Europe’s Wake-Up Call

Muslims have immigrated to Europe—and they’re changing the continent’s culture as a result. Or so argues Christopher Caldwell, in Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West—which The New York Times’ Dwight Garner calls “a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title.” Caldwell explains that Muslims in Europe aren’t assimilating, instead forming a “parallel society,” listening to Al Jazeera, and not BBC. And, Caldwell writes, this society may be responsible for bringing anti-Semitism back to Europe. He also examines the debate, explaining that critics of Muslim immigration have been labeled Islamophobic, and a “standing fatwa” now exists against them. But he does go on to hail French President Nicolas Sarkozy as an ally to Muslim immigrants and a leader unfettered by “uncritical multiculturalism.” According to Garner, “like an action-movie hero, [Caldwell] walks calmly away from his own detonations while the fire swirls behind him” in a book that reads as a “wake-up call to many of Europe’s liberal democracies.”