Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell is a columnist for the Financial Times, a contributing editor for the New York Times Magazine and a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. He is a leading proponent of Eurabia and of the New anti-Semitism thesis.

Islamophobia

On Muslim societies

Caldwell has decried the 'the penury, servitude, violence, and mediocrity of Muslim societies worldwide'.

The Islamic world is an economic and intellectual basket case, the part of the potentially civilised world most left behind by progress.

Pankaj Mishra notes that Caldwell does not appear to know that Edmund Burke, 'from whom he derives his book title, had a rather exaggerated reverence for "Muhammadan law"', and while he approvingly quotes Ernest Renan and Hilaire Belloc's hostile pronouncements against Islam, he forgets that both men were notorious anti-Semites.

However, Caldwell is not always hostile, he also finds things to admire. Stephen Holmes notes:

Caldwell feels more at home with Muslim values than with the values of contemporary Europe -- as, he says, would Dante. And Caldwell also values women's chastity more than women's autonomy because chastity (not to mention virginity) "can further dignity, responsibility, and self-respect." You may think that burqas and niquabs demean women, he ironizes, but what about "jeans that cinch halfway down the bum crack"?

On Muslim cuisine

Caldwell has offered a novel warning against the celebration of the contributions of Asian cuisine to the UK:

If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour.

Pankaj Mishra notes:

Most south Asian cuisine consumed on British high streets hails from India or Bangladesh, rather than Pakistan. Caldwell, however, won't let facts get in the way of the many eagerly consumed chapattis rising up his white British reader's gorge, though a reference to Pakistan "in the 19th century" does make one wonder whether Caldwell can tell his brown folks apart.

On Eurabia

Caldwell is a proponent of the Eurabia myth; Muslims, he says, are 'conquering Europe's cities, street by street'. There is, according to Caldwell, a reverse colonization of Europe presently under way. Ziaddun Sardar notes in Caldwell's book the 'framing of Islamic values as the antithesis of Europe, the equation of Islam with fanaticism, violence and despotism, an obsession with Muslim women and the veil'

In Caldwell's neoconservative reformulation, orientalism becomes an instrument for shoring up the declining influence and hegemony of the United States. The real anger of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is directed not towards Islam and Muslims, but towards a Europe that has "emancipated" itself from, and hence abandoned, America. Caldwell uses orientalist tropes to strike fear in the citizens of Europe, urging them to wake up to the enemy now in their midst. Europe's duty is not to its former colonies, or else to some utopian ideal of a fair and just world. Rather, it is to embrace America, its manifest destiny.

Further, Sardar notes, that

there is a strong streak of paranoia in the analysis, and Caldwell is unable to differentiate between "integration" and "assimilation". He regards "primitive" Muslims, even those born and bred here, as "non-natives", but Jews as indigenous - even though they were being described in exactly the same manner as Muslims less than three generations ago...Ultimately, Caldwell wants Europe to be less tolerant. Instead of officially recognising minorities, which is "dangerous", we should follow the United States, where "immigration is Americanisation". It is a myth, the author contends, that America is an open society. Rather, it "exerts Procrustean pressure on its immigrants to conform" - America is about homogeneity, not diversity.

Stephen Holmes notes the menace implied in the title of Caldwell's book:

Echoing Edmund Burke in his title, Caldwell suggests that Europe is undergoing a "revolution" vaguely analogous to what happened in France in 1789. In his first letters on those events, Burke claimed to see a human society being dissolved and replaced by a world of monsters. This isn't far from how Caldwell portrays Europe today.

However, he adds:

You may doubt that a socially marginalized, economically impoverished, politically disorganized, and territorially dispersed minority could pull off a revolution, seizing the commanding heights from native Europeans who dominate their countries' institutions and own virtually all of Europe's wealth. After all, the groups in question are trapped in pockets of violent weakness where smoldering anger does not translate into significant power...Some may object that this way of seeing Europe's immigration problem is inflammatory, but the more serious problem is that it makes no sense. Given the huge numbers of non-Muslims mixed into Europe's immigrant population, Caldwell can only sustain his thesis by the gratuitous assertion that Romanian, Chinese, Dominican, and other immigrant groups will rally behind the banner of Islam in a campaign to blot out traditional European civilization.

Perry Anderson likewise observes:

Caldwell says at the outset that he will seek to avoid either alarmism or euphemism. There is no doubt that he succeeds in the second aim, with brio...Reflections on the Revolution in Europe says little or nothing about the racist discrimination, harassment and animosity so widely meted out to Muslim or other arrivals from overseas, by officials and natives alike. Caldwell explains that his book focusses on “the difficulties immigration poses to European society”, not “the difficulties faced by immigrants”. The two can hardly be separated, however, as if the objective experience of immigrants at the hands of European society were irrelevant to their subjective attitudes towards it, about which Caldwell writes at length...The vice-like grip of Washington and its allies on the oil resources and assorted client states of the area, the bases strung along the Gulf, the armies occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, the drones wiping out villagers in Pakistan, not to speak of the unstinted arming and funding of the nuclear settler state of Israel; all of these things find no place in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe...Imperialism, not fundamentalism, is the root of what Muslim alienation there is from Europe.

Anderson notes Caldwell's over-emphasis on Islam:

It is material needs and hopes, for a better standard of living, not spiritual beliefs, that are the driving forces of emigration from Africa, the Near and Middle East, or the Subcontinent. Immigrants are in search of security and prosperity, rather than salvation. When they encounter unemployment and hostility instead, religion readily becomes a protective shield for communities at risk, providing some base-line of collective identity and solidarity. But such defensive functions are a far cry from any summons to war against the infidel...where real riots against state and society have erupted, it is the least religious sectors of the immigrant population – jobless urban youth – that have taken to the streets, as in the great insurrection of the French banlieues in 2005. Anger at deprivation and discrimination, rather than at disbelief, is what is liable to ignite further such uprisings.

Yet, despite all this, Anderson is overly generous in his review. On the other hand Holmes dismisses Caldwell's 'random flashes of sobriety' because they are 'at odds with, and unintegrated into, the main argument.' Diving beneath Caldwell's 'jibes and anecdotes', to restate central thesis 'is a sufficient refutation', Holmes writes. Caldwell's 'sophomoric fantasies', he writes,

contribut[e] little to the understanding and nothing to the resolution of the very real problems surrounding immigrant communities in Europe today. About his half-veiled thoughts on how a post-post-nationalist European public should confront its immigrant communities, the less said the better. If you like this sort of exercise, you may read it for the author's wit. For wisdom, look elsewhere.

On clashing civilizations

For Caldwell the values of Islam and Europe are irreconcilably at odds. In his book he writes:

the conditions unifying Europe culturally have not been better for decades, and Islam is part of the reason why. Renewed acquaintance with Islam has given Europeans a stronger idea of what Europe is, because it has given them a stronger idea of what Europe is not.

In conjuring Europe's Muslims immigrants as a civilizational threat Caldwell erases their subjectivity to present them as a coherent force, constituting a hostile organism eating at Europe from within. He writes:

Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers. For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like ‘majority’ and ‘minority’: mean little. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthed by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.

On the scourge of Human Rights

Holmes notes Caldwell's attempts 'to reveal to the world the ugly reality hidden behind the pretty ideology of universal human rights'.

His thinking, to the extent that I can reconstruct it, goes something like this: When rich nations subscribe to universal human rights, they lose all moral grounds for keeping out poor immigrants. After World War II, Europeans abandoned their traditional intolerance of non-Christian peoples in the name of universalism. Their inability to turn away immigrants who "present themselves in suffering humanity's name" may look like a moral choice, but it is actually a refusal to defend their own values and traditions.

And the cultural malady that allowed the Muslim invasion, as Caldwell sees it, goes back even further than postwar guilt. The true source is "Europe's spiritual void," the product of "ideological secularism, which aims to break every link between religion and public life, shepherding people out of religion altogether." As Europeans lost their Christian faith, they also lost their "anchor" (one of his favorite words). Skepticism eroded the moral justification for cultural self-preservation because "all European cultures depend for their stability on certain ethical survivals of Christianity, and would have a difficult time defending their 'values' without them."

