Anecdotal Evidence: `To Unriddle the Job-Like Vagaries of the Human Heart'

Anecdotal Evidence: `To Unriddle the Job-Like Vagaries of the Human Heart'
Excerpt:
he most dispiriting book I can remember reading is While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer, an X-ray of a continent’s cowardice, hypocrisy and moral confusion. Bawer’s subtitle tells the tale: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer is an American writer who moved to the Netherlands in 1998 and later to Norway. These are nations I, like Bawer, grew up thinking were civilized, sophisticated, liberal-minded democracies – in short, like us. Bawer demolishes our naïve image by documenting patterns of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and capitulation to Islamic thugs. Out of fear of offending barbarians (ponder that phrase for a moment), the French, Germans and others have given their tacit approval to female genital mutilation, wife beating, murder and routine Jew-baiting. It’s that last point I want to look at. Here’s Bawer:

“…since 2000, anti-Semitism in France has been epidemic. Synagogues have been burned down, schools vandalized, shops attacked, rabbis beaten, children assaulted, school buses shot at, gravestones knocked over and defaced with swastikas and the name of Hitler. At Muslim demonstrations, shouts of `Death to the Jews’ have become common. (one thing I’ve noticed is that while Americans speaks of `Jews’ or, more often, `Jewish people,’ Europeans usually say `the Jews.’)”

One day before I started Bawer’s book, I...