elites in the media and politics take radical Islam's assault on liberal freedoms too lightly, commit self-censorhip for fear of offending religious sensibilities, and give illiberal forces both the speaker's platform and recognition."  Åmås called me "a knowledgeable writer with several books behind him that have won international attention.  Here in this country he is reviewed surprisingly infrequently."  After summing up the argument of Surrender, he wrote: "Bawer has written an engaging book of political argument."  Then he offered some criticism: that I don't give enough attention to those in Europe who do criticize Islam and who stand up unequivocally for freedom of speech.  My response to this argument is that there aren't that many people in Europe who have dared to do this, and that I do devote attention in Surrender to several members of this exclusive club, including Robert Redeker, Hege Storhaug, and above all Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  All in all, however, Åmås's review was, by the standards of the Norwegian media, extremely fair, sympathetic, and complimentary.

Then on Thursday came a piece in Dagbladet by Marte Michelet, also mentioned below, headed "Åmås Recommends."  Michelet, who is Dagbladet's culture and opinion editor, cast me as a purveyor of "conspiracy theories," a promoter of "the idea that the Muslims have a secret plan to conquer Europe and subjugate the continent to the Arabic world."  Of course, to those who are truly interested in knowing the facts, the widespread desire in Western Muslim communities to institute sharia law - a desire firmly rooted in the founding Islamic notions of the "House of Submission" and the "House of War" - is hardly a "secret."  But by using the words "secret" and "conspiracy" Michelet managed to make my book, in which every major assertion is documented by a compendium of evidence, sound instead like a grab-bag of baseless rants by some hate-mongering crackpot.

Michelet attacked Åmås for having called me "knowledgeable" and for describing Surrender as "engaging" and for giving the impression "that Bawer is a recognized and balanced academic in the service of human rights."  In fact, she said, "Bawer's scribblings can best be described as foaming-at-the-mouth racist fantasies."  She asserted that "Bawer provides no evidence for his dashed-off claims about stealth Islamization; in fact he doesn't manage to come up with a single source reference."  On the contrary, Surrender contains 30 pages of source notes in small print.  Michelet's lie is breathtaking.  But then so is the underlying assumption of her entire piece - namely, that there's no basis whatsoever for concerns about Europe's Islamization and about growing censorship and self-censorship in the West. 

But Michelet's real targets are not me and my book: they're Aftenposten and Åmås.  "That the culture and opinion editor of Aftenposten thinks Bawer's accounts are worth taking seriously," she writes, "is ominous.  When Åmås now once again recommends Bawer [she is referring to the fact that Åmås also wrote about While Europe Slept when it came out] and claims that he 'exposes the forces that are a threat to freedom of speech and other liberal values,' it is therefore necessary to ask: does he share Bawer's idea of an extensive and tangled Eurabia conspiracy?  If not, why doesn't he feel a need to distance himself from this idea?"  Her point was clear: Aftenposten had strayed off the reservation.  It was OK for them to have a Muslim columnist (Mohammed Usman Rana) who refuses to disagree from the proposition that gays should be executed, but to give even a partial a thumbs-up to someone who acknowledges the sticky realities I take up in Surrender is to violate the Norwegian media's unwritten rules. 

So how would Aftenposten respond to this?  The answer came yesterday, not in a signed piece by Åmås but in an editorial.  The paper's reply to Michelet starts out promisingly, arguing that her "underlying tone [sic] seems to be a desire to silence important approaches to problems out of fear of feeding the fire of Muslim hatred that occasionally rises to the surface of Norwegian society.  In our view this is a totally misguided strategy in the struggle against attitudes that we, too, strongly dislike."  But then Aftenposten's editors said this: "of course a discussion of the American Bruce Bawer's 'Norwegian' observations does not meant that Aftenposten or the newspaper's culture editor share his, to put it mildly, weird [spesielle] conspiracy theories."  In short, although Aftenposten's editors pretended to be standing up to Michelet - criticizing her for using the word "Islamophobia" to bully colleagues into limiting the discussion of important issues - they were, in effect, caving in: Michelet scared them into backing off entirely from Åmås's praise of me as a defender of liberal values and into embracing her own thoroughly mendacious description of me as a purveyor of conspiracy theories.  Congratulations, Marte!  Well done.

In the meantime, I sent in a reply on Friday to Michelet's piece.  To my surprise, Dagbladet actually accepted it.  At their request I cut it down and then cut it down again, and supplied them with a picture.  My understanding was that it would appear on Saturday.  It didn't.  It didn't run yesterday, either.  I've sent an e-mail asking what happened.  We'll see.  In the meantime here's a piece by my fellow conspiracy theorist, Hege Storhaug, just up at the Pajamas Media site...

Thursday, May 28, 2009, 5:49 P.M., CET: In yesterday's Aftenposten, that paper's culture and opinion editor, Knut Olav Åmås, ventured to say a couple of reasonably respectful things about me and my book Surrender.  In today's Dagbladet he gets a good drubbing for this from Marte Michelet, who describes my work as "foaming-at-the-mouth racist" "scribbling" and gives Åmås hell for even daring to write about it. 

As Hans Rustad observes, Michelet's piece -- which is breathtaking in its wholesale misrepresentation of me -- is a prime example of "good old-fashioned Stalinism."  But what else, after all, can one expect from her?  She was head of Red Youth (Rød Ungdom), the junior division of Norway's Communist Party, the Rød Valgallianse, from 1996 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2003 worked for RadiOrakel, a radio station operating out of the headquarters of a violent radical group called Blitz.  Her father, Jon Michelet, is a novelist who has served as a board member of the Rød Valgallianse and as editor-in-chief of the Communist newspaper Klassekampen. 