Readers may be forgiven for feeling lost at this point. Isn't Christianity one of the cultural sources of humanitarian universalism? After all, Christ allegedly died for all mankind.

On 'honour killings'

Laila Lalami writes:

Caldwell also suggests that Muslims are far more likely to commit violence against women. Under the heading "Virginity and violence," he writes that "there were forty-five [honor killings] in Germany alone in the first half of the decade." Since the argument here is that Muslims are more inclined to commit homicides against women in the context of "some trespass against sexual propriety," it would have been helpful if Caldwell had included, for the sake of contrast, the number of ethnic German women killed in incidents of domestic violence, as well as numbers for an entirely distinct and recent immigrant group, such as Eastern Europeans. Without such empirical comparisons, it is difficult to see how he can reach the conclusion he does, which is that "such acts make law. They assert sovereignty over a certain part of European territory for a different sexual regime." The label "honor killing" makes violence against women and girls sound like an exotic import rather than the pernicious and all-too-frequent reality that it is. Caldwell doesn't mention that domestic violence has been treated as a criminal problem in Europe thanks to the work of European feminists in the 1960s and '70s, and that now European Muslim feminists are working to create a similar zero-tolerance level about honor killings. Encouragingly, a recent Gallup study found that Muslims in Paris, Berlin and London disapproved of honor killings and crimes of passion about as much as the general French, German and British populations.

On Europe

Pankaj Mishra has also noted Caldwell's 'shaky' grasp of European history

Italy, he tells us, is like Sweden in being "without an important colonial history". Approvingly quoting Ernest Renan's and Hilaire Belloc's scaremongering about Islam as a threat to "white civilisation", he seems to be unaware that these two writers also described Jews as inferior "aliens" in Europe.

He chastised Europeans of opposing American wars and even in countries that did support the war, he accused Europeans of encouraging Muslims to be anti-American:

When Muslims marched in anti-war demonstrations, after all, their secular and Christian fellow citizens marched alongside them.

He also decries European women's infertility:

The closer one gets to European culture, the farther one gets from family and its raison d'être, children.

By allowing Muslims to immigrate, writes Caldwell, 'For the first time in centuries Europeans are living in a world they did not, for the most part, shape.' Immigration, writes Caldwell, 'is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it.'

Stephen Holmes adds:

Unlike Americans who often seem to love themselves uncritically, Europeans are mired in "self-loathing" and "hand-wringing self-detestation." He explains, "Whether or not [Europe] can defend itself, it has lost sight of why it should."...Ashamed of their past persecution and oppression of non-Christian peoples, European elites began to espouse an "ideology of tolerance." You might suppose that an "ideology of tolerance" would be ethical and principled, but in Caldwell's telling, it is actually an expression of unprincipled self-disgust...The principal characteristics of today's Europe are "its atomization, its consumerism, its sexual wantonness." What is the chance that the European civilization we discover in "the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and high rate of anomie and self-loathing" could defend itself against the Muslim advance? Very little: "The spiritual tawdriness Islamic immigrants perceive in the modern West is not imaginary. It may be Europe's biggest liability in preserving its culture."

Europe vs. America

Holmes again:

Unlike Europe, however, America will not be flushed down history's drain. At least not yet. For one thing, America "has not yet had any mass immigration of Muslims" and "scale matters." In addition, America has retained the moral fiber that Europe has lost. It is more Christian and more convinced that Christianity is morally superior to Islam. It is also less squeamish about using force to defend itself abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) or at home. When Caldwell remarks that "a quarter of the prison inmates in the world are held in the United States," he means this not as criticism but as praise. Reflecting on U.S. "policies that are distasteful to most Europeans," such as the death penalty, he observes that such toughness means that "American cities and suburbs are extremely inhospitable places for immigrants who are criminally inclined." This is one of the principal ways in which America, unlike Europe, "exerts Procrustean pressure on its immigrants to conform." Most important, the United States believes in itself, while "Europeans are confused about whether they are citizens of the world or citizens of their own nations."...Unlike the post-nationalist Europeans, Americans remain willing to write history in the letters of blood. Not Christ-like concern for the weak and the marginalized but readiness for organized violence is presumably why America's culture strikes the editors of the Weekly Standard as less drab than Europe's...But thanks to America, equivalent dreams of patriotic (even "racial"?) glory have not entirely vanished from the West. Despite its sometimes-tawdry consumerism, America is pumped for war and is therefore well-positioned to take on the Islamic threat.

