86  Race & Class 51(3)

polemical purposes. Though he likes to quote historians, he seems unwilling to engage with any version of history that does not bear out his own prejudices and assumptions. At one point he suggests that Muslim immigration is another version of an old enemy that ‘for virtually all of Europe’s history since the Dark Ages … had been a mortal threat’ to European civilisation.

Quoting anti-Islamic statements of Hilaire Belloc and Ernest Renan with approval, he dismisses the work of the anthropologist Jack Goody for its ‘Panglossian’ emphasis on the more positive cultural interactions between Islam and the West, as a form of historical political correctness. His assertion that ‘Europeans abandoned the Mediterranean to Muslim navies and Saracen pirates’ following the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century is entirely ahistorical. Caldwell has clearly not heard of the defeats inflicted on the Ottomans at Lepanto or Malta, the sacking of Tunis, the numerous Christian attempts to conquer Algiers and other parts of North Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He seems unaware that Christians as well as Muslims had navies and engaged in piracy throughout this same period.

For Caldwell, like Renan and Belloc, Islam is the ancestral enemy, as dangerous to present-day Europeans as it was to their predecessors. Thus he accepts Samuel Huntington’s hoary assertion that ‘Islam has bloody borders’. He dismisses the Islamic world as ‘an economic and intellectual basket case, the part of the potentially civilised world most left behind by progress’, citing the Arab Human Development Reports published by the UN as evidence. For Caldwell, European Muslims are the religious and cultural footsoldiers of a new Islamic conquest, intent on establishing Islamic enclaves that override the political sovereignty of their adopted countries. Thus the ‘relative violence of Muslim neighbourhoods is a main obstacle to social mixing and integration’, since ‘Immigrants and their children commit much of the crime in all European countries, and most of the crime in some of them’ and ‘violence has kept native Europeans out of certain immigrant neighborhoods as effectively as an electric fence’. In his discussion of the banlieue riots in France in October 2005, he dismisses suggestions of racism, police brutality or discrimination as motivating factors and rejects the conclusions by the International Crisis Group and other observers that they were not Islamic in character since: ‘Even if [the rioters] did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam.’

Some of Caldwell’s statements are demonstrably absurd, such as his assertion that ‘In very few parts of Europe are active steps taken to send rejected asylum seekers home’ or his rejection of the possibility of a fascist resurgence because there is no evidence that ‘the rightist parties that exist today are especially preoccupied with Islam’. But again and again the shrill tone of the ideological zealot breaks through the nuance and detachment, whether he is condemning Europeans for refusing to join the Bush administration’s war on terror because ‘their selfesteem meant more to them than their self-interest’ or his insistence that ‘Any Euro reluctance to embrace Islamic immigration gets called Islamophobia. So does any suggestion that immigrants or their children adapt to European ways’.