Bruce Bawer on America

Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, argues in this piece on Pajamas Media that in some ways, Americans are faster asleep than are Europeans. As he points out, most Americans appear blithely unaware of the challenge of radical Islam; certainly, it figures nowhere in the current electoral debate.

The mainstream media on both sides of the Atlantic ignore or obfuscate the problem of radical Islam, but Europeans are more aware of it "because they can see with their own eyes what's going on around them." The only positive point in Americans' favor is that, when they resist radical Islam, they tend to be "consciously fighting for freedom". In contrast, Europeans on the right are more likely to oppose radical Islam on the grounds of ethnic identity, cultural tradition or religion. Those on the left, he argues, are anyway more interested in the welfare state than individual liberty.

If anyone has any ideas about how to alert Americans to the danger posed by radical Islam, I'd love to hear them.