"An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last": Winston Churchill

I was wandering around in the book store the other day, looking for a good read, when I came across Bruce Bawer’s latest effort, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. I looked at it for a minute or two, noted the price ($30 Cdn) and wondered whether it was worth it. I am well read in Islamic subjects and follow a number of websites that keep me current on the subject. What could Bawer tell me that I didn’t already know?

What the hell. I bought it. And, as it turns out, plenty.

Bawer, a former literary critic, currently living in Norway, is a gay American who decided several years ago that gays could live a better life in Europe than in the United State and he moved to Amsterdam. Europe was not what he expected and he documented his epiphany in a previous book called, While Europe Slept.

His conclusion from his European foray is that Islam is slowly, but inexorably, swallowing Europe. Like a crocodile.

His new book spans the Atlantic, shifting between the United States and Europe, and outlines in cringe-inducing detail the lies and distortions of the members of the Islamic Project, and its enablers and useful idiots; namely, the mainstream media, politicians and university faculty and administrators.

Anybody concerned about this subject ought to read this book. Anybody who is not concerned about this subject ought to read this book.

I read the thing in one sitting, I couldn’t put it down.

Bawer is very good at cutting through the cant and obfuscation to get to the heart of an argument. His logical analysis of the bullshit that passes for intellectual argument is worth the price of the book, even if you know a great deal about the subject matter.

His detractors, who regularly brand him as a racist, miss the essential point of his argument, which is simply that Islam is incompatible with secular liberal-democracy, the values and ideals associated with the Enlightenment, and one or the other must prevail – there is no compromise.

One of the interesting perspectives he brings to the table is the plight of homosexuals under Islam.

We read a lot about women in Islam: should we insist they remove their veils to vote in elections; should headscarves be banned in public facilities; should the wearing of the burqua be banned outright; should we look the other way when husbands beat their wives, etc.

We have non-Muslim troops dying in Afghanistan so that Afghan women can go to school, so we are told. Yet we barely hear mention of Islam and homosexuality.

Women may be beaten, lashed, mutilated and abandoned within the tenets of the faith, but homosexuals are simply killed.

The odd thing is the support of gay groups for Islam. We had a bit of a local furor recently when a gay, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian organization marched in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade. Bawer dissects other examples of this odd phenomenon.

Bawer should be celebrated for speaking out forthrightly and telling the unvarnished truth. Sadly, too many people in our politically correct establishment cannot, as Jack Nicholson said, “handle the truth”, and it shows in the poor reviews he received in a couple of the mainstream newspapers in the U.S.

Given that other publishers have crumbled in the face of Islamic threats and either shredded their works or refused to publish their authors, it would be an oversight not to also congratulate Doubleday, a division of Random House, for publishing Bawer’s work.