Arab-bashers who double as Euro-bashers by Louis Werner
The results from a recent survey of American attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs are not surprising. One in three Americans report having heard racist slurs - the question wasn't asked if the respondent himself had done the slurring - and one in four admit to holding anti-Arab views. But certain pundits must be enjoying every minute of it, for they are the ones who have invested so much of themselves since 9/11 in crying wolf. And among these Arab-bashers are a small group who double as Euro-bashers. So for them a perfect storm of bigotry, a synergistic interplay between two fundamentally distinct but now interrelated prejudices, has erupted.Two recent books, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's, Too, conger up fears of re-fighting, and this time losing, a world war across Europe whose enemy now is Muslim. The one word title Eurabia, subconsciously alliterating with "phobia", cuts right to the chase. You don't have to hate Europe in order to poke a stick at it, or to associate with those who do - after all, Richard Perle has a house in the south of France. Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, decamped America first for Amsterdam and then for Oslo in order to enjoy its continental manners.
Claire Berlinski's blurb on the back of her book Menace in Europe announces her bi-city love affair with Paris and Istanbul as a means of burnishing her cosmopolitan credentials. You won't catch these two pouring French wine down toilets, as was gleefully reported from the US in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
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