Europe's hope for survival

As Holmes notes, Caldwell has not entirely abandoned hope for Europe.

While Europe's elites despise their own culture, the average, love-it-or-leave-it, tabloid-reading man in the street believes correctly that "Islam itself" is "dangerous" and understands simple truths, such as: Muslims living in Europe make life crummier. The "smoldering rage among working-class voters," moreover, suggests that at least these Europeans have not yet been drained of moral vitality.

Caldwell's solution for stemming 'the implantation of Muslim culture' in Europe? Holmes notes Caldwell's three proposals:

One is deportation, an option that he broaches when he asks about rioters in the French banlieues who shout "Fuck France!": "Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country?" A second possibility is conversion: "It no longer seems unreasonable to demand that immigrants who want to stay in Europe give up the ways of their parents." About the third possibility, Caldwell does not speak so directly, but he raises it in a parable about the fate awaiting guests who overstay their welcome: "The most spectacular illustration history offers of the kinship of hospitality and mistrust is that of Captain Cook, who was feted, flattered, and worshipped for a month by the Hawaiian islanders in Kealakekua Bay in 1779. When he and his crew returned on an emergency visit to repair a broken mast, they were massacred."

I do not suppose Caldwell is seriously encouraging Europeans to return to their venerable tradition of mass murder. But readers may be forgiven for wondering what he really thinks about writing history in letters of blood.

On Enoch Powell

In his book -- excerpted by the New York Times next to a glowing review -- Caldwell presents Enoch Powell as a prophet who had anticipated his own arguments by four decades. The debates over Powell's speech, Caldwell argues, revealed a 'class-based split', and he, naturally, stands with masses:

Political elites focused on whether Powell was right morally...Popular opinion, though, focused on whether he was right factually. And in this sense, right he was, beyond any shadow of a doubt...Ordinary Britons loved Powell's Birmingham speech. He received literally vanloads of mail--100,000 letters in the ten days that followed, of which only 800 expressed disagreement.

Manipulation of sources and statistics

Ziauddin Sardar notes Caldwell's 'crude' manipulation of statistics:

Birth rates among European Muslims are falling, not increasing. In Austria, recent research has shown Muslim birth rates to be far below those of people without religion, and below even those of Protestants. If we consider Austrian "natives" to be exclusively Catholic, then the "native" population of Austria will indeed be overtaken by 2051, yet exceeded not just by Muslims, but by the rest of the population, too, including Protestants and the biggest majority of all - people without religion. Caldwell fails to consider the consistent upward mobility of Muslim women throughout Europe, as well as countless examples of successful integration. And he simply ignores the many surveys that show Muslims to be exceptionally loyal to their respective European countries.

Commenting on Caldwell and Bruce Bawer (another proponent of the Eurabia myth) Eliot Weinberger writes in the London Review Blog, 'there are two sets of population statistics: those of the Islamophobes and those of everyone else'.

The general consensus is that Muslims now make up merely 3.6 per cent of the population of Western Europe, and the fertility rate of European Muslims is a fraction of 1 per cent higher than that of Christians. Allowing that second and third and fourth generations of immigrants tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, and thus have less children, and that intermarriage is common, it doesn’t seem likely there will be ever be a muzzein at the top of the Eiffel Tower, let alone, as the I-phobes warn, Sharia law in Denmark and Britain...the rhetoric and the specific fearmongering details of the Islamophobes are identical to those used against the Jews in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the United States against every large immigrant group – Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Chinese – since the 1880s.

Lalami adds:

But recent studies show that birthrates among European Muslim women are declining sharply; for instance, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9 between 1990 and 2005. Turkish-born women had 3.2 children in 1990 and 1.9 in 2005. Similar patterns have been observed in France and Germany. Martin Walker, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, points out that, "broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations."

After acknowledging that Muslims constitute a minority of 3.6 percent, Caldwell writes:

Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today.

