Europe's surrender

Blistering piece in City Journal by Bruce Bawer – author of While Europe Slept – about the progressive crumbling of European resistance in the face of creeping sharia-isation. These Westerners have begun, he says, to internalise the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis -- infidels living in Muslim societies as second-class citizens:

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys… In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This ‘stunning whitewash of radical Islam,’ as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, ‘helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses’ in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police… So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are ‘moderate’ (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are ‘Islamophobes.’