Philadelphia Weekly

This week we think about 9/11, and everything that came after. A lot's happened in six years. We invaded two countries and imprisoned hundreds of people, some of whom deserved it. And we gave Iran and North Korea the silent treatment. That was the politics.But there were great cultural accomplishments too. We declared the first war on an abstract noun (terror). We attempted the first lynching of cute white Southerners (the Dixie Chicks). And we created the first new literary genre of the millennium: Islamic panic.

This year Sept. 11 sees the paperback release of Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within. It's one of dozens of titles that explain how gutless, pinko Europeans have capitulated in the face of fascism (again!) and allowed Islam to conquer the continent. The book addresses America with a warning and a plea: Don't let this happen to you--you're the world's only hope.

While Europe Slept typifies the Islamic panic genre. Containing no references for any of the behavior it attributes to European Muslims, the author gets even the most basic facts wrong. Bawer claims that 12 percent of the French and 20 percent of the Swiss are Muslim, and that Islam-choked Sweden's murder rate is twice that of America. Two minutes on Google reveals the latest French polls and Swiss census (4 percent Muslim is nearer the mark in both countries), and World Health Organization data showing violent deaths occur five times more often here than in Sweden.

Nevertheless, Bawer argues, Europe is sleepwalking toward catastrophe with its liberal immigration laws and blank-check welfare systems. Sleepwalking, that is, until it ... er, wakes up. The book finally reveals that Denmark, the Netherlands and the U.K. have reformed the marriage visa and social security programs which Bawer spent 300 pages denouncing. Most readers would be confused. But then I suppose While Europe Made Sensible Policy Decisions would've been a terrible title.

Most Islamic panic authors cast themselves as cassandras, the only ones brave and brilliant enough to see through the jungle of political correctness and speak truth to power. This seems even more ridiculous when your local bookstore's shelves groan with sensational expos�s of Euro-Muslim wickedness. A small sample of this thoughtful, measured scholarship includes The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?

And the Islamic panic genre extends into fiction. Hysterical novels of Muslim domination are now commonplace, usually recounting brave resistance by local Christian guerrillas--a bit like the film Red Dawn, but without Patrick Swayze. The irony of rooting for these religiously inspired terrorist insurgents against the foreign occupiers is apparently lost on the authors.

The nuttiest English-language novel is Peter Jones' Empire: The Islamic Occupation of Wales (A Chilling Tale of the Near Future). But Russian fiction takes the cake for sheer paranoia. Yelena Chudinova's Notre Dame Mosque imagines a 21st-century Paris under Sharia law, where the city's great cathedral becomes an Alamo-esque last stand for plucky Catholic rebels. Vladimir Mikhailov's Variant-I describes how the last tsar's son survived the Bolsheviks by escaping to Iran, where his heirs conspire to reinstate the monarchy and make Russia an Islamic state.

Maybe these novels cater to the same fear and fascination with armageddon that Red Scare novels did in the 1950s. Today, kitsch nerds will pay top dollar for anticommunist pulp fiction like Red Rape, I Killed Stalin or The Puppet Masters. Perhaps one day Islamic panic books will also be just another weird cultural artifact obsessed over by memorabilia collectors.

If you have any faith in the human race (and the free market), buy first editions now.