In an overview of the rise of Islamophobia in UK, Pankaj Mishra writes:

The birthrates of Europe's Muslim immigrants are actually falling and converging with national averages, according to a recent survey in the Financial Times; but "advanced" cultures, Caldwell claims in his book, "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones"...Caldwell is also convinced that "Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation"

Islam scholar Malise Ruthven notes that Caldwell

flatly ignores evidence produced by numerous scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh, Tariq Modood, Philip Lewis, and Jytte Klausen that Muslim identities are shifting to meet changing circumstances, that a majority of younger British Muslims, for example, "share many aspects of popular youth culture with their non-Muslim peers," and that their problem is not so much with the majority culture as with "traditionally-minded parents who seek, usually unsuccessfully, to limit their access to it."...No one remotely familiar with the work of scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh (who ruminates on the diversities of "Islams" and "modernities") or the political scientist Jytte Klausen, whose brilliant work on European Muslims investigates emerging hermeneutics and epistemologies of faith, would dismiss them, as Caldwell does, as "glib." Al-Azmeh and his colleagues provide plenty of support to refute "the cliché," as al-Azmeh writes, "of a homogenous collectivity innocent of modernity, cantankerously or morosely obsessed with prayer, fasting, veiling, medieval social and penal arrangements,"[1] while Klausen has demonstrated convincingly that European Muslims are overwhelmingly hostile to extremism, support democratic processes, accept the duties of citizenship, and are evolving distinctively local styles of Muslim identities.[2]

Nor does Caldwell exhibit any familiarity with the rich literature describing the spread of Islam in peripheral cultures such as sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, where a religion originating in Arabia proved every bit as adept as Christianity in adjusting to local conditions. He has similarly failed to familiarize himself, even superficially, with the vast literature charting the encounter between Islam and modern Western society. In his review of Western attitudes toward Islam he prefers to celebrate the prejudices of writers such as Ernest Renan (in 1883) or Hilaire Belloc (in 1938) than to engage with significant Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman, Muhammed Arkoun, or Abdullahi an-Naim who might challenge his essentialist assumptions. Caldwell's "Islam" owes more to tabloid headlines than to responsible research.

On Caldwell's misuse of sources and translation Ruthven notes:

Impressive though he may appear in marshaling a disparate army of sources (ranging from government statistics, social surveys, and think-tank reports to novels and newspaper stories in eight or more languages), the impression he gives is spurious and not supported by real evidence. Caldwell selects a multitude of facts or quotations that support his central premise of a "believing" Islam pitted against a doubting or skeptical Europe. This conclusion, however, is not supported by surveys of actual religious behavior...the conclusion to which they point is that Muslims do not greatly differ in religious behavior from other Europeans...The failures in this book are not limited to its flawed and biased research. A troubling example of Caldwell's method involves the misuse of translation in order to further his argument that unlike other religious traditions, Islam cannot be assimilated into European culture.

Endorsements

Despite the overtly Islamophobic tone of Caldwell's book, it has garnered endorsements from several figures in the mainstream as well as fellow neoconservatives such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson. Caldwell has been given mainstream respectability through interviews with Andrew Marr on Start the Week and on Radio 3's cultural flagship Nightwaves. In his full-page review for the Observer, Prospect editor David Goodhart calls Caldwell 'a bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties' (although he describes part of the book as 'a rather cartoonish polemic about the potential Islamic takeover of Europe') and that 'compared with most literature on migration, so often dull and cliché-ridden, this book pulsates with ideas'. The Guardian's Martin Woollacott likewise dispenses praise, calling Caldwell one of the 'more urbane and interesting' neoconservative voices, and concludes by noting:

But he is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced constitutes a risky experiment to which we need not have submitted ourselves, and of which the final result is not yet clear. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways. If his book sharpens a so far sluggish debate, it will have served an important purpose. However, these writers have still voiced some reservations. Other have openly championed Caldwell's extreme positions include:

Sam Tanenhaus

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and the biographer of Whittaker Chambers, put a glowing review of Caldwell's book by the neoconservative Orientalist Fouad Ajami on the front page of the Sunday Review (the book had already been reviewed in the pages of the New York Times). He has himself spoken approvingly of Caldwell's book in an interview with the author in which he described Muslim immigration to Europe as a 'crisis'.