That a woman with such a background is now a major voice in Norway's mainstream media goes a long way toward telling you all you need to know about Norway's mainstream media.  In the world of Dagbladet and NRK (the Norwegian State Broadcasting Service, by which Michelet has also been employed), Communists are welcomed with open arms as members of the intellectual mainstream; critics of multiculturalism, however -- even if they're gay and liberal and have a quarter-century-long track record of standing up for freedom and equal rights -- are reflexively anathematized as right-wing extremists, virulent racists, and haters of Muslims.  Apparently Åmås didn't get the memo.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 12:22 P.M. CET: Earlier this month I hung out in Amsterdam with my old New York friend Paul Lucre, who is now working in Rotterdam.  He's been there a few weeks and loves it.  Yesterday I heard from him and found out that he's joined the club, as it were: on Friday night he walked out of a gay bar in Rotterdam and, he writes, "was accosted by about 6 Moroccan youths."  (Ah, what would we do without the word 'youths'?)

"One asked if I was British.  I said no, I was American.  One said, 'We hate America.'  I said, 'So?'  One pushed me.  I said, 'Look man, I am a Puerto Rican from New York.'  One said, 'But you are American and we hate America, Bush.'  One said, 'Are you gay?'  I said, 'None of your fucking business.'  Then I was kicked and pushed to the ground and kicked again.  Grabbing his foot, I managed to pull him to the ground before another blow.  (Thankfully, they just kicked my legs, which, while sore, are fine; could have been my face, I suppose.)"  Thankfully, "someone from the 2nd floor of a building yelled and threw something at them and they all scattered like wet rats back down the sewers from whence they came.  Two seconds later the police showed up.  I was fairly drunk and these two middle-aged Dutch people, a man and a woman, came out from the building and talked with them.  I was upset because I thought I was being arrested or something, like for public intoxication.  But the policeman said that they understood I was the victim and [asked me] if I remembered what they looked like, etc....Surprisingly, they asked me if they could take me home.... I was shocked how nice they were."

The only part of the story that surprises me is the intervention of the people on the second floor.  That's not the kind of thing you can count on in these cases -- far from it.  Clearly they saved Paul from what could have been a far worse experience.

Thursday, May 7, 2009, 8:55 P.M. CET:  I have known for years that May 4 and 5 are the days on which the people of the Netherlands remember their war dead and celebrate their liberation in World War II, but when I strolled onto the Dam in downtown Amsterdam late Monday afternoon I wasn't thinking about what the date was and was therefore surprised to find the square ringed by police, crammed with even more than the usual number of people, and outfitted with giant screens on which one could see a choir singing.  It was the National Remembrance Ceremony. 

There followed a stately procession, a wreath-laying by the Queen, a two-minute silence, the singing of the national anthem.  It was all very dignified and impressive and, yes, affecting.  Owing to the density (and stature) of the crowds it was impossible to really see anything from where I was standing, so I soon repaired to a nearby bar where a handful of patrons and staff were watching the ceremony on a large flat-screen TV.

I was, yes, moved.  Yet watching the Queen as she lay that wreath in memory of the soldiers who liberated the Netherlands, I couldn't help remembering that this is the woman who refused to attend Theo van Gogh's funeral.  Watching the speech by Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen (I didn't hear it, because by that time the TV sound had thankfully been turned off), I couldn't help recalling his deplorable suggestion that the Netherlands allow Muslim men to oppress their women.  In short, both this monarch and this mayor have betrayed the very freedom that they were celebrating and for which foreign soldiers gave their lives. 

Speaking of which, I also couldn't help noticing that the flags flying from the poles around the National Monument were the flags of the Netherlands' twelve provinces, not those of its wartime liberators.  In fact, at least in the part of the ceremony I saw and heard, there was no visible or audible reference to Canada, Britain, or the U.S.  I happened to pass through the Dam the next day, Liberation Day, but again -- alas -- saw no Union Jack, no Maple Leaf, and no Stars and Stripes.

Pictures here.   
 

Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 9:28 P.M. CET:  Recently, Andrew Sullivan posted a link to an article about Charles Johnson, the celebrated blogger who has distanced himself from many other anti-jihadists and called them “a bunch of kooks.”  Though it grieves me to say so, and though I've hoped that things would somehow turn around, Charles is, alas, not whistling Dixie: I can testify that in the last couple of years some significant, and lamentable, shifts have taken place on the anti-jihad front.  Writers and bloggers whom, not very long ago, I would unhesitatingly have described as staunch defenders of liberal values against Islamofascist intolerance have more recently said and done things that have dismayed me, and that, in many cases, have compelled me to re-examine my view of them.

Once upon a time, these people made a point of distancing themselves from far-right European parties such as Belgium’s Vlaams Belang – whose most prominent Internet voice, Paul Belien, has declared himself to be fighting for “Judeo-Christian morality” not only against jihadist Islam but also against “secular humanism.”  Belien has made no secret of his contempt for gay people and for the idea that they deserve human rights as much as anyone else.  Now, however, many of the anti-jihadist writers who once firmly rejected Vlaams Belang have come to embrace it wholeheartedly.  In fact, for reasons unknown to me, this regional party in one of Europe’s smallest countries appears to have become, for a number of anti-jihadist writers on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing short of a litmus test: in their eyes, it seems, if you’re not willing to genuflect to VB, you’re not a real anti-jihadist.

