Order Robert Spencer’s new book, Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It: HERE.

Many years ago, when I was first living in Oslo, I would sometimes board a local bus in the middle of the afternoon, and the spectacle that greeted my eyes as I walked up the aisle to find a seat was one that, in any other part of the world, would have been inconceivable, and that it took me a while to get used to: many of the passengers would be perky, peppy blonde girls on their way home at the end of a day of high school, and every one of them would be, by ordinary international standards, just plain beautiful. If you were a stranger to Scandinavia, you might have thought that the highest-charging models from all of the top modeling agencies were being bussed to a location shoot for a spread in Vogue.

Those images from Oslo came to mind as I was reading one of the early chapters in Robert Spencer’s characteristically brilliant and learned new book, Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It. In it, Spencer recounts a story told by Arabic scholars: once, when Muhammed was trying to work up his men’s enthusiasm for a plan to attack the Romans – religion of peace, remember? – he pointed out that the Roman women were blondes. Muhammed and his fellow denizens of the desert, you see, were big on blondes. And this Arabic taste for flaxen-haired females persisted into the succeeding centuries, when caliphs collected Byzantine slave girls because, in the words of one source, they were possessed of “blond hair, blue or green eyes, a pure and healthy visage, lovely breasts, a delicate waist, and a body that is like camphor or a flood of dazzling light.” Ah, those poetic Arabs! Spencer puts it a bit more prosaically: “Jihadists love blondes.”

Which brings me back to my memories of those bus rides in Oslo. For in addition to those blonde girls on the bus, there were, naturally, also blond boys. While the blonde girls were, as noted, almost uniformly vivacious, the blond boys tended to be more low-key – as boys of that age, I guess, usually are in such circumstances. And there were other boys and girls as well: Muslim girls, many of them in hijab, and virtually all of them quite sedate, even somber. And the Muslim boys? They were animated, often boisterously so. And some of them were plainly cozy with blonde girls.

Indeed, as my period of residence in Oslo stretched into years, and my social life brought me into contact with more and more young (and not so young) Norwegian women, I discovered that the Arab male’s fondness for the blonde female was, not infrequently, reciprocated – at least when the blonde female is a Norwegian of the present day. Why? Part of the reason, I came to understand, was that, over the past half century or so, Scandinavian society has become highly feminized. No men on earth are more respectful of women, more polite, more deferential, than Scandinavian men. Certainly not all Scandinavian men, but many of them, have been raised to be beta males. It’s Sweden, after all, that boasts of having “the world’s first feminist government.” And it’s Norway that claims to be the world’s “peace nation,” teaching its children that making peace is always preferable to making war. It’s a tried-and-true formula for creating docile men.

The problem, alas, is that once Scandinavian women had succeeded in taming their Vikings, they realized they didn’t want gentle men – or, for that matter, gentlemen. So it is that when you walk these days through the streets of Oslo, or any other Scandinavian city, you’ll see a lot of blondes strolling arm in arm with macho Muslim men. They’re probably not married: on the contrary, most of the men likely have wives at home – Muslim wives – tending the kitchen and taking care of the children. The wives probably know about the girlfriends, but dare not breathe a word of criticism, because they know their husbands have the sacred right to smack them upside the head if they get out of line; and the blondes may or may not know about the wives, but what they almost certainly don’t know is that their exotic lovers, who they may think of as being deeply in love with them, view them, in fact, as infidel whores whom they’re permitted to ravage precisely because they’re of no intrinsic human worth whatsoever.

In my years in Scandinavia, I’ve encountered more than a few of these women. I’ve witnessed many a blonde’s starry-eyed adoration for her gruff, loutish barbarian. And I’ve witnessed the anguish when the barbarian moves on to a new blonde. What I’ve never witnessed is a sign that any of these women has ever learned a larger lesson from her experience. Bottom line: today’s Scandinavia is overrun with naive blonde females who are drawn to dark, exotic, potentially violent alpha males – which in this part of the world means, almost exclusively, Muslims – but who are clueless about what it means to have a relationship with an authentic adherent of the Religion of Peace.

