Be wary of words                               By way of emiliewood.com

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, there seems to be a paranoia about Muslims in the West, and some misguided observers have been taking advantage of this fear warning the West of a so-called Islamicization of their societies. For years now, Daniel Pipes, a prime spokesperson of the anti-Muslim lobby in America, has tried to convince us that 'Muslims are coming...' because they demand halal meals for their kids in public schools or that their burqini-clad women are part of a sweet jihad to change Western cultural norms without seeming violent. Until recently, the rant of Pipes and others like him has been limited to Fox News and the New York Post (with substantial damage nonetheless), but thanks to Christopher Caldwell, the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, the Foxian anti-Muslim tirades are somehow 'confirmed' because Caldwell's argument of the Islamic threat, as the book's jacket states, is "at once urgent and subtle, alarming and profound. It takes a subject on which you might have thought everything has been said, and makes that subject new again. Written with elegant restraint, it still shimmers with generous passion. Although its thesis is depressing, the book itself is a rare pleasure." Caldwell is an avowed conservative and I did not expect him to tackle this issue any differently, but the celebration of his book is a bit extreme, particularly when those of us who lived and live in European cities, including the ones with the highest concentration of Muslims, see no need to speak in alarming tone about European Muslims or warn about an impending "Eurabia." I invite Mr. Caldwell and the many more who will follow in his 'sophisticated' footsteps to visit the neighborhoods of the cities he's warning against and look beyond the facade of couscous restaurant names and seemingly-different dark-skinned passers-by. If he did, he'd see what this reporter from the same publication he writes for did in the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville.