Europe is a lost cause. Is US next?
At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed
poised to overrun Christian Europe!
and now...Europe is in a new phase of a very old war
The 1978 US and European covert operations and policies to overthrow Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalistic Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini have proven to have catastrophic consequences for the free world. Today in Europe, Israel is a demonized word, a confiscated reality. European governments created an anti-Semitic culture in order to integrate the Muslim immigration, but they have absorbed the values of a Jihadist society. This is why Europe is intellectually and spiritually confused and disoriented. " You cannot ally with Jihadist forces that want to destroy you intellectually, spiritually and politically, without being destroyed, and this is what is happening"
In a wide ranging interview with Islamic scholar Bat Ye'or comes a frank discussion of Eurabia: what it is, and what it means for Americans. Interview by Alyssa A. Lappen
In her new book, Eurabia: The EuroArab Axis, Bat Ye'or takes a sweeping view of history, not the one that most of us consider, just past the ends of our noses. The world's preeminent historian of two unique Islamic institutions, Jihad and dhimmitude—the latter, the humiliated, precarious state of non-Muslim peoples living under Islamic rule Bat Ye'or has masterfully portrayed the means by which the Euro-Arab Dialogue unfolded over the past 30 plus years. 'There are three forms of Jihad,' she says today, 'the military Jihad, the economic Jihad and the cultural Jihad.' The EAD between the European Community and the Arab League has been a means of spreading the economic and cultural Jihad from the Middle East to Europe.
Q. Then why do you say the whole thing is crumbling. Clearly they are winning.
A. There is so much hatred now in Europe, so many lies, so much confusion, that people don't know where they are going. They don't understand what is happening. They don't understand why they have to hate America, Israel and why they have to hate themselves. They have no view of the future except the economic extension of the EU. Our leaders commend that every effort should be made to integrate the foreign immigrants. It is not the foreigners that have to adapt in a country they have chosen to come. Foreigners were given the right to immigrate with their own culture. So they have imported the seeds of the culture of dhimmitude into Europe. This is their culture, this is the type of relationship they had with Jews and Christians and they brought it with them. This was the culture in which they were educated, and this is what creates so much confusion in Europe.
Q. is Europe completely lost and nothing can be done?
A. I don't see a solution. Europeans are not reproducing. Soon, the 60 and 70 year olds will die. And there are no Europeans to replace them. Suddenly, millions of Europeans won't be there any more. And against that loss is a mounting immigrant population, which refuses totally to integrate into a society many hate. In some schools, the new generation rejects the curriculum, under the pretext that it is not an Islamic history or culture, or that it is a Judeo—Christian perspective. In a few years they will be adults and have political power. Laws and institutions will change, already there are pressures in schools and hospitals for sex segregation. Polygamy is unofficially tolerated.
Q. So 15 million Arab Muslims out of 350 million can do this? Change an entire continent? It's only 15 million.
A. No, it is over 20 million, but in fact you don't know their number, because it is impossible in some countries to take a census on a religious basis, and anyway there are always new immigrant waves, this is without counting the clandestine ones, those who come without papers.
Q. So it could be 50 million.
A. I don't know, no one knows. It is not so much the number that counts, it is the will to take the power, and to dominate. At the beginning of each [historical Islamic] conquest, the Muslims were a very small minority. But this colonizing minority became masters over overwhelming Christian majorities.
Q. Let's talk about the universities because the same thing is beginning to happen in the U.S. We have professors coming from the Middle East, spouting anti-Israeli, anti-American propaganda, funded by the Saudis, and it is getting very difficult to open your mouth in the universities.
A. Palestinianism started in the universities in Europe in the late 1960s. The whole Left was pro-Palestinian because the Soviets supported them and gave them training camps and arms to conduct their terrorist activities. The agreements between the European and Arab leaders included in the Euro-Arab Dialogue, mention that the Arabic civilization and Middle Eastern subjects should be taught in European universities by Arabs from the Arab countries. The Arab perspective of history whereby Jihad was a peaceful conquest not really even a conquest but a just war against unbelief, was imported into European universities. The idealized Muslim vision of history, and Islam's conception of tolerance towards infidels entered into the educational system. This partial vision exists also here on campuses.
