Reception
The book has been cited several times as a segment of "Eurabia literature". [1] [2] [3]
New Oxford Review, "one can't read [Menace in Europe] and walk away optimistic about the future of Europe. [4]
Conservative think tank writer Fred Siegel wrote, "it's hard to do full justice to the rich material in [Menace in Europe]. Ms. Berlinski...has a fascinating chapter on the Nazi aesthetic of Rammstein, Germany's most popular band. But if [Menace in Europe has] any weaknesses it is the lack of a historical framework. [5]
Clive Davis wrote in Washington Times, "what worries me about books like this is that they risk reducing Europe to a caricature in much the same way as Stupid White Men turns America into one big Wal-Mart with drive-by shootings." [6]
National Review piece reads, "her observation that there is nothing Americans can do to change [Europe], "short of dying politely en masse," suggests that Ms. Berlinski, a lively writer always happy to hype up the snark and the spark of her prose, is taking her readers not to France, or Germany, but to Planet Coulter. [7]
Baltimore Chronicle's John Hickman said that a "better example of the essential emptiness of neo-conservatism than Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe would be difficult to find...ugly vituperation expressed in sweeping generalizations...Berlinski cherry-picks her evidence. [8]
"Eurabia" is a far-right, anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that posits that globalist entities, led by French and Arab powers, aim to Islamize and Arabize Europe, thereby weakening its existing culture and undermining its previous alliances with the United States and Israel.
City Journal is a public policy magazine and website, published by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, that covers a range of topics on urban affairs, such as policing, education, housing, and other issues. The magazine also publishes articles on arts and culture, urban architecture, family culture, and other topics. The magazine began publishing in 1990.
Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and a radio and television presenter. He has written several books, including The New York Times bestsellersAmerica Alone, After America, and Broadway Babies Say Goodnight. In the US he has guest-hosted the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show, as well as Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appeared as a guest and fill-in host. In 2021, Steyn began hosting his own show on British news channel GB News. He left GB News in early February 2023, saying that the channel wanted him to pay fines issued by the UK media regulator Ofcom, which was investigating complaints of COVID-19 vaccination scepticism aired on The Mark Steyn Show. He has since moved his show to his own website.
Gisèle Littman, better known by her pen name Bat Ye'or, is an Egyptian-born British-French author, who promotes the Eurabia conspiracy theory in her writings about modern Europe, in which she argues that Islam, anti-Americanism and antisemitism hold sway over European culture and politics.
Dhimmitude is a polemical neologism characterizing the status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, popularized by the Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye'or in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a portmanteau word constructed from the Arabic dhimmi 'non-Muslim living in an Islamic state' and the French (serv)itude 'subjection'.
Niall Campbell FergusonFRSE is a Scottish–American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.
Market fundamentalism, also known as free-market fundamentalism, is a term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated laissez-faire or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used as pejorative by critics of said beliefs.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born, Dutch-American writer, activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. At the age of five, following local traditions in Somalia, Ali underwent female genital mutilation organized by her grandmother. Her father—a scholar, intellectual, and a devout Muslim—was against the procedure but could not stop it from happening because he was imprisoned by the Communist government of Somalia at the time. Her family moved across various countries in Africa and the Middle East, but at 23, she received political asylum in the Netherlands, gaining Dutch citizenship five years later. In her early 30s, Hirsi Ali renounced the Islamic faith of her childhood, began identifying as an atheist, and became involved in Dutch centre-right politics, joining the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).
FrontPage Magazine, also known as FrontPageMag.com, is an American right-wing, anti-Islam political website edited by David Horowitz and published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The site has also been described by scholars and writers as far-right and Islamophobic.
David Berlinski is an American mathematician who has written books about mathematics and the history of science as well as fiction. An opponent of evolution, he is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, an organization which promotes the pseudoscience of intelligent design.
The Force of Reason is a 2004 book by Oriana Fallaci. The book is a follow-up to The Rage and the Pride, aimed at her public critics, accusations of racism, and the lawsuits and death-threats launched against her. The book became a bestseller, selling 800,000 copies in Italy alone.
Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within is a 2006 best-selling book by the British journalist Melanie Phillips about the spread of Islamism in the United Kingdom over the previous twenty years. The book was published in London by Encounter Books.
Christopher Caldwell is an American journalist, and a former senior editor at neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, as well as a regular contributor to the Financial Times and Slate. He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, conservative think tank, and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books. His writing also frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It is a 2006 non-fiction book by the Canadian newspaper columnist and writer Mark Steyn. It forecasts the downfall of Western civilization due to internal weaknesses and Muslim population growth in Western countries and the world generally. Based on his own observations, Steyn says that the fall of the Western world is caused by three factors: demographic decline, unsustainability of the advanced Western social democratic state, and exhaustion of civilization. By 2007, Steyn's America Alone, had already convinced many American conservatives that there was an imminent and inevitable Muslim invasion. The Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) filed Human rights complaints against Maclean's magazine—in which they accused the magazine of Islamophobia—with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Ontario Human Rights Commission, based partly on Maclean's publication of a chapter from Steyn's book, "The Future Belongs to Islam".
Mischa Berlinski is an American author. His first novel, Fieldwork, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. In 2008 Berlinski won a $50,000 Whiting Award, given to writers showing early promise in their careers.
Douglas Murray is a British author and conservative political commentator. He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018. He is currently an associate editor of the conservative British political and cultural magazine The Spectator.
There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters is a 2008 biographical account of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher written by American author Claire Berlinski.
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within is a 2006 book by Bruce Bawer. It was Bawer's second book dealing with the issue of religious fundamentalism, following his earlier Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, a critique of fundamentalist Christianity published in 1998.
Claire Berlinski is an American journalist and author. Born and raised in California and other parts of the United States, including New York City and Seattle, she read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford where she earned a doctorate in International Relations. She has lived in Bangkok, where she worked for Asia Times; Laos, where she worked briefly for the United Nations Development Program; and Istanbul, where she worked as a freelance journalist. She now lives in Paris.
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam is a 2017 book by the British journalist and political commentator Douglas Murray. It was published in the United Kingdom in May 2017, and in June 2017 in the United States.
