Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is an American conservative poet, literary critic and author who lives in Oslo, Norway. He is also active in the counterjihad movement.
Contents
Counterjihad role
Islamophobic book
He is the author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.[1] The book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2006 leading the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, to write on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com):
- I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept’... It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.[2]
Literary critic Eliot Weinberger has called Bawer an 'anti-Muslim hatemonger'[3] and described his work as 'racism as criticism'.[4]
Bawer has suggested that European officials, who are 'in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday', 'could start rescuing Europe tomorrow'.[5] In his new book Surrender, Bawer also accuses The New York Times for refusing to highlight the Islamist threat and attacks Tariq Ramadan, who according to Bawer is 'a habitual practitioner of the Islamic art of taqiyya — which essentially means saying one thing in Arabic and another thing in English or French.'[6]
Predictably the book has received the endorsement of figures such as Stephen Pollard, Martin Sieff, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Daniel Pipes, and Ron Rosenbaum.
Breivik citations and Fjordman connection
The manifesto of Islamophobic Norwegian mass murderer Ander Behring Breivik quoted Bawer on 22 occasions, though always in texts lifted from other writers.[7]
Author Sindre Bangstad writes that Oslo-based Bawer was, by his own account, in regular social and email contact with 'Fjordman' (Peder Jensen), the Norwegian writer most heavily cited in Breivik's manifesto, in the years leading up to Breivik's killing spree. He states that Bawer introduced Fjordman to Robert Spencer and Bat Ye'or at a conference commemorating the murdered Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn in the Hague in 2006.[8]
On multiculturalism
Along with a laudatory review by neoconservative commentator Stephen Pollard, the New York Times published an excerpt from Bawer's book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, which included the following passage:
- The pernicious doctrine of multiculturalism, which teaches free people to belittle their own liberties while bending their knees to tyrants, and which, as we shall see, has proven to be so useful to the new brand of cultural jihadists that it might have been invented by Osama bin Laden himself.[9]
Support for the Progress Party
According to Sindre Bangstad, Bawer is a supporter of the right-wing Norwegian Progress Party.
Affiliations
- Moderator at Identity Crisis: Can European civilization survive? a conference held in Rome on 13-14 March 2008, under the auspices of the European Freedom Alliance in conjunction with the European University of Rome and the Lepanto Foundation.[10]
- Human Rights Service, a Norwegian think tank
Publications
- Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009)
- While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (2006)
- Prophets and Professors: Essays On the Lives and Work of Modern Poets
- Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity
- A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society
Contact
- Website: http://www.brucebawer.com/
References
- ↑ Identity Crisis: Can European civilization survive? - Biographies, European Freedom Alliance, accessed 7 January 2009.
- ↑ Patricia Cohen, In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam, New York Times, 8 February 2007
- ↑ Eliot Weinberger, Unquestionable Political Correctness, London Review Blog, 28 July 2009
- ↑ Patricia Cohen, In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam, New York Times, 8 February 2007
- ↑ Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, A Culture of Fear, The Guardian, 15 August 2009
- ↑ Quoted in Stephen Pollard, The Appeasers, New York Times, 26 July 2009
- ↑ James Kirchick, Mocking Justice in Norway: The Breivik Trial Targets Contrarian Intellectuals, World Affairs Journal, September/October 2012, accessed 24 February 2015
- ↑ Sindre Bangstad, Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia. London: Zed Books, 2014. p82.
- ↑ Bruce Bawer, Excerpt: ‘Surrender’, New York Times, 26 July 2009
- ↑ Program - Identity Crisis: Can European civilization survive?, European Freedom Alliance, accessed 5 January 2009.
