To understand both Time magazine’s award of its 2015 “person of the year” award to Angelica Merkel for welcoming nearly a million Syrian immigrants to Germany and the pro-Islamic rhetoric and policies of the Obama administration, they must be seen as nearly verbatim implementations of European pronouncements streaming for 40 years from international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. That Barack Obama launched his 2008 presidential campaign with a speech in Berlin, Germany, indicates the degree to which he consistently seeks to align himself with European nations and their Islamic overtures. For example, the EU’s ban on words which might offend Muslims—e.g. jihad; fundamentalists; Islamic terrorism—is scrupulously followed by the American president. So Obama administration spokesmen, following terrorist attacks, consistently refer to violent extremists, ever insisting they have no necessary ties to Islam—which is, of course, a necessarily “peaceful” religion. Indeed, as Attorney-General Loretta Lynch immediately declared, following the slaughter in Riverside, California, we must, above all else, avoid Islamophobia whenever “extremists” indulge in terrorist acts!
Should one want to get inside such thinking he should heed Bat Ye’or’s Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, c. 2011), an expansion and update of her earlier Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Doing so enables one to see that what’s now happening in America has been developing, in what was once the heart of Western Civilization as Muslims implement their “Koranic duty to Islamize the planet,” since the whole earth is Allah’s and his people, the Muslims, are to enforce his rule. Importantly: “Muslims can never be guilty of occupation or oppression because Allah granted them the whole world; jihad returns to them what belongs to them as true believers” (#317). So while “Westerners define terrorism as murderous attacks that blindly target civilian populations or individuals, committed by criminal gangs that act outside of recognized formations and do not respect the laws of war,” Muslims “judge terrorism by its motives, not its methods. Any enterprise aimed at extending Islamic territory is considered ‘resistance.’ Palestinian jihidists, who popularized all modern terrorist methods, are always called ‘resistants’ in official OIC documents” (#930).
Bat Ye’or is an Egypt-born Jewess who has devoted her life to historical research, publishing important treatises illustrating the plight of Jews and Christians under Islam in The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam and The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude. In an enlightening foreword to The Dhimmi, the great French philosopher Jacques Ellul noted that there exists in the secularized West a “current of favorable predispositions to Islam,” notably evident in the many euphemistic discussions of jihad. But by setting forth the historical facts, Bat Ye’or dares contradict such prevailing assumptions. “Historians,” she says, “professionally or economically connected to the Arab-Muslim world,” have misled the public with treatises “which were either tendentious or combined facts with apologetics and fantasy. After World War II, the predominance of a left-wing intelligentsia and the emergence of Arab regimes which were ‘socialist’ or allied to Moscow consolidated an Arabophile revolutionary internationalism” that remains strong is much of the contemporary world.
Jihad, in fact, necessarily characterizes Islam, Ellul says, for it is a sacred duty for the faithful—“Islam’s normal path to expansion.” Almost never the inner “spiritual” combat imagined by some pro-Islamic writers seeking to make the religion palatable to non-Muslims, actual jihad advocates “a real military war of conquest” followed by an iron-handed policy of “dhimmitude”—the brutal reduction of conquered peoples to Islamic law. Indeed the word Islam means submission—not peace! Muslims divide the world into two—and only two—realms: the “domain of Islam” and “the domain of war.” At times there will be tactical concessions and “peaceful” interludes. But ultimately, all devout Muslims are committed to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible. Ellul stresses this “because there is so much talk nowadays of the tolerance and fundamental pacifism of Islam that it is necessary to recall its nature, which is fundamentally warlike!” Writing presciently in 1991 Ellul declared: “Hostage-taking, terrorism . . . the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel) . . . all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional policy of Islam.”
Turning to Bat Ye’or Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate, we find a careful study of the multitudinous documents generated by various congresses operating under the auspices of the UN and EU as well as assorted Muslim-controlled organizations such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) which work to establish an “EU Mediterranean policy.” Illustrating the dictum of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s revolution—“If Islam is not political, it is nothing”—the OIC fuses religion and politics. “Close to the Muslim Brotherhood, it shares its strategic and cultural vision, that of a universal religious community, the Ummah based upon the Koran, the Sunna and the canonical orthodoxy of shari’a” (#1429). It’s supported by 65 countries and represents some 1.3 billion Muslims. The OIC vows “‘to support the restoration of the complete sovereignty and territorial integrity of a member-state under foreign occupation.’ Such a principle could be applied to every jihad waged by Muslims in various countries to expand the reach of Islam and to install shari’a there, whether in Europe, Africa or Asia” (#4156).