Fouad Ajami

On July 29, 2009, Caldwell's book was lauded in the New York Times Book Review by neoconservative Orientalist Fouad Ajami in an article entitled 'Strangers in the Land'. He called the author 'a meticulous journalist' and his book 'subtle', 'honest and forthright', and the 'most sustained and thoughtful treatment' of the subject. As an example of Caldwell's subtlety Ajami offers this statement: '[Islam] is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture'. 'It hadn’t taken long for Islam to make its new claim on Europe', writes Ajami. 'The European welfare state', he writes, 'has tempted and aided the new Islamism'. The neoconservative bogeymen of 'moral relativism and tolerance' come in for ritual denunciation; Muslim immigrants are described as 'desperate wards or determined invaders' and anyone who thinks otherwise is engaged in 'works of evasion and apology'. He adds:

“The guest is sacred, but he may not tarry,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes in a set of remarks that Caldwell cites with approval. Many of Europe’s “guests” have overstayed their welcome.

Adrian Michaels

The group foreign editor of the Telegraph Media Group wrote two articles on 8 August 2009 characterizing Muslim Europeans as a 'demographic time bomb', who he claims will constitute one fifth of the population by 2050. For his more outrageous claims Adrian Michaels used Caldwell as his key source. In the article he lamented:

Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policy-makers are talking about it.

Muslims, he argued, 'represent a particular set of issues beyond the fact that atrocities have been committed in the West in the name of Islam.'

Whites will be in a minority in Birmingham by 2026, says Christopher Caldwell, an American journalist, and even sooner in Leicester. Another forecast holds that Muslims could outnumber non-Muslims in France and perhaps in all of western Europe by mid-century. Austria was 90 per cent Catholic in the 20th century but Islam could be the majority religion among Austrians aged under 15 by 2050, says Mr Caldwell.

Dwight Garner

In his laudatory review for the New York Times entitled 'A Turning Tide in Europe as Islam Gains Ground' which appeared in the 'Books of the Times' section, Dwight Garner praised the author for gathering his evidence 'patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit'. Caldwell, he writes, is a 'vivid writer', an 'action-movie hero'.

Muslim cultures “have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings,” he deposes. “Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.”

After identifying the book's pedigree -- works by Bernard Lewis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lee Harris, Bruce Bawer, and Oriana Fallaci -- Garner calls it 'the most rigorous and plainspoken' which according to him 'never quite cross[es]' into 'being alarmist'.

Rod Liddle

From the right, Times and Spectator columnist Rod Liddle has showered the book with praise, calling it 'scabrous and excellent'. After endorsing Caldwell's thesis of a demographic threat -- 'Muslim majority is possible in some European countries within the next 50 years...you will see the advent of Eurabia' -- Liddle adds this observations:

...it would be nice if the incomers sort of liked us and didn’t find almost everything about our culture—equality for women, freedom of speech, rights for homosexuals, freedom of conscience—repulsive.

Liddle then proffers a quote allegedly from the Qur'an: 'kill the one who is doing it and the one to whom it is being done'. (There is no such quote). He also offers this insight: 'Muslim incomers to Great Britain have values very similar to the British lower classes of 1,500 years ago'. Liddle also laments 'the painstaking care with which the Western countries have ensured they pick the very worst, most dangerous Muslims to whom they will pay welfare benefits to and later, as a form of thanks, be blown to smithereens by.'

Affiliations

• Financial Times
• Weekly Standard
• NATO and the Greater Middle East Conference participant, October 2003

Publications

Books

• Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe be the same with different people in it? Allen Lane, 2009

Articles

• With Friends like these, FT.com, 13 February 2004.

External resources

• Matt Carr, Christopher Caldwell dissected, Institute of Race Relations, 2 July 2009.
• Kenan Malik, Book review: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and Europe by Christopher Caldwell, New Humanist, July 2009
• Stephen Holmes, Chicken Little goes to Europe, The American Prospect, 28 August 2009.
• Laila Lalami, The New Inquisition, The Nation, 24 November 2009
• Malise Ruthven, The Big Muslim Problem!, New York Review of Books, 17 December 2009