While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bawer.  New York: Doubleday, 2006.  $23.95, 247pp., ISBN 0-385-51472-7

Bawer (Stealing Jesus, A Place at the Table) isn't the first to raise the alarm about Europe's self-destructive appeasement of radical Islam.  Tony Blankley covered similar ground in last year's The West's Last Chance.  And, Ralph Peters considers—before rudely dismissing—Europe's latest follies in his wider-ranging New Glory.  The problem of Europe's impending cultural suicide, however, is crucial enough to merit considerable analysis, and Bawer brings a unique perspective to the task. 

A native New Yorker, Bawer moved to Europe in 1998 and has lived there (Netherlands and Norway) since.  He also has traveled extensively throughout the continent and talked to scores of Europeans.  He admires European culture as only an expatriate can and fervently hopes it can be saved. 

The story is familiar by now but deserves repeating.  Like a Trojan horse, radical Islam has slipped into Europe and threatens to destroy it from within.  Muslims, who make up a substantial (and rapidly growing) minority in Western Europe, often refuse to assimilate and are contemptuous of European democracy and values.  European elites, blinded by a politically correct, ironclad multiculturalism, compound the problem by tolerating Muslim intolerance as a cultural prerogative. 

In their blind rush to appease their Muslim minorities, European governments not only overlook intolerance but also female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and other physical abuse of women.  The problem is that appeasement only encourages worse behavior. 

Bawer finds several causes for this self-destructive "denial and appeasement."  There's the multiculturalism of the elite, of course, that refuses to admit that all cultural practices are not equal.  Then, there's Western Europe's "vicious, irrational, and twisted . . . American hatred" and instinctive anti-Semitism.  "Muslims are more popular than Jews" among Western European elites, Bawer claims. 

Will Europe wake up to the danger posed by radical Islam in time or continue to drift toward Eurabia?  Bawer admits that recent warnings—the Madrid and London terrorist bombings and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh—seem to have done little to shake Europe awake.  But, he remains hopeful because he seems to believe that the U.S. will ultimately be lost without Western Europe.  He offers no compelling reason for such a conclusion though. 

Peters, who notes many of the same symptoms of European morbidity in New Glory, comes to a radically different conclusion.  Dismissing Europe as beyond help, Peters argues, "Our security does not lie in preserving a loathsome Eurocentric past, but in building a better future elsewhere."  For Peters that elsewhere lies mainly in Latin America, Africa, and the Indian Ocean.  

Regardless of who is right about Europe's future and its impact on America, it is an important, perhaps crucial, issue that needs to be explored and debated.  This is first and foremost Europe's problem and they have to deal with it.  If they refuse to be roused from their slumber, then so be it. 

Peters wrote as a critic of modern Europe, but Bawer writes as a friend and a neighbor.  If Europe won't listen to him, it might not wake up in time to save itself.  And, unlike the last time Europeans ignored the rise of fascists within (the subject of the late John F. Kennedy's While England Slept), the Americans won't be able to bail them out this time.