I happen to be aware of this new state of affairs because during the last year or so I’ve been scolded by a number of respected and accomplished writers for refusing to make nice with Vlaams Belang.  Some of them have done this gently, pleadingly; others, who once addressed me with civility and respect as a fellow independent writer, have taken a harsh and hectoring, and in two or three cases even a condescending and bullying tone with me, as if they’re the bosses of some political machine and I’m an irksome underling who’s deviating from the party line.  The shift is, frankly, breathtaking.  Some of these writers have admitted privately that VB is bad news but argue that the party is nonetheless a valuable ally in the struggle against the Islamization of Europe, just as Stalin was a useful partner in the war on Hitler; others insist vehemently that Belien & co. are terrific folks, and claim that their checkered reputation is entirely the work of Charles Johnson.  Never mind that other right-wing European parties, such as Norway’s Progress Party, have explicitly distanced themselves from VB; never mind that in 2006 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a far more well informed student of Benelux politics than any of VB’s eager new boosters, called VB “a racist, anti-Semitic, extremist party that is unkind to women” and earlier today, while acknowledging that “the party has adjusted its rhetoric and seems to have dropped its anti-Semitic stance,” told me in an e-mail that “it’s very difficult to know whether this [adjustment] is genuine or political pragmatism.”

The other day, in the wake of my City Journal piece "Heirs to Fortuyn?", a couple of anti-jihad writers who had not yet rebuked me for my stance on Vlaams Belang finally got around to doing so.  Not only did they send me e-mails taking me to task for criticizing VB in that article; one of them also took it upon himself to chew me out for, in his view, admiring Pim Fortuyn too much and Geert Wilders too little.  (Never mind that I’ve defended Wilders frequently and that Wilders has blurbed my new book, Surrender.)  Wilders, this individual felt compelled to lecture me, is a far greater figure than Fortuyn ever was.  Why?  Because, he explained, Wilders stands for “Western values,” while Fortuyn stood only for – get ready for this – “Dutch libertinism.”

Yes, “Dutch libertinism.”  The words took my breath away.  During the last few days (while, as it happened, I was visiting Amsterdam) I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind.  For a self-styled anti-jihadist – who, by the way, I first met three years ago at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in The Hague – to refer in this way to a man who sacrificed his life for human liberty is, in my view, not only incomprehensible but profoundly despicable.  This is, after all, precisely the sort of language that Dutch Muslim leaders hurled at Fortuyn during his lifetime.  And in the present case the words were plainly aimed not only at Fortuyn but at me – a writer who, like Fortuyn, that great martyr for freedom, is gay.

What the hell, one is entitled to wonder, is going on here?  Why has Vlaams Belang, of all things, become a veritable sacred cow for so many anti-jihadist writers?  And why does at least one of them now take such a staggeringly contemptuous view of Pim Fortuyn?  I can’t honestly say that I understand any of it.  But I do know this: when writers who represent themselves as champions of liberty start cozying up to distinctly illiberal parties like Vlaams Belang – and when one of those supposed champions of liberty starts to sound uncomfortably like the Islamist enemies of freedom whom he purports to despise – then there’s something terribly wrong, and genuinely evil, afoot.

(NOTE: At first I headed this post "Thursday" instead of "Wednesday." I have corrected the error.)

Thursday, April 23, 2009, 2:05 P.M. CET: My piece "Heirs to Fortuyn?", written for City Journal, is now online at the Wall Street Journal.
 

Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 1:22 P.M. CET: Ghufoor Butt is one of those Western Muslim men who are always being labeled moderates because they dress in Western fashion, don’t have beards, speak the language of the country they live in, have achieved a degree of professional success, and just plain look and sound seem like reasonable guys who are comfortable with Western values.  Butt, who according to Dagbladet “has acted in 20 Pakistani movies, is still a big name in Pakistan and was a famous Pakistani political journalist,” moved to Norway in 1974, making him a member of the first wave of Muslim immigrants to the land of the fjords, and now owns a thriving DVD outlet in Oslo’s immigrant quarter. Now Butt (who told Dagbladet that "if Norwegians didn't drink alcohol, have sex, and eat pork they would be the world's best Muslims") has founded a new political party that seeks to woo the nation's Muslim voters, and in the fall will head up his party’s slate of candidates for Parliament.

What is his party's platform?  Well, for one thing, while more and more Norwegians realize that immigration laws providing for “family reunification” have led to disaster and need to be drastically overhauled, Butt’s party wants to move in the other direction, granting Norwegian visas automatically to anyone who marries a Norwegian citizen.  Also, the party wants children who belong to Norway’s six largest immigrant groups to be taught in their mother tongues; it wants the government to pay imams’ salaries; it wants people who publish Muhammed cartoons and the like to be punished.  Butt also told Dagbladet that the party wants to prohibit homosexual activity, but on Monday he called the newspaper back to say that although Islam does indeed forbid such behavior, the party doesn’t “want to change Norwegian law” in this regard.  Butt further maintained that America commits most of the terrorism in the world, and suggested that “the Jews” were behind 9/11.

