530 of 562 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Dhimmitude of Europe, February 27, 2005
This review is from: Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Paperback)
On a recent trip to Switzerland, I encountered a gigantic mural in the Zurich Airport which depicted a proto-typical Swiss goat and sheep herder leading his flocks over an Alpine mountain pass, meeting a fully cloaked and turbaned Arab camel herder. Below the mural, a caption read, "You never know who you'll meet in Switzerland". This bucolic image struck me as bizarre, not having been personally conditioned to Western Europe's deliberate sociopolitical transformation over the past 30 years. I was reminded of these prescient words, written a quarter century ago by the great historian of Medieval European Islam, Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, who was concerned (even then) that historical and cultural revisionism might precipitate a recurrence of
"...the upheaval carried out on our continent (i.e., Europe) by Islamic penetration more than a thousand years ago...with other methods."
And Dufourcq characterized the original methods which facilitated the violent, chaotic jihad conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and other parts of Europe, indistinguishable in motivation from modern acts of jihad terrorism, like the Madrid bombings on 3/11/04:
"It is not difficult to understand that such expeditions sowed terror. The historian al-Maqqari, who wrote in seventeenth-century Tlemcen in Algeria, explains that the panic created by the Arab horsemen and sailors, at the time of the Muslim expansion in the zones that saw those raids and landings, facilitated the later conquest, if that was decided on: `Allah,' he says, `thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.'"
Within a decade after Dufourcq's death in 1982, the historian Bat Ye'or (from a 1991 French interview, published in English translation in 1994) echoed his intuitive concerns about Europe's re-Islamization, and warned more broadly,
"I do not see serious signs of a Europeanization of Islam anywhere, a move that would be expressed in a relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism...we are light years away from such a development...On the contrary, I think that we are participating in the Islamization of Europe, reflected both in daily occurrences and in our way of thinking...All the racist fanaticism that permeates the Arab countries and Iran has been manifested in Europe in recent years..."
Bat Ye'or is the most informed and insightful contemporary scholar of those unique Islamic institutions which regulate the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims: jihad, and its corollary institution, dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating system of governance imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis) subjugated by jihad. Although she coined the term dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or's characterization of the salient features of this institution is entirely consistent with the views of seminal scholars from the early and mid 20th century, such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar, and Antoine Fattal. Bat Ye'or's seminal contribution to the study of jihad and dhimmitude has been her unparalleled ability to accomplish two related tasks: (I) methodically and compulsively pooling a vast, rich array of primary source data; (II) providing a brilliant synthetic analysis of these data to demonstrate convincingly the transformative power of jihad and dhimmitude, operating as designed, within formerly Christian societies of the Near East and Asia Minor.
Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis portrays Western Europe's recrudescent dhimmitude, chronicled in real time, by our most knowledgeable contemporary scholar of the dhimmi condition. Living as an eyewitness in Geneva - a major European center, with its United Nations, NGOs and other international fora - Bat Ye'or describes in painstaking detail, the ongoing transformation of Europe into "Eurabia," a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world. The use of the term "Eurabia", she notes, was first introduced, triumphally, in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity, Lucien Bitterlein, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d'Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East International (London). The articles and editorials in this publication called for common Euro-Arab positions, at every level - social, economic, and commercial - and were contingent upon the fundamental political condition of European support for the Arab (and non-Arab) Muslim umma's jihad against Israel. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated theorists - they in fact represented policy decisions conceived in conjunction with, and actualized by, European state leaders, their ministers of foreign affairs, and European Parliamentarians.
Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" clearly transcends attempts to analyze the same contemporary phenomena by other pundits. This remarkable book is the product of her serendipitously apposite prior expertise, painstaking new research, brilliant insight, and intellectual courage. Bat Ye'or's analyses have profound implications for Western Europe which may be incapable of altering its Eurabian trajectory; her research may be even more important for the United States if it wishes to avoid Europe's fate:
"Eurabia's destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States...Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people. Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia's contemporary anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent."
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474 of 509 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding, February 26, 2005
This review is from: Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Paperback)
Bat Ye'or is the world's preeminent historian of Islam, jihad and dhimmitude--the reduced state of non-Muslim peoples living under Islamic rule. Here, she has masterfully portrayed the means by which the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) unfolded over the past 30-plus years, and how that process relates to the World War II Axis--as well as the historical, 1,400-year jihad.
"There are three forms of jihad," says Bat Ye'or today, "the military jihad, the economic jihad and the cultural jihad." The EAD between the European Union and the Arab League has been a means of spreading the economic and cultural jihads from the Middle East to Europe.
The process outlined here began with Charles DeGaulle's 1967 pronouncement that henceforward, France would assume a pro-Arab policy. In 1971, France began selling arms to Qaddafi, a step from which the EAD flowed as naturally as it did from DeGaulle's policy initiative.
Another factor, according to Bat Ye'or, was the French desire to regain a leading role in European history; Georges Pompidou furthered the process in October 1973, following the Syrian and Egyptian Yom Kippur war with Israel.
At that time, the Arab world imposed an oil embargo on Denmark, Holland and the U.S., cut oil production and began to raise oil prices by five percent a month. These new global geopolitics terrified the leaders of Germany and France.
Before it agreed to establish the EAD, the Arab League had demanded that Europe establish pro-Arab and anti-American policies in all their united political, cultural and economic endeavors. The oil embargo was the catalyst which finally moved the European Economic Community to action. Now, writes Bat Ye'or, EEC ministers enacted resolutions that met the Arab demands, and which at the same time reversed the true intent of United Nations Resolution 242. Only then was the Arab oil embargo to Europe lifted.
Through this give and take, Europe was mostly on the losing end, for the EAD contained from the start a significant rider to its economic agreements concerning oil. Now, a process unfolded whereby Arab culture, politics and faith were imported into Europe along with a militant Muslim population that refused to assimilate into European culture. Arab culture did not change, while European universities and politics changed radically.
Bat Ye'or also shows how the EAD renewed and fostered Europe's Axis ties to the Middle East: In the late 1940s and 1950s war criminals fled Europe to Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations. Now, Axis links to Europe were rekindled through the Middle Eastern policies imported into Europe. The new Europe was built on a unified anti-Israel and anti-American policy.
As Bat Ye'or also suggests, America is the last frontier, and the American people should take it as their duty to avoid Europe's fate.
Read this book for the depressing details.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
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