The ideas set forth by these organizations rather quickly set the tone and substance of policies that have shaped much of the modern world; providing “the progressive Islamization of the West; they establish the major elements of a new global system of totalitarian social and political domination impervious to Western democratic institutions” (#215). “Europe is a perfect ally, serving the expansionist ambitions of the Ummah, the universal Muslim community” (#902). In the past Jihadist warriors conquered vast swaths of land and subjected the residents who survived to the dhimmitude that slowly destroyed them. Today’s “jihad ideology of world conquest, propelled by billions of petrodollars and facilitated by the complacency of European governments and the rivalry between Western powers, is flourishing in every corner of the world. The driving force of this process is the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which has been dedicated since its creation in 1969 to the elimination of the State of Israel and the eventual implementation of shari’a over the West” (#257).
Accordingly, Muslim supporters (many of them former Nazis, such as Paul Kickoff, the former SS officer who became the head of Interpol, and Kurt Waldheim, who served as the UN Secretary General) especially stressed a “multilateralism” and “multiculturalism” paradoxically combined with an anti-Israel agenda which included the strident anti-Americanism routinely expressed in UN resolutions. Multiculturalism, devoted to the notion that all cultures are equally admirable, served as a rationale recognizing the reality of “Muslim immigrants’ refusal to integrate into Western societies” (#1752) while simultaneously insisting that European nations provide employment, housing, medical care, education, etc. It also mandated that Europeans promote Islamic culture among immigrants and celebrate the utterly spurious “immense contribution of Islamic culture and civilization to Europe’s development and to include it in school and university syllabuses” (#1954).
The strong support of the European Community for Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (leading to, of all things, a Nobel Peace Prize for the murderous Arafat) sharply illustrates the legitimization of modern jihadism. One of the most powerful organizations, The Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC), was formed “in 1974 in response to Palestinian terrorism and the oil boycott . . . injected Eurabia into the very heart of Europe. In effect, to its initial anti-Israeli and anti-American program the association added a new element relating to the internal politics of the EEC: the promotion in European countries of an extensive Muslim Immigration on which would be conferred the same social, political, and national rights as the indigenous populations” (#550). Yet the rights and privileges (e.g. freedom of religious expression, equality under law) Muslims demand for themselves in Europe are precisely those denied non-Muslims in Muslim nations! As Montalembert noted long ago: “When I am weaker, I ask you for liberty because it is your principle; but when I am strong, I take it away from you because it is not my principle.”
Bat Ye’or repeatedly discusses the nation of Israel, pointing out how the very survival of this tiny nation is at risk. She illustrates the deep hostility toward Jews ever-evident in Islamic history, and she shows how this hostility continues in conferences hosted by Arab countries whose publications represent “a monument to hatred and anti-jewish incitement that goes well beyond Nazi literature, with sentences such as, ‘Jews are the enemies of Allah, the enemies of faith and of the worship of Allah’” (#2860). Israel has no right to exist, and all the land must be returned to Palestinians (this explains why an independent Palestinian “state” alongside Israel is unacceptable to Muslims). Pro-Palestinian edicts —fully evident in World Council of Churches publications and United Nations resolutions and elite universities’ “divestment from Israel” posturing—are pervasive.
What’s taking place, Bat Ye’or insists, is the steady break-up of the nation states that once constituted Europe. Without their consent, the historic peoples of France and Germany, Italy and Spain, have lost their identity as the European Union has taken control of the continent and acceded to almost every Islamic demand, especially regarding immigration. Dependent on Middle East oil and hoping to profit from immigrant labor, the EU has provided ways for Muslims to settle in Europe without forfeiting their Islamic culture. Second and third generations insist on the teaching of Arabic and pro-Islamic materials in the schools. Leaders from Muslim communities must be included in the political system and where possible sharia law must be established to settle intra-Muslim issues. Slowly, through demographic growth, Muslims hope to gain power in various places. The Caliphate now effectively dominates a number of European cities. And across the Atlantic, with “President Obama, America is engaging more radically along such a path,” engaging in “outreach” and education, easing “the bureaucratic process in obtaining US visas and avoid embarrassing delays” entering the country (#3527).
Europe’s “globalist and pacifist trends are obvious in the American Democratic administration under President Barack Obama,” which strongly supports UN policies and embraced a booklet titled Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World. “For a European familiar with EU surrender policy, President Obama’s policy had no surprises. Western guilt, apologies, flatteries, tributes, anti-Zionism/antisemitism, open-doors immigration, were all part of the dhimmitude paraphernalia” (#4521). Thus in his 2009 Ramadan address, the president praised “‘Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings’” (#4534). Such statements, Bat Ye’or sadly concludes, reflect a civilization in the process of collapse, a people willing to submit to Islam. Europe lost its bet that money and appeasement would pacify Muslims. And the United States, she fears, is tilting in the same direction.
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