Because his party is aimed at voters who, though living in Norway, may not understand Norwegian, its official name is in English: it’s the Independent Labor Party (ILP).  And its official launch next Monday will take place not in Norway but in Pakistan, where Butt will appear on two TV channels.  “Isn’t it strange to launch a Norwegian party in Pakistan?” asked Dagbladet.  “No,” replied Butt.  “Most Norwegian Pakistanis watch these two TV channels.  So if you want to reach them, these are important channels.” 

Butt looks forward to a Norway which, in 15 years, will have a prime minister with an immigrant background.   But he believes another breakthrough will occur much sooner – namely in the 2012 local elections: “I believe that in three years the mayor of Oslo will be a Norwegian Pakistani,” he says.  He may well be right.
 

Sunday, April 19, 2009, 12:55 A.M. CET: The other day in Dagbladet, Thomas Hylland-Eriksen, who for reasons I have never understood is considered one of Norway's foremost intellectuals, rejected Steinar Lem's argument that Islam represents a threat to Norwegian values.  After all, Eriksen noted, one can find speakers of Norwegian in Pakistan!  (Yes, and most of them are officially residents of Norway who actually live full- or part-time in their homeland, where they can live like kings on the money they earn in Norway and/or collect in Norwegian government handouts.)  "Norwegianness is enlarged," explained Eriksen, "when more and more people start to communicate in Norwegian.  Norway is perhaps above all a language community."  Yes, let's soft-pedal free speech, sexual equality, etc.: what matters is that at least some Pakistanis can speak some Norwegian!  Far from threatening Norwegian values, Eriksen insisted, Muslim immigration has made Norwegian culture stronger. 

On the same day this piece appeared, the Norwegian media reported that every single case of aggravated rape in Oslo during the last three years was committed by a non-Western immigrant.
 

Wednesday, April 1, 2009, 2:55 P.M. CET: Andrew links to this horrible story.  As Andrew notes, there appears to be no independent confirmation of the report, but if the story is true, it is hardly surprising, given other news on this front that has come out of the new Iraq.  It is crushing to think that American soldiers - some of them gay - gave their lives for this.

* * *

A personal note: I moved to Norway ten years ago today. 
 

Sunday, March 29, 2009, 7:33 P.M. CET: Some European political parties make an issue of Muslim immigration because they are legitimately concerned about the erosion of Western freedoms; others are motivated by racism and extreme nationalism.  Evidence over the years has persuaded me that the Sweden Democrats fall on the far side of that line.  Now it turns out that three reporters for the Swedish radio program Kaliber spent six months posing as members of the party and listening to the things SD members said behind closed doors.  Expressen today reports on this undercover project in an article headlined "Racism at SD meetings revealed on tape"; accompanying the story is a list of nine remarks recorded by the reporters at SD meetings.  A couple of these remarks are indeed wince-worthy: one SD member jokes that Muslims won't eat pigs because they have sex with them; another suggests that immigrants from Africa and Afghanistan carry more parasites than dogs do.  But most of the remarks are rooted in facts.  For example: 

"They don't have a feeling of solidarity with us.  They don't want to pay tax.  They're here to work in the underground economy."

"Look at these Somalians here.  They already have ten kids.  And each of those kids will have ten or twelve kids, too."  

"You can understand this business with the burkas.  When the guys get to hit their wives the way they do and they get black eyes and fat lips, it's obvious they have to wear a burka."

Admittedly, these aren't the most elegant or sophisticated possible formulations of the ideas being expressed, but let's face it: the unfortunate truth is that a wildly disproportionate number of Muslim immigrants in Sweden (and elsewhere in Europe) don't feel solidarity with the native population, do work in the underground economy, and do have a lot more children than non-Muslims.  As for wife-beating, according to orthodox Islam it's not only a husband's right but his obligation to beat his wife under certain circumstances, and there's ample evidence that an extremely high proportion of Muslim men in Sweden (and, again, elsewhere in Europe) regularly exercise this right.  Instead of pretending to be outraged by these comments by SD members, Swedish journalists and politicians should be getting worked up about the very real, and very grave, social circumstances that lie behind the comments.

In any case, if the nine comments listed in Expressen are really among the worst the Kaliber trio could come up with after six months behind the scenes, one can only conclude that they've fallen considerably short of their obvious goal to serve up irrefutable proof that the Sweden Democrats are all a bunch of racists.  If anything, they've unintentionally provided SD with evidence that party leaders could conceivably use to support the opposite argument. 

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 5:19 P.M., CET: Bravo to Christopher Hitchens for spelling things out to a semi-literate rapper, unaccountably included on Bill Maher's panel yesterday, who professes to be unaware of the motives of Al-Qaeda and who proudly represents himself as an example of healthy skepticism and independence of mind (and is applauded for this by Maher's typically knee-jerk PC audience).  Rushdie comes off well here, too, joining Hitchens in an ultimately vain attempt to educate this clown in the basic facts of jihadist Islam.  Riveting TV - but how insulting to Hitchens and Rushdie to oblige them to discuss serious issues with this fool!
 

Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:35 P.M., CET: I wrote on Thursday that it would be interesting to see how Aftenposten edited Muhammed Ali Chisti's op-ed.  Aftenposten did not disappoint.  As expected, the published version omitted the most revealing and alarming language from Chisti's original, making him seem considerably less fanatical and dangerous.  As Rita Karlsen puts it, Aftenposten gives space to extremists and then edits their contributions in such a way as to "set their messages in a more flattering light.  The question is: Are such editorial procedures thoroighly acceptable, or do they amount to putting a prettier face on both the contributor and his message?"  Karlsen has placed Chisti's original and Aftenposten's edit side-by-side, making it easy to see at a glance that the single most substantial passage removed by Aftenposten is the long, sensational one in which Chisti rejects Sabr (patience), calls for armed jihad against evil, and identifies Jews and Israel as the evil to be fought.  By editing out this rant, Aftenposten makes Chisti's claim that he is no anti-Semite or would-be terrorist sound much more credible. 

