European anti-Americans get a taste of their own medicine

America: American visitors to Europe have long had to endure tiresome, often ill-informed lectures from complete strangers about the wickedness of US foreign policy, the brutality of its penal system, the injustice of its treatment of African-Americans and the barbarism of its economic system.

Polite by nature, most Americans just nod and smile, sometimes volunteering their own criticism of the Bush administration and occasionally correcting the most glaring misconceptions.

When they come home, they may share their experiences of European anti-Americanism, fret for a moment about what can be done about it, and then shrug and forget all about it.

However, some conservative commentators have started hitting back, and last year's French riots provoked a flurry of gloating opinion pieces in US papers crowing that Europe's social-democratic, multicultural chickens were finally coming home to roost.

Two new books take the fight-back a step further, warning that Europe's flabby, indulgent societies are sleepwalking into self-destruction as Muslim immigrants prepare to destroy the Continent's liberal values.

Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept - How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within argues that Europe's rejection of the United States's "war on terror" and its failure to stamp on Islamist militants have created a "Weimar moment" that could lead to the Continent's cultural suicide.

A libertarian conservative who has written a critical study of Christian fundamentalism in the US, Bawer moved to Amsterdam in 1998 and later to Oslo, drawn by Europe's cultural diversity and liberal social policies, particularly on gay rights. He soon began to cool towards his adopted home, however, tiring of Europeans' condescending behaviour towards him ("I have a PhD!" he screamed at one of them) and outraged by their lack of sympathy with US foreign policy after September 11th, 2001.

Bawer is horrified by the sight of Muslim women wearing the hijab and sees an Islamic threat to his civil liberties everywhere he goes.

When the editor of a Washington gay paper is beaten up while holding hands with his partner in Amsterdam, Bawer identifies the assailants' Moroccan origin as the most important fact about the incident.

Too many of us have experienced homophobic violence, but it is just as likely to come from blue-eyed German skinheads or beer-bellied British louts as from young Muslims. As Washington's gay press reports every week, it's a fairly common occurrence in the US too.

Muslims don't have to physically attack Bawer or even speak to him to cause offence, as a Muslim couple in Oslo discovered when they glared at two women kissing.

"The Muslim wife, in hijab, stared at them, her eyes blazing with rage. She was obviously out to intimidate. My partner and I exchanged a look. The Muslim woman kept staring. The hate in her eyes was unsettling. Finally, my partner couldn't take it any more. 'Please stop that,' he said to her in a gentle, pleading tone. 'This is Norway. We don't do that to people here'," Bawer writes.

Bawer will do anything to discover the dark side of Muslims in Europe, whom he accuses of everything from swindling the welfare system to supporting terrorists. Anything, that is, except speak to an actual Muslim.

Bawer interviews politicians, academics and journalists and quotes from numerous reports, newspaper articles and websites. But nowhere in more than 200 pages does he speak to a single member of the group his book is actually about.

Claire Berlinski is a tougher customer and her book, Menace in Europe - Why the Continent's Crisis is America's too, makes a more bracing read. An American journalist and academic who studied international relations at Oxford and now divides her time between Paris and Istanbul, Berlinski heaps scorn on the European liberal establishment. She shares Bawer's concern about Europe's relationship with its Muslim immigrants, but unlike him, she tries to find out what immigrants are thinking and recognises that they have real grievances.

She not only analyses the weaknesses of integration policies in Britain, France and the Netherlands, but travels to Marseilles to establish why community relations in that city work so well.

Berlinksi sees European anti-Americanism and growing anti-Semitism as having roots in the Continent's violent history and the decline of the Christian faith. (Like many American conservatives, she has no time for religion herself, but thinks it's good for other people.)

Berlinski may read too much into the popularity of Rammstein, a dreadful German rock band that flirts with a Nazi aesthetic, and she is wrong to believe that most European critics of Israel are anti-Semitic. Like Bawer, she misunderstands the nature of the EU, imagining that it seeks to replace national identities with a single European identity.

Her book is nonetheless a refreshing, erudite blast of polemic that, if nothing else, should give European anti-Americans a jolting taste of their own medicine.