What those women don’t know – and what they desperately need to know – is what you’ll find in Spencer’s new book. Just for starters, they don’t know that in Islam, forced sex with a wife doesn’t count as rape. Neither does forced sex with an infidel. Why? Simple: men are higher up in the hierarchy than women, and Muslims are higher up in the hierarchy than infidels. And in Islam, sex plays a major role in – well, in everything. Indeed, the more you learn about the religion, the more it seems to have been designed by horny young men as a framework within which they can have as much sex as they want, with very little obligation in return and with an extraordinary range of partners, while women, under the same framework, are expected to shut up and obey. And just as sex, under Islam, encodes the dominance of the male over the female, it also plays a key role in the articulation of Islamic power over the infidel. As Spencer puts it, “rape of infidel women is…useful as a means to humiliate the defeated infidel force, as well as a means of social control and to aid in the redrawing of ethnic boundaries. On top of all that is the divine sanction given to it all. Rape of infidel women in a jihad war is not just something the commanders permit, as a means to humiliate the infidels. It is a holy act.”

Now, your typical high-school tootsie in Oslo – let’s call her Ingrid – might protest as follows: “But Ahmed has never raped me!” Well, that’s because you’ve always put out. Try resisting. (Good luck with that.) And try taking a step or two back to see what role your relationship with Ahmed is playing in the currently unfolding history of your civilization. What you think of, Ingrid, as a private affair – an enchanting intercultural romance between a daughter of Western power and privilege and a son of Third World poverty and pestilence – is, from the perspective of Ahmed and all his brothers in the faith who now find themselves in the land of the infidel, just one front in a broad, long-term (but not really all that long-term) transfer of power from infidel parliaments to Muslim caliphates. By diddling you, in short, Ahmed is doing his own part to defeat, to humiliate, to express control. To put it a bit differently, there are other ways of committing jihad than by flying planes into skyscrapers, shooting up dance clubs, or setting off bombs at concert arenas.

Then again, it’s unfair to blame poor Ingrid for not knowing any of this stuff. After all, ISIS, when it was running its caliphate in Iraq and Syria a decade ago, seized Yazidi and Christian girls and pressed them into sex slavery – and Western authorities who commented on this development, from Barack Obama to David Cameron, made sure to deny that such atrocities had anything whatsoever to do with Islam. Lies, of course. As Spencer documents exhaustively, the endorsement of such conduct by Islamic authorities goes back to the time of Muhammed. A thousand years ago, in Muslim-controlled Spain, “Muslims could buy non-Muslim girls even when the girls were no more than eleven years old, and force them into sex slavery.” (So much for the legend of glamorous, romantic Andalus.)

And in our own time, in one country after another, Muslims who have raped infidel children have cited Islam’s holy books in their defense. One 12-year-old victim testified that her rapist had told her “that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God” (and hence, I might add, putting a distinctly unsavory Islamic twist onto the title of the old hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee”). In cities across Britain, so-called “grooming gangs” of Pakistani men have for decades been systematically raping working-class white girls without a trace of guilt – thanks, Muhammed! – and, in most cases, with absolute impunity, their offenses having been ignored by public officials who were scared of being called racists or of disrupting “social harmony between communities.” (As if a country where men from one “community” rape thousands upon thousands of children from another “community” can be described as enjoying “social harmony”!) In most cases, this fear of stepping on the toes of your daughter’s rapists is at the center of the refusal of Western adults – adults who, in reality, know better – to take responsibility in these matters.

Spencer’s book is, then, in large part, a hair-curling catalogue of horror stories about the Islamic rape of infidels in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and Australia – stories that could wisen up (and perhaps even save the life of) any halfway intelligent Western woman with a lust for Muslim manhood, if only she were willing to listen. It’s also a compendium of cowardice, chockablock with outrageous accounts of police officers and social workers who, when presented with overwhelming evidence of Islamic sex crimes against children, chose to stay silent, as well as of high-level political officials, including Keith Ellison and Marco Rubio, who have heatedly denied any connection between Islam itself and the patently Islamic precepts that permit the sexual abuse of infidels.

The contents of Holy Hell are so sensational that the book can be very hard to put down; but even for a reader who’s steeped in this sort of thing, they can also be so disgusting, so repellent, so vile – and, not least, so utterly maddening – that you may find yourself driven to a seemingly impotent rage. But, as Spencer underscores, none of us is impotent in the face of this civilizational crisis. What it will take to resist the Islamic assault on our most cherished values is the wisdom to recognize just how much is at stake, the courage to speak up about it to everyone possible, and the willingness to gather in numbers to compel one’s leaders to do what’s necessary – however radical – to save the West from its most ancient of enemies.