Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956, in New York City) is an American literary critic, writer and poet. His work focuses mainly on criticism and issues related to Islam.

Personal life

Bawer 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 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. He currently lives with his male partner in Oslo, Norway.

Works

Bawer's works have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, The Nation, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The American Spectator and The Hudson Review. {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)

In A Place at the Table, Bawer argued for what he considers a centrist and mainstream political philosophy at odds with 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 While Europe Slept, Bawer writes that 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 a violent past. 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 states that rising Muslim birthrates and "refusal" to integrate will allow them to dominate European society within 30 years, and that the only way to avoid such a disaster is to abolish the politically correct and multicultural doctrine that, according to him, is rife within the continent.

While Europe Slept was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2006 in the criticism category, a circumstance that led to 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 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. And claims its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia." Bawer declared that comments such as those from Weinberger and Freeman came as no surprise, as he had been expecting a considerable amount of criticism from "politically correct" officials; in response, he stated that he had never criticized a race, only Islam as a "political ideology." J. Peder Zane, a member on the nomination committee, said Freeman "was completely unfair to Bruce Bawer" and insulting to the committee.

Since 2009, Bawer has also been an associate of the Oslo-based organisation Human Rights Service.

Far Right extremist Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, cited Bawer's While Europe Slept in his manifesto. Bawer notes that all these citations were the result of Breivik's wholesale reproduction of Fjordman's essays.

In a review, Stephen Pollard described Bawer's 2009 book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, as an argument that liberal appeasement is paving the way for a replacement of European civilization by Islamic culture.

Bibliography

• The middle generation: the lives and poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, Archon Books, 1986, ISBN 978-0-208-02125-0
• The contemporary stylist, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, ISBN 978-0-15-513716-5
• Diminishing fictions: essays on the modern American novel and its critics, Graywolf Press, 1988, ISBN 978-1-55597-109-0
• The screenplay's the thing: movie criticism, 1986-1990, Archon Books, 1992, ISBN 978-0-208-02332-2
• A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. Simon and Schuster. 1994. ISBN 978-0-671-89439-9.
• Prophets and Professors: Essays On the Lives and Work of Modern Poets, Story Line Press, 1995, ISBN 978-1-885266-04-0
• Beyond queer: challenging gay left orthodoxy, Free Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-684-82766-7
• Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. Random House Digital, Inc. 1998. ISBN 978-0-609-80222-9.
• While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, Random House Digital, Inc., 2006, ISBN 978-0-385-51472-9
• Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. 2009. ISBN 978-0-385-52398-1.
• The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam, 2012, ISBN 978-0-06-218869-4.

Poetry

• Innocence: eight poems, ralia Press, 1988
• Coast to coast: poems, Story Line Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-934257-51-0

See also

• Criticism of Islam
• Criticism of multiculturalism

External links

• Bruce Bawer Homepage
• While Europe Sneered, City Journal online, 1-5-2010
• 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
• 'Surrender' by Bruce Bawer - a review by Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2009
• Bruce Bawer, Norway Embraces Islamist Tyranny, 2011-11-16
• Andrew Sullivan, Bawer vs Bawer, 2011-07-25