No, in my view this isn't responsible editing - but it's hardly surprising in a society whose cultural establishment, by and large, has convinced itself that the only road to social peace and harmony is to whitewash Islamists and welcome them into the mainstream while demonizing and isolating those who criticize this folly.
 

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 7:25 P.M. CET: While the Kingdom of Norway pours truckloads of taxpayer dough into various absurd and overblown bureaucracies, dubious welfare payments, and generous support to churches, mosques, privately owned newspapers, etc., there have been relentless cuts in funding to schools, health care, the police, and the military.  The other day Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre rejected the U.S. ambassador's plea that Norway spend more on defense.  (Norway spends 1.3% of its GNP on defense, down from 1.9% five years ago.)  Now comes news that the police in Romsdal, in West Norway, will be so short on manpower and money during summer vacation this year that they will have no choice but to close police stations in four rural townships for the duration.  Yep, you heard that right: no police whatsoever.  I expect that the media attention will force the government to do something to keep this from happening, but it's still a pretty shameful development for a country that likes to think of itself as the world's richest.

* * *

European academics continue to churn out nonsense about Islam that no sane, alert individual can believe at this late date.  On Tuesday, Aftenposten ran an op-ed in which political scientist Henrik Thune actually stated that Norway's integration problems have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, that Islam itself is not "anti-modern or particularly irreconcilable with individual liberal social values," and that "Norway needs a broader immigration from Muslim countries."  If there are integration problems in Norway, Thune insisted, it's because most Muslim immigrants here come from patriarchal cultures in Somalia, Pakistani villages, and northern Iraq.  The solution, according to Thune?  Start importing Muslims from other parts of the Muslim world.  This argument, of course, conveniently overlooks the fact that (a) patriarchy and the subjection of women are part and parcel of Islam and (b) every Western European country has its own distinctive Muslim-immigrant profile - Moroccans predominate in the Netherlands, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain, etc. - and all of them have extremely similar integration problems.

To criticize Thune is not to say that Europe couldn't profit by continuing to welcome immigrants from the Muslim world; the key is to stop letting in the fake refugees and the boys and girls forced into arranged marriages and instead admit people who have experienced genuine oppression and harassment in Muslim countries - among them Christians, Jews, Hindus, gays, apostates, secular/liberal Muslims, and women who want to escape family tyranny and live in freedom.  But that's a different argument than the one Thune is making.

Aftenposten ran Thune's piece a day after it published Shakila Ashraf Nabi's "'Why, Mamma?'", which is apparently the text of the talk she gave at Abid Raja's "hate meeting" last weekend.  It's the one about how her little girl supposedly asked why somebody would want to burn a hijab - a question which, Nabi says, she was at a loss to answer.  Indeed, Nabi describes herself as unable to even speak to the message underlying Sara Azmeh Rasmussen's hijab-burning on International Women's Day - an action which, Nabi writes, "only encourages hate, stigmatizing, and harassment, and nothing else."  Today Rasmussen replies in Aftenposten, calling Nabi on her refusal to engage in frank discussion about the role of women under Islam.

Rasmussen is right, of course.  But what's really lamentable here is that newspapers like Aftenposten continue to give space to pieces like Thune's - in which the main assertions are utterly at odds with facts that have been obvious for years - and Nabi's, which is simply a variation on the now-familiar practice of replying to legitimate critics of Islam by shouting "I'm offended!"  In printing such pieces, Aftenposten isn't fostering the honest and open debate everybody claims to want - it's simply contributing to an effort to bury the plain truth under a mountain of disingenuous claptrap.

* * *

I had already written the above and was about to post it when I decided to check out a couple of sites to see if there were any new developments worth mentioning - and immediately found a remarkable posting by Hege Storhaug about Muhammed Ali Chisti, the young man who spoke about his dislike for Jews and gays at Abid Raja's big "hate meeting."  Storhaug writes that Chisti, having read her posting about the meeting, phoned her today "to 'clear up misunderstandings' both about himself and Islam."  The phone call, Storhaug explains, "turned into a long monologue" in which he treated her to "an intense lesson in how fabulous Islam is, the Koran too (I was 'so stupid' not to understand why over a billion people get 'tears in their eyes' just from touching the book), and ditto how fantastic Muhammed is."  Chisti told her that he's not an extremist, that he's peaceful, that he got top grades in high school, and that he's the son of Norway's first imam.  Chisti then sent Storhaug a long e-mail along with a piece he'd written for - where else? - Aftenposten.  The e-mail read, in part, as follows: "Hege Storhaug, I challenge you to debate.  You are ignorant and spread only hate and prejudices....I have heard you speak before, just BULLSHIT [he wrote this word in English. - B.B.]....Let us discuss this like adult PEOPLE!!!! I am not Dangerous!" 

Whereupon Storhaug - bless her! - shares with us Chisti's contribution to Aftenposten, which according to him will be published tomorrow in an edited version.  We all owe Storhaug a debt for giving us his unedited, 1660-word draft, because it offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this "peaceful" young man. 