Q. I think it is, and you starting to see these Islamic centers, with Middle Eastern professors coming.
A. [Philosopher and theologian] Jacques Ellul was totally opposed to what he called 'the subversion of Western culture, but his views caused him to be marginalized by the Protestant church, the university, and the press. Many people shared his opinion, but they were silenced by the network of the Euro-Arab Dialogue supported by the government's policy and the powerful European Commission. Through the network of the EAD the Muslim policy and culture infiltrated into the highest political and cultural levels in European countries members of the EC. This is why it succeeded so well.
Q. Look, you could see something similar happen here, with the President's nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace. Daniel Pipes as you know was nominated to that, but there was a huge war against his nomination, and finally, the President appointed him by executive order during a summer recess. But there are Islamists seeping into that institution and elsewhere into the upper echelons of government. What can Americans do?
A. The history of Jihad must be taught according to the Western perspective. And the same for dhimmitude, its development and consequences. This is extremely important, to prevent a return to the condition of dhimmitude. Unfortunately, an institute to study the history of Jihad and dhimmitude worldwide has not been established.
Q. So you think an institute would help.
A. Of course. In Europe, this history has been totally erased, in order to please the Muslim world. The Islamic view is taught whereby conquests were achieved through peaceful means, with tolerance, which is the contrary to the reality. In Europe, the Muslim groups always accuse the West, and take a tack that makes them victims and victimized. All evil is projected on the West and on Israel, and this vision gives the West a feeling of guilt towards Arabs. In fact, what Arabs have done with the help of European intellectuals engaged in the Euro-Arab Dialogue is to project the Jewish history of victimhood onto the Arabs, in order to neutralize the West. They have usurped the history of another people to create guilt among Western countries and paralyze them. This process has eliminated the whole history of Jihad. We see that Europeans are incapable of understanding their past, or even the current situation. This work was begun by Edward Said who promoted European guilt toward the Arabs and Muslim people. He was totally supported by high level governmental bodies and European universities. Otherwise he would not have achieved such fame, his position being based on historical ignorance and anti-Western racism.
Q. Could you briefly explain the history of Jihad and dhimmitude.
A. The history of Jihad started in the 7th century with the Islamic religion and the conquests of Arabia by the followers of Mohamed. Arabia was inhabited by a pagan majority, but there were also a great number of Christians and Jewish peasants and artisans who cultivated the oases there. Mohamed started his war against the pagans in Arabia, who opposed his beliefs. He fled to Medina, where Jewish tribes lived. On their refusal to convert to his belief, he attacked them and either expelled them or as in the case of the Qurayza tribe, he executed all the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Then Mohamed continued his war to impose Islam on the whole of Arabia. Finally, just before he died, he had converted the whole of Arabia to his religion. Now Mohamed's tactic was in fact patterned on the normal means of Bedouin war. But the founders of Islamic law established a whole school, a jurisdictional process by which they made this warfare into a sacred obligation to conduct a worldwide war against the realm of unbelief. This ideology inspired from the life of Mohamed, either true or invented, based on Koran, the hadith and the biographies of the Prophet, became the sacred duties of Jihad in order to Islamize the world. Now the ideology and laws of Jihad represent a system founded on Islamic theological belief.
