Bruce Bawer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956 in New York City) is an American literary critic, writer and poet. His works have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The American Spectator and The Hudson Review, among other places. He is also the author of several books, including A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society, Prophets and Professors: Essays On the Lives and Work of Modern Poets, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (ISBN 0-385-51472-7). It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2006 in the criticism category, which was controversial. His most recent book (2009) is Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (ISBN 978-0-385-52398-1). Eliot Weinberger, one of the board members of the Circle, when he presented the list of nominations for the award, stated that Bawer's book was an example of "racism as criticism." Following that, the president of the Circle, John Freeman, declared that "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's 'When Europe Slept'. Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia."[1] Comments such as those from Weinberger and Freeman came as no surprise, as Bawer was expecting a considerable amount of criticism from politically correct officials, and responded by pointing out that he never criticized a race, only Islam as a political ideology.
In A Place at the Table, Bawer endorsed a centrist and mainstream political philosophy that criticized the gay left. In Stealing Jesus, Bawer leveled sharp criticism at evangelical, Pentecostal, and other strains of modern Christianity, including premillennialism and evangelical apologism for capitalism.
He moved from New York to Amsterdam in 1998, where he felt that he could live better as a gay man in a more liberal society. He then moved to Oslo in 1999, and throughout the years has translated several books from Norwegian to English.
In While Europe Slept, Bawer explains how Europe's politically correct culture defends and protects the Islamic fundamentalism that is preying upon its liberal social systems. Bawer argues that Islamists use welfare and religious grants to fund extremist mosques and support imams with violent histories. Once established in Western European nations, Bawer maintains, the Islamists avoid integration and answer only to sharia law, while avoiding the legal systems of their host nations, allowing abuse of women, gays, Jews and non-Muslims. In his conclusion, Bawer shows how rising muslim birthrates and refusal to integrate will allow them to dominate European society within 30 years, and the only way to avoid such disaster is to abolish the politically correct and multicultural doctrine that is abundant within the continent. He also suggests how the problem could be physically resolved: "European officials have a clear route out of this nightmare. They have armies. They have police. They have prisons. They're in a position to deport planeloads of people everyday. They could start rescuing Europe tomorrow."
He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also taught courses in literature and composition. He currently lives with his partner in Oslo, Norway.
[edit] References
- ^ Patricia Cohen: "In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam", The New York Times, February 8, 2007