The text, to begin with, is rambling and repetitious, with more than its share of bemusing and self-contradictory statements (not to mention plenty of misspellings and errors in grammar and punctuation).  Replying to all those who this week have called him a terrorist, neo-Nazi, fundamentalist, or Islamist, Chisti insists that he is none of these things and that he opposes "all forms of violence."  He professes to be confused and hurt by such comments, which he characterizes as personal, and insists that, contrary to media reports, not everybody at Litteraturhuset booed his talk: many of those in attendance, he says, supported him.  Remarkably, he claims that "What I said were not my opinions; there were over 200 people who shouted these things during the demonstrations."  (He is referring here to the Muslim youth riots that devastated much of downtown Oslo on January 8 and 10.)  Chisti says that "before I gave my talk I made two things very clear.  1: I wanted to provoke in the name of freedom of speech; what I would say is necessarily not everything I believe.  2: The title ["Why I Hate Jews and Homosexuals"] was decided upon by Raja."  He insists that he has "nothing personally against homosexuals.  Their choice, their actions, all will someday answer for them."  As for Jews, "I must simply apologize to all of those who felt insulted or offended....All people are of course of equal worth; the Koran says so.  The Prophet also said that 'No Arab is better than non-Arabs and vice-versa.[']...The Prophet was himself married to a Jewish woman."  Chisti maintains that his father was "a man of dialogue, and I am too." 

All that having been said, Chisti's show of humility and contrition gives way to...well, something quite different.  "Few know more about Islam than I do," he assures us.  "Islam is the religion of peace.  Everyone who has studied the religion knows this.  On several different occasions in his life the Prophet Muhammed showed that he is peaceful, conflict-resolving, and places a high value on forgiveness."  Yet sometimes, Chisti goes on to say, one's faith demands that one take action.  "The Koran says that those who die in the cause of God do not die but live.  What is it to die in God's cause?  It is to take action against evil and oppression.  The Prophet said that if you don't stand up against oppression and tyranny you are one of those who are guilty of oppression.  There were many at Litteraturhuset who challenged me to perform Sabr [Islamic term for "patience" - B.B.], to be Patient, for the Koran says that in problems and difficult times one should seek comfort in prayer and patience.  What is patience?  Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet) sacrificed his life and his family in Karbala.  Why?  Couldn't he just sit home and perform Sabr?  Hussain stood up against tyranny in his time.  He fought for what was right, and would not accept a tyrant as his leader.  Patience is important, but patience is not synonymous with passive conduct.  Islam says that one should seek knowledge, and stand up against evil in one's time.  In all periods there have been disagreements and war between right and wrong, and this struggle goes on today as well.  Who is the evil?  Who decides who should be considered evil?  Who sets the criteria of what the term 'terrorist' should encompass?"

Chisti then quotes his own Litteraturhuset remarks: "Today Israel is the world's most barbaric and murderous state.  They slaughter civilians, women, children, and the elderly.  They are merciless....We have been attacked everywhere, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia.  Is it odd that we feel that there is a war against Islam underway?  Jews are at the forefront of all this.  The U.S. was created to create Zionist Israel.  They are a minority, yet to a huge extent they run the world.  Is this fair?  Is it representatives?  Today there are more than 1 billion Muslims living in the world; how many Muslim countries have the veto in the UN?  NONE....Are you with me in the struggle against oppression and evil?  Do you support me in the struggle against tyrannical states?...It is the winners who write history.  Jews were victims in the war, and they won the war.  A Jew can be nice and polite.  Indeed, many Jews don't support Israel's right to exist.  Israel has no right to exist, in its present form....During the demonstrations in Oslo I was one of the most active.  And why shouldn't I be?"  He recalls some of the slogans the participants shouted during the riots, while admitting that some of them were "not well thought-out": "Death to the Jews." "Today is the day for revenge." "Death to Israel." 

Having quoted these choice excerpts, Chisti calls it "ridiculous" that he was criticized for acting as a messenger for other people's views.  He does, however, note that one of those who did not criticize him is Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, for whom (he says) he has "enormous respect" and whom he describes as "a wise man who holds the correct opinions."  (In his phone call with Storhaug, indeed, Chisti claimed that that when his talk at Litteraturhuset was over, Gahr Støre "gave him a thumbs up."  Unfortunately, I don't find this detail at all hard to believe.) 

But if Chisti is high on Gahr Støre, he's angry at Raja: "It was he who asked me to talk about what was shouted during the demonstrations; I did NOT want to do that."  Chisti chides Raja for handing the microphone after his talk to a "15-year-old terrified Jewish boy" in the audience who tearfully said that he found Chisti's remarks frightening, and whose tears "struck home with the Norwegian people."  In short, Chisti complains, Raja "allowed me to be made fun of, and didn't even let me answer for myself.  Unfair?  Dialogue?  Raja is a pure coward when he lets me come off as THE BAD GUY [these three words are in English in the original]....I was alone, helpless, and had to listen to one personal attack after the other, with Raja standing there spicing it all up.  Reprehensible and persecution!!!!"

It will be interesting to see what Chisti's piece looks like after Aftenposten has edited it down.