This is how Jihad developed. Since then, the Arab armies were bent on always conquering more territories in order to expand the rule of the Koran over the earth. They conquered all the Christians lands west of Arabia in the Middle East. They invaded Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Maghreb. These lands inhabited by Jews and Christians, were Islamized through different procedures. Arab conquests expanded to Iberia (Spain) in Europe, Portugal and up to France and Switzerland and were stopped in Poitiers in the 8th century. In the East, the Muslim armies conquered Persia, Armenia and part of the Byzantine empire, which was later totally dominated by the Turkish tribes converted to Islam. Then, further East, Muslim power expanded in Afghanistan to the Indus. From the 11th century, there was a second wave of Islamization, which concentrated on Europe. Under the Ottomans it advanced to the borders of Poland and Hungary and occupied the whole of Eastern European countries who became part of the Muslim empire. The Ottomans were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
All these lands were, at the beginning, populated by non-Muslim people. At this time, these lands had armies and kings. The kings were deposed and the armies disbanded, but the population stayed in the cities and the countryside. So once a land has been Islamized, the whole colonization process took place. These processes were based on legal texts written by Arab theologians in the 8th and 9th centuries. The system of dhimmitude is congenial with Muslim colonization. Non-Muslim majorities were either totally eliminated or survived as small minorities, heirs of the big civilizations that they represented before the conquest. The process of dhimmitude, is of course linked to Jihad.
Q. Let's talk about the economic portion of this war.
A. Well, first of all, terrorism destroys civilized life and the prevention of terrorism is very expensive. Now with the weapons of mass destruction it is possible to kill thousands of people at once and control a population by terrorism. It happened in Spain. Zapatero, the President of the Spanish government, like a dhimmi, pulled the Spanish army from Iraq and went to Morocco to proclaim his love for Morocco and Islam. He said he would not deal with terrorism through arms, but by giving aid. Paying money for your security means ransoming. This is the policy of Europe.
Q. It is the policy of the U.S. also. We have given $50 billion to Egypt, and they hate us. And a few hundred billion to all the other Arab countries, probably, so it dwarfs any aid to Israel. Is this a bad thing?
A. It is bad policy to feed those who hate you. The help that is given must be appreciated, because it is paid through the work of other people. Government should not squander the money of the European taxpayers, who are deprived of many services to which they are entitled for their work. The European Union has paid billions to Arafat during the intifada. The more the Palestinian terrorists killed Israelis, the more money they received. To the Arabs, this is encouragement to continue.
Q. It seems that the U.S. government must be made aware that an economic Jihad is also a means to wage war.
A. Yes, Jihad takes different forms. The military Jihad is waged through terrorism. The cultural Jihad is done in the universities through the subversion of western values. It developed under the aegis of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The economic Jihad used the oil boycott. Arab countries rely heavily on oil exports. Their economy is very dependent on Western products. It is important to reduce our dependency on the Arab countries' oil, in order to free ourselves from the economic Jihad.
Q. Does corruption of officials that go with the Jihad. Do you see any of that in the U.S.?
A. Well, in the U.S. you have a different system, you have a much stronger democracy. The people can control the policy of the government. It is under strong scrutiny. But this is not so in Europe. The policy of Europe is conducted at the top level, and this escaped the people's scrutiny. They do not understand what is happening. And the whole foreign policy of the Euro-Arab Dialogue was conducted by the European Community, the European Counsel of Ministers, the European Parliament and the European Commission, which are different bodies than each European country government.
Q. Right, but in the U.S. we also have the World Bank, the North American Free Trade Agreement which is going to be expanded to South America, and I presume that will have links to the EU and those things are not followed here, either.
A. We live in a global world, and international organizations develop. Americans should be aware of these developments and be diffident of the United Nations, which is an extremely corrupted organization, which works according to different standards. Here, it must be clearly stated that the Arab Muslim countries, 56 countries, and the Palestinian Authority, which will become a state soon, probably, operate according to Koranic justice, which is not what we consider justice. It is based on the superiority of Islam over non-Muslim countries, it justifies Jihad and Jihadists' values. Those whom we call terrorists, are called freedom fighters, because fighting against non-Muslims countries is a 'just war'. This is why the Palestinians have a 'just cause' and conduct a 'just war.' The same in Darfur, in Sudan. As long as we have different values, it will be difficult to agree on what is just. For Muslim countries, Sharia rules take precedence over any other rules, especially over man-made rules. They consider Western rules inferior to their God given rules. For this reason, America is right to refuse to participate in the International Court of Justice, which is dominated by Islamic and European nations, both abiding to the Islamic principles of justice.
