Bruce
Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender,
and The Victims' Revolution. His novel The Alhambra
was published in 2017.
In
a time when even the conservative imprints of corporate publishing
houses are under pressure not to accept books that are too
offensive to woke sensibilities (witness the widening protest
against Penguin Random House’s contract with Amy Coney
Barrett), the New English Review Press, based in
Nashville and London, is a priceless cultural institution.
In recent years it’s put out books by first-rate writers
such as Theodore Dalrymple and Phyllis Chesler—books
that otherwise might never have seen the light of day.
Now
comes news that two titles on the NER Press’s backlist,
Ibn Warraq’s The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The
Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideolog (2017) and
Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s
Grooming Gang Scandal (2016), have been removed from
the virtual shelves at Amazon.com.
Warraq?
Really? Outrageous. Born in British India, raised in Pakistan
and the UK, and resident now in the United States, Warraq—a
pseudonym—is one of our most eloquent, courageous, knowledgeable,
and important writers about Islam. A student of Arabic, he’s
written such books as The Origins of the Koran and
Defending the West. His 1995 work Why I Am Not
a Muslim is a modern classic. And Why the West Is
Best (2011) is a richly human expression of gratitude
for Western freedom.
And
The Islam in Islamic Terrorism? As I wrote in a 2017
review, it provides a definitive answer to everyone who insists
“that Muslim terrorists have hijacked a peaceful faith.”
No, jihadist violence isn’t motivated by poverty or
the Palestinian question or America’s Middle East policy
or Western imperialism or the Crusades. It’s an essential
part of Islam, present from its birth—“a duty
incumbent on all Muslims,” Warraq writes, “until
Islam covers the whole surface of the earth.”
As
for McLoughlin, I wasn’t familiar with him or with his
book about grooming gangs until I heard about Amazon’s
ban. I’ve perused his book now. It turns out to be an
invaluable study of the mass rapes of thousands of English
girls, most of them white or Sikh working-class children,
by gangs consisting almost exclusively of Pakistani Muslim
men. These rapes have been going on for decades, but until
relatively recently they were ignored by social workers, police
officers, teachers, judges, journalists, charity organizations,
feminist groups, and politicians at every level for fear of
being labeled racists, provoking Muslim riots, and/or damaging
British multiculturalism.
McLoughlin
covers his topic from a variety of angles in a thoroughly
sober and responsible fashion. It’s clear to see, however,
why his book offends some woke sensibilities. McLoughlin refuses
to use the British media’s standard euphemism, “Asian,”
to describe the members of the rape gangs. He’s frank
about them being Muslims and their victims non-Muslims. He
calls out the British media for the circumlocutions and outright
lies with which they’ve obscured the geographical extent
of the grooming gangs’ offenses, the number of victims
involved, the length of the time period during which these
crimes have been going on, and, above all, the distinctly
Islamic roots of the rapists’ common belief that it’s
acceptable to sexually abuse the children of infidels.
Neither
of these two NER Press books is a polemic. Both are solid,
scholarly presentations of objective facts. And both confront
the widespread refusal of mainstream Western institutions
to face up to certain dark realities of Islam. That both books
have been pulled by Amazon is a profound irony, because by
taking this action, the online bookseller is engaging in precisely
the kind of head-in-the-sand denial that these books criticize
so passionately.
Amazon’s
refusal to make these books available to its customers is
not only an affront to believers in free speech and open debate.
It’s a slap in the face—and worse—to everyone
who ever lost a loved one in an Islamic terrorist attack or
whose child has been sexually exploited by a Muslim gang.
And like so many other recent attempts to cancel the un-woke,
it’s yet another triumph of reality-denying progressive
ideology over the plain and simple truth.
by
Bruce Bawer:
You
Before Me
Stop
Saying LGBT
Paul
Auster: Man in the Dark
Karl
Ove Knaaugaard's The Morning Star
Gender
Narcissism
History of World's Most Liberal City
Global Warning: An Unsettled Science
