The Arabization of Europe: Book Review

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis

By Bat Ye′or

Fairleigh Dickinson University

322pp., $23.95

How is it that ten percent of France is Muslim, 15% of Denmark is Muslim and close to half of the births in the next generation will be Muslim? Imperious mosques and lawless Muslim neighborhoods dot the landscape of major European cities. And Spain willingly and meekly chose to acknowledge its Islamic past, and that pro-Arab opinion is rampant and anti-Israeli sentiment vitriolic.

European appeasement apparently did not end in Munich in 1938.

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye′or is a definitive work for the early 21st century. Its very title and subtitle brim with insight and controversy: that Europe is merging with Arabism and, with Arabia, constitutes a bellicose and anti-democratic force.

In her earlier books, Bat Ye′or surveyed, documented and exposed the phenomenon of Jewish and Christian dhimmi subjugation under Islam in the lands of the Middle East and beyond. This aspect of Muslim/non-Muslim relations, largely concealed by intent and ignorance, evoked interest and debate.

Now this new work, 270 pages accompanied by eight documentary appendices, extends the examination of dhimmitude into the heart of Europe itself.

Central to this book is a sweeping political conception and moral indictment. The evolving ties between Europe and Muslim North Africa/Arab Middle East, within the nexus of bureaucratic machinations in Brussels and various European capitals, have transformed Europe into an appendix of the Arab-Muslim world.

Europe, manifesting anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and an anti-Israel bias, has succumbed to Arab policy dictates. The former European Commission and now the EU has opened its media, schools and parliaments to singularly Arab views, whereby a Euro-Mediterranean partnership provides the political umbrella for dhimmitude in Europe.

The former European imperialism in Muslim lands has been replaced by Muslim colonization and political domination of Europe. A critical sign of the latter development was Europe′s cultivation of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization beginning in the 1970s, and its demonization of Israel′s existence and policies as the Jewish state faced savage Palestinian warfare.

For Bat Ye′or, Islamic jihad denies dhimmis their dignity and right to self-defense. A mental process evolves with the internalization of self-degradation by the dhimmi victims who, over time, deny themselves the right to even criticize Islam and Muslim policies. Instead, the dhimmis – European countries like France – symbolically pay the poll tax (jizya) in the currency of investments in the Arab world, diplomatic support for the Arab world, and by turning a blind eye to Islamic and Palestinian terrorism. In return for which Europe expects to be rewarded with security, business contracts and oil, while spared the wrath of Islam.

The newest development is that Christians are humiliated and physically harmed not only in Muslim lands, as in Iraq and Egypt, but also in their own European countries. Meanwhile, the persistent abuse by Palestinian Muslims of Christians in Bethlehem has aroused neither moral protest nor political intervention from Europe.

Of course, Muslim terror is responsible for 9/11, the Bali bombing in Indonesia in 2002, and the 2004 Madrid train explosions. In March 2003, Europe demonized President Bush for the war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, while the Euro-Med Report of the same year called the southern Mediterranean zone part of "Europe′s space."

A profound psychological change has swept Europe. With the Palestinization of Jesus, Christianity is being Islamicized. European history is being sterilized by propagating the idyllic "Andalusian myth" of ancient Islamic tolerance and Muslim-Christian symbiosis in the Middle Ages. European politics have been hijacked by the Arabs, who have successfully bound a tired and battered continent to the Islamic jihad against Israel.

Many examples exist of Muslim conquest, colonization and conversion, culminating in the historical transformation of countries and peoples into lands of dar al-Islam. Christian Egypt became Muslim-Arab Misr; Zoroastrian Persia became Muslim Iran; Hellenic Christian Anatolia was Turkified and Islamicized. Byzantine Constantinople became Ottoman Istanbul. Marseille is Maghrebized, and the days of jihad are far from over.

North Africa and the Arab countries were to be merged with Europe, yet Europe itself was instead submerged by the Arab-Muslim world.

Consistent with this political and cultural trend was the March 2005 London Conference at which, under the political orchestration of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the post-Arafat Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was confronted with no European demands to dismantle the Palestinian terrorist organizations, though he was awarded millions of dollars.

For Israel, considered by a recent European survey to be the greatest threat to world peace, salvation will not come from the Old World, and perhaps not from the new one, either. Indeed, Europe′s support for Arab "peace" is equated with Israel′s extinction, as Bat Ye′or points out. Her book is a must read, certainly for Israelis who want to be apprised of the broader motives and mechanisms of European interest in the Arab-Israeli "peace process."

The writer lectures on the Middle East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.