Bruce Bawer

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, and Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. His most recent book is 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. The nomination led to much controversy. 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 Cicle, 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."

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.

In 1998, he moved from New York to Amsterdam, where he felt that he could live better as a gay man in a more liberal society. In 1999 he moved to Oslo and throughout the years has translated several books from Norwegian to English.

In While Europe Slept Bawer claims that Europe's "politically correct" culture allows and protects an Islamic fundamentalist movement that preys upon its liberal social systems. Bawer argues that Islamists use welfare and religious grants to fund extremist mosques and support imams with a violent history. Once established in Western European nations, Bawer maintains, the Islamists avoid integration and obey sharia law while avoiding the legal systems of their host nations, allowing abuse of women, Jews, gays and non-Muslims. In his conclusion, Bawer argues that Islamists' rising birthrates and refusal to intermarry will effect domination of European society within 30 years unless laws are passed to close loopholes favorable to the fundamentalist movement. He also suggests a solution to the problem he sees: "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."

In an article in The New York Sun in 2006 called When Sweden Slept, Bawer attacked Sweden for its tolerant immigration and minority policies and defended the Sweden Democrats, a small, xenophobic party that grew out of Bevara Sverige Svenskt ("Keep Sweden Swedish"), a racistic movement of the 1980s and has many members with a documented neo-Nazi pastpast.

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.

External links

• Bruce Bawer Homepage
• An Anatomy of Surrender, City Journal, Spring 2008
• The Peace Racket, City Journal, Summer 2007
• Hating America
• 9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe
• In Books, a Clash of Europe and Islam