Arafat’s Legacy for Europe

On October 29, 2004, just before the U.S. presidential election, Osama bin Laden delivered a taped speech that confirmed the jihadist strategy. His declaration “Any US state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security," epitomizes the Palestinian terror threat to Europe in the 1970s. It is precisely this threat that has engineered a Euro-Arab and Palestinian solidarity. It has fueled the frantic European devotion to Arafat and Europe’s neurotic insistence that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the prime danger to its own security and world peace. This fear motivates the European countries’ adamant refusal to recognize Palestinian terrorism and to fight it. Instead, Europeans, in the tradition of dhimmitude, purchased their security by devising an alliance with the Arab League and the PLO against Israel.

With George Bush’s re-election, Tony Blair is under ever stronger pressure from his own Labor party and from a traumatized Europe eager to get at Israel as a quid pro quo for the war in Iraq, while promising a deceitful Euro-American rapprochement. Like it or not, Americans must face a new reality: Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian secular and free civilization to a continent imbibed by a new political and religious cult: Palestinianism. This cult is vital for Europe’s security; it permeates the culture, academia, universities, the churches, the unions, the media, even the fashion industry, and all aspects of political life. For over thirty years, it has been injected in every sector of European society by the European Commission's supra-national power and unifying policy. The European Commission is the executive body that advises, directs, influences and monitors the same unique agenda, the same ideology, the same political correctness over all the European populations. It strives to control Europe’s foreign policy, and model Europe as a rival to America. This anti-American lust for power can only be implemented through the building of an idealized “Islamo-Christian Civilization,” the dawn of a messianic universal peace whose blessing over the whole world is impeded by Zionism and Israel. Islamic assistance is essential for building this European anti-American super-power, initially via Palestinianism, the ideology which foments Israel's elimination.

Palestinianism condenses jihadist values. It promotes the destruction of Israel, the denial of Hebrew biblical history and hence Christianity. It preaches Islamic replacement theology and the Arabization and Islamization of the Holy Land’s biblical archeology. Arafat, its leader, was the bin Laden of a seduced Europe, which applauded his policy of spectacular terrorism. It is Arafat who initiated in 1968 air piracy against Jews, hostage ransoming, suicide bombings, random killings of civilians and the destruction of urban areas as in Lebanon. In short, the current global terror campaign was successfully introduced first by Arafat against Jews and Israelis, as well as Lebanese Christians.

More than Hitler before him, Arafat became the most popular hero in Europe, cradle of Palestinianism, concocted by the second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples (Cairo, 25-26 January 1969), as an international strategic war against Israel, and conducted through today. The Conference’s Sponsoring Committee of 54 members comprised 46 influential European intellectuals and politicians. Palestinianism as an ideology bringing together Europe and the Arab countries on the ashes of Israel was conceived and planned in Europe with unofficial Gaullist benediction, and Arafat was its embodiment.

France’s love affair with Arafat became a European state policy after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, although some European leaders had already been convinced of Arafat’s “just cause” by earlier PLO air piracy and terrorist murders (December 1971 London; in 1972 Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Lod, and in February 1973, Khartoum). Such terrorist achievements brought the opening in European capitals of PLO offices, following the French example in 1975. The unshakable European-Arafat alliance was sealed by the Venice Declaration (1980) when Arafat was recognized as leader of the PLO, the only representative of the Palestinian people, and Israel was summoned by the European Community to negotiate only with him.

For years the European countries have joined the 56 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to promote Palestinianism in the international bodies as a world warfare against Israel waged by its leader Arafat whom they supported. This war was officially stated at the 1980 Fez Islamic Conference and at the Amman Arab Summit, soon after the Venice Declaration. It was re-emphasized at the Mecca-Taif Islamic Summit (January 1981). Those august bodies showered thanks on the Vatican and the World Council of Churches for their invaluable support to Palestinianism. The red-green alliance was then strengthened in the Amman Arab Summit Declaration (November 1980). In this marriage the Muslim trend, confident in its divine mission and fed by unlimited funds, overwhelmed its faithless, leftist European partner. The latter, weakened by Communism’s collapse, is now rejuvenated as the antisemitic, anti-Christian, and anti-American conveyor of Islamization in Europe.

The cohorts of European foreign ministers rushing to Arafat’s commemoration ceremony in Cairo, signals that Palestinianism – Europe’s war against Israel – will not die with Arafat, having been generated from Europe’s most persistent hate impulse. Had it not existed, peace would have prevailed. But peace was never the goal. The goal was Israel’s suffering, bleeding, isolation, demonization, vilification and robbery of its identity and history through Palestinianism.

This is why European chief diplomats hastened to laud Arafat, a terrorist whose protection they bought with billions of euros, much of which disappeared through corruption. The glorification of such a war-criminal, who indulged in the massacres of thousand of Israelis and others innocent civilians, insults basic human ethics and the memory of his countless victims, Jews and non-Jews alike. Already the Euro-Arab lobby of the powerful replacement theology models Arafat as a Moses, or even Jesus, casting the Arafatian cult into the Palestinian Liberation Theology. After the failure of the Communist, Nazi, and fascist ideologies in blood and mass massacres, Europe is left with Palestinianism, which she has concocted as a substitute.

But now Europe wants to attract America into its own decay and delusion. The trans-Atlantic rapprochement can go two ways: America could draw nearer to Europe’s cult of Palestinianism, which is tantamount to submitting to bin Laden, the Arafat of America. Or the U.S. could bring Europe to her side. This later option is practically impossible today. Many Eurabian politicians have sternly predicted that the gap will not narrow. Not only social and demographic factors hinder this possibility, but Eurabian political leaders oppose it as they intend to maintain and cherish Arafat's iconic legacy. Moreover, Islamist terror from within and without is overwhelming Europe. Today it is not uncommon to hear Europeans express their disgust for Europe and their wish to emigrate. Europe, they say, is dead and has no future. They flee this Islamic-Christian dhimmi civilization where the native non-Muslims are deprived of their basic human rights under the yet unofficial shari’a rule that recognizes conditional peaceful co-existence only to dhimmis respectful of Islam. Going Europe’s way means a U.S. compliance to bin Laden and the denial of Islamist global terrorism, whose creator and promoter was Arafat, Europe’s hero and the demonic agent of its downfall.

Bat Ye'or is author of Islam and Dhimmitude. Where Civilizations Collide. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). For a full analysis of the above thesis, see her forthcoming book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, January 2005, 384pp.)

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