* * *

Which reminds me: Aftenposten reported yesterday that of the 194 individuals apprehended in the riots - the results of which can still be seen the taped-up and boarded-over front windows of many stores and other businesses in downtown Oslo - 72 were immediately let go because they were minors, and now all but ten of the remaining 122 cases have now been dismissed.  Of those ten, eight are still supposedly being investigated, and only two perpetrators have been charged or convicted.  This, even though 104 of the 194 who were taken into custody during the riots had criminal records, including 49 convictions for acts of violence.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 1:19 A.M., CET:  Recently, reading Ted Hughes's collected letters, I couldn't help wondering about what life has been like for his and Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas, who many years ago left Britain for a place (Alaska) and a career (as a "professor of fisheries and ocean sciences") that seemed to indicate a determination to distance himself from the scenes of family tragedy and from the London literary and cultural circles in which he would have been viewed, first and last, as the child of his parents.  Well, now comes the terribly sad news that Nicholas Hughes, who apparently suffered from depression, has committed suicide.
 

Monday, March 23, 2009, 11:35 P.M., CET: A sampling of people in Denmark was asked: "Do you think that the law should prohibit homosexuals from practicing their sexuality?"  Among ethnic Danes, 3% said yes, 97% said no.  Among Muslim immigrants, 33% said yes, 67% said no.  Among the children and other descendants of Muslim immigrants, 27% said yes, 73% said no. 

Note that the question wasn't about gay marriage, say, or the right of gays to adopt children.  It was about whether gays should be locked up if we don't stay celibate.  Also note that many European Muslims with illiberal views aren't necessarily inclined to be honest about those views with pollsters - in other words, the real "no" numbers for Muslims are likely to be much higher than the survey suggests.

And yet those of us who are gay and who live in European cities with large and fast-growing populations of Muslims are routinely called Islamophobes for being concerned about such things.

(UPDATE: March 24, 1:19 A.M.: I've removed a sentence from the above posting that was based on a misreading of the statistics.)
 

Monday, March 23, 2009, 9.25 P.M., CET: Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders is already facing a trial in his own country for speaking his mind.  Now comes news that a French "human-rights organization" is also taking him to court in France for encouraging hatred of Muslims.  Wilders's accusers cite comments he made last September in New York to the effect that "Paris is encircled by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods" and that "many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head coverings."  Wilders also committed the crime of describing the 2005 riots in Paris suburbs as a "Muslim intifada," and of mentioning the high level of support among French Muslims for suicide bombing.  Simple statements of fact - but according to Wilders's accusers, these statements "awaken further extremism among Muslims," and must therefore be punished.
 

Monday, March 23, 2009, 8:59 P.M., CET: Today Hege Storhaug ponders the fact that Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who during the Danish cartoon crisis belittled free speech and labeled editor Vebjørn Selbekk an extremist for reprinting the Muhammed caricatures, "gave his warm support" yesterday to Abid Q. Raja's big "dialogue" event at which a real extremist, Muhammed Ali Chisti, was given a platform to pour out a stream of pure, bilious Jew-hate.  Defending the appropriateness of inviting Chisti to give his talk - which was entitled "Why I Hate Jews and Homosexuals" - Støre said "If we are serious about having freedom of speech in this country and having debate meetings in the best Norwegian debating tradition, I'm against those who say we shouldn't allow this sort of person to participate."  Storhaug wonders: Does Støre believes in dialogue with neo-Nazis, too?  (Raja, who has ardently supported limits on free speech in matters touching on Muslim sensitivities, also invoked freedom of speech in defending his decision to invite Chisti.) 

Storhaug points out that while it's apparently acceptable at such events for Muslims to vent hate for Jews and gays, the meeting's non-Muslim participants - including a Jewish woman, Berit Reisel, who represented Oslo's Holocaust Center - plainly considered it off-limits to criticize Islam at all.  (Employing a familiar euphemism, Reisel attributed the threats to Oslo's tiny Jewish community to "extreme milieux.") 

This was, in short, yet another example of "dialogue" in which mind-bogglingly hateful utterances by Muslims were welcomed, but dispassionate discussion of the very real problems posed by Islamic religious doctrine and social conventions was verboten.

I noticed on last night's TV news that not only did Crown Prince Haakon sit next to Raja at the hate meeting -- he walked out shoulder to shoulder with him when it was over, so close that it was impossible not to conclude that he was determined to make a big show of solidarity with the king of Norway's Muslim community.  I may be wrong, but somehow I can't imagine his dad, King Harald, honoring the likes of Abid Raja in this fashion.

Sunday, March 22, 2009, 6: 55 P.M. CET:  After the murder of Theo van Gogh, a young TV journalist in Norway named Noman Mubashir, who belongs to the moderate Ahmadi Muslim sect, ventured to organize a rally in Oslo which, he hoped, would show that Norwegian Muslims rejected terrorism and stood for freedom.  The rally, as I recounted in While Europe Slept, was a disastrous failure, drawing a minuscule fraction of Oslo's Muslims.  The event's highlight, or lowlight, was a speech by Muslim lawyer Abid Q. Raja, well-known for his fiery op-eds and his frequent appearances on TV debate programs, on which he cut an aggressive, even bullying, figure, calling for limits to free speech and defending even highly illiberal aspects of fundamentalist Islam.  Having been invited by Mubashir, in an apparent gesture of Muslim unity, to serve as co-chair of the anti-terrorism rally, Raja made use of his time at the microphone to, as I put it, "let loose a violent harangue, furiously rejecting the demonstration's entire premise and ranting belligerently about the disgraceful treatment to which Muslims were subjected in Norway" (While Europe Slept, p. 199).   

Since then, however, Raja has dramatically changed his tone - though not (one can be certain) his convictions.  These days he presents himself as a voice of sweet reason and conciliation, and would plainly like to be perceived as a supporter of pluralist democracy, an opponent of religious extremism, and a champion of respectful dialogue.  He is a member of the Venstre (Liberal) Party and this autumn will stand on its list of candidates for Parliament.  Ever since I first saw Raja in action on TV, I had the feeling that his aim was to be Norway's first Muslim Prime Minister - that, in fact, he was being groomed for that post - and it must be said that he appears to be making steady progress in that direction.  Today, Litteraturhuset in Oslo hosted a high-profile, extremely well attended event, organized by Raja, which was billed as a "Dialogue Meeting about Hate: Hate Directed at and from Minorities."  Among those present was Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, and VG's article about the meeting is illustrated by a photo of Raja sitting with none other than Crown Prince Haakon, Norway's future king. 

Among the speakers at Litteraturhuset was British writer and former Islamist Ed Husain, who warned that extreme Islam is getting a foothold in Europe, he said "You can see the signs of danger already.  Muslims must understand that they cannot introduce sharia."  Yet he also insisted, according to Dagbladet's account, that the problem of extreme Islam has nothing to do with Islam itself: "Islam's humanism is one of the most important things in the Koran."  Striking another note entirely was Muhammed Ali Chisti, a young Norwegian Muslim who warned of global Jewish conspiracy. "Jews are a small group, but everyone knows they have a lot of power," maintained Chisti, who according to VG "went a long way toward suggesting that the Jews were behind the September 11 attacks and the attacks in Mumbai."  "There were several thousand Jews away from their jobs at the World Trade Center," Chisti told the audience, "and why were there more Jews than usual in Mumbai when Pakistani terrorists attacked?" 

Yet another participant, Shakila Ashraf Nabi, condemned Muslim lesbian Sara Azmeh Rasmussen for burning a hijab on March 8, International Women's Day.  According to Dagbladet, Nabi said she had no answer when her school-age daughter asked why Rasmussen had burned  the hijab.  (Um, how about: "Honey, she did it because the hijab symbolizes women's subordinate status under Islam"?)  But that wasn't all Nabi had to say.  Apropos of a recent - and, frankly, surprising - public reference by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg to the danger of "radical Islam" in Norway, Nabi suggested that "perhaps she [Nabi's daughter] will ask: Mommy, what is radical Islam?  She knows him [Stoltenberg], because he has visited her school.  I may say that it [radical Islam] is a secret that only our politicians know about."  Yes, forget 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Mumbai, etc.: "radical Islam" is just a specter conjured up by Western politicians. 

Note well: in Norwegian political, intellectual, and media circles today, to implicitly deny, as Nabi did, that Islam systematically treats women as men's inferiors, and that there is such a thing as radical Islam, is scarcely controversial.  On the contrary, what's manifestly offensive in the eyes of many bien pensant folks hereabouts is what they view as racist, hate-mongering scare rhetoric about "radical Islam."  Such is the wholesale denial and dishonesty that reigns widely in these parts in the year 2009.  

What, in any case, did Foreign Minister Gahr Støre have to say about all this?  "We are for dialogue," he told VG.  Period. Well, you've got your dialogue.  Now what?

Sunday, March 15, 2009, 3:55 P.M. CET: A quick tour of today’s UK papers:

British-born Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary has urged his followers to contribute to the “mujaheddin.” A Daily Mail article reports on the wild youth of Choudary, who now favors the death penalty for things he used to do regularly:

One of Britain’s saner papers, the Times, editorializes that we should laugh Choudary off – as if he were some isolated wacko and not, as one reader comment puts it, “the public face of something much more sinister.”   Another commenter remarks: “And just what are his followers doing while we laugh?  Living in denial is exactly what these extremists desire of us.”  How come the readers nearly always make more sense than the editorialists?

A protest in Luton: “They were brought up and educated in England but, although many live on benefits, they admit their loyalty is not to this country but to Islam. They want the UK to be an Islamic state, with sharia law and women in burkas.” 

Also: “A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’” 

And last but not least, the "moderate" Inayat Bunglawala of the "moderate" Muslim Council of Britain (who before 9/11 called Osama bin Laden a "freedom fighter") has been "arrested after an alleged stabbing" at his home.
 

Saturday, March 14, 2009, 10:46 P.M. CET: James Purdy, an underappreciated American writer, is dead.  I wrote about him here.

* * *

Publishers Weekly has reviewed my forthcoming book Surrender.  Check it out:

"Bawer's graceful prose and lucid insights make this a must-read book for anyone concerned with the relationship of Islam to contemporary American culture."

Just kidding.  In fact, that's from PW's review of my 1997 book Stealing Jesus: I just changed "Christianity" to "Islam."  The actual PW review of Surrender - which does a perfect job of illustrating the very points I make in the book - is here.  Pull quote: "Anti-Muslim."

Hat tip: Dave Lull.  (By the way, I just googled "Hat tip: Dave Lull": 3,470 hits!)

* * *

Norway has been convulsed in recent weeks by a debate: should Muslim women cops and judges be allowed to wear hijab on duty?  I was abroad last Saturday when Sarah Azmeh Rasmussen, the country's sole openly lesbian Muslim, brought the debate to a climax by burning a hijab at a public celebration of International Women's Day in Oslo.  Muslims pelted her with snowballs and verbal abuse, but she was unbowed: "I have a dream that there will stop being a black veil between the West and the Muslim world.  I have a dream of a God who is mild and good, and who doesn't care whether women show their hair or thigh."

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