_________________________End of
Story___________________________
| THINK-ISRAEL |
| HOME | March-April 2010 Featured Stories | Background Information | News On The Web |
|
Bat Ye'or spoke at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at an international conference on Antisemitism, multiculturalism, and ethnic identity. Her talk was entitled "From Europe to Eurabia," and it takes on a special urgency today in light of the Geert Wilders trial. [See Fjordman's article on the implications of the Wilders trial here.] Pamela Geller has the full transcript of Bat Yeor's speech on the Atlas Shrugged website. A video made during her speech is available here. [In addition, a 3-part playlist is available on youtube.com. Speeches by her and others on this topic are to be found in the KitmanTV remarkable collection of documentaries. Participant speeches from the Symposium are available here.] Here are some highlights from her speech. |
Eurabia is not Europe, it is its enemy. It does not represent the majority of Europeans nor all its politicians. When I speak of Eurabia I refer to an ideology, a strategy, a policy and a culture whose nerve-centre and way of working are exemplified by the Anna Lindh Foundation in Alexandria, linked to the Swedish Consulate. At the origin of this vision in the 1960s, one can identify Charles de Gaulle and Haj Amin al-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem, whom de Gaulle saved from the Nuremberg trial in 1946. Implemented after the Yom Kippur War, this view promoted an alliance between the European Community and the Arab world - operative at all levels of the European Community, regionally and internationally, and linked with the European Common Foreign and Security Policy. It aimed to create a strategic Euro-Arab pole hostile to Israel, supporting Arafat and the PLO, and opposed to America. Without much difficulty, France was able to carry along the rest of Europe into this programme from 1973, after the Arab oil embargo.
[...]
In the 1970s the EC and the Arab League went into this association with different but converging aims. Antisemitism and anti-Americanism always existed amongst the European Left-wing parties, the Communists, the Nazi and Fascist movements, and this provided Arab propaganda with a favourable ground for development. Europe believed that, thereby, it had a cheap solution to protect itself from Arab terrorism; for assuring its energy supplies; dominating Arab markets; and turning Arab jihadists against Israel and the USA by adopting a pro-Arafat stance, as well as sponsoring Palestine and hence maintaining the conflict's purulence by internationalising the Palestinian cause until Israel would wither away under a heap of infamy. The twinning of Judeophobia and anti-Americanism fitted well into the strategy of the Euro-Arab alliance and is one of its pillars. The other pillar is the war against Israel which in fact is nothing but a smoke-screen hiding the Islamization of Christian theology and the subversion of Western values.
From their point of view, the countries of the Arab League and the Islamic Conference saw in this alliance with Europe the means to separate Europe from America; to divide and weaken the Western camp; to destroy Israel; to achieve technological parity with Europe; and, through the Mediterranean Partnership, to set up a vast Euro-Arab demographic, political, economic and cultural zone. In this way, with multiculturalism and immigration, Islam and Arab culture could be introduced as a force toward the Islamization on the European continent. Europe would thereby - through the combined effects of demographics, terrorist pressure and oil - become a continent, vassal of world Islam.
Multiculturalism is in fact a crucial dimension of the Euro-Arab strategic alliance. Since 1975 the texts of Euro-Arab meetings and of the EU mention the agreements linking Europe to the Arab world; listing the terms of Arab and Islamic immigration to Europe; the non-integration of immigrants and the maintenance of their ties with their homelands; the establishment of cultural and political Muslim centres in European cities; and the handling of school-teaching, publications, and media. For the most recent period one can read the report of the European commission for culture, science and education presented to the European Parliamentary Assembly by Luis Maria de Puig from the Spanish socialist group (November 2002).
It is within the context of multiculturalism that one must place the cultural jihad with its Judeophobic, anti-American and anti-Western character. Multiculturalism thus becomes the instrument for the subversion of Western thought, aimed at imposing on it Islamic historical and theological thinking such as, for example, the negation of the historical jihad - interpreted as a defensive rather than aggressive war - the denial of dhimmitude; or the justification of Islamic terrorism - based on a victimological perception of Muslims, the eternal victims of the Christian West and, today, of Israel, both bonded together in an essentialist vision of evil.
[...]
Allow me to go a little further into the themes of this cultural jihad within multiculturalism. Through the myth of Andalusia, Islam tries to prove its historical, cultural and demographical legitimacy in Europe. Several European leaders have affirmed that Islam is at home in Europe and that it is at the root of European culture. Thus, it can legitimately impose itself, invoking multiculturalism in the education system - as the Obin Report pointed out for France (2004) - and in the European legal and cultural spheres with the introduction of shari'a principles, as well as of Islamic customs and political ethics, under the mantle of multiculturalism.
For Muslim leaders, multiculturalism in Europe was a fundamental requirement in the Euro-Arab agreements governing immigration, for it allows Muslim immigrants to not integrate and to protect them "from the aberrations, the mores and thinking of non-Muslims" - as called for by Mohammed al-Tohami at the second Islamic Conference, at Lahore in February 1974. Multiculturalism encourages the coexistence of parallel communities that will never integrate, thus replicating the Ottoman millets or the conditions of Islamic colonization after its conquest of non-Muslim peoples. Multiculturalism and nationalism are polar concepts. The modern fight against European nationalisms within the inter-European scenes - for the integration of Europe - allowed millions of Muslim immigrants to import their culture to Europe and establish it on an equal footing, using two fundamental arguments: the Andalusian myth and an Islamic origin of European culture.
As far as Israel is concerned the purpose of the cultural jihad waged in Western academia is to replace Israel by Palestine on the cultural and theological levels. It develops around a few main themes: the non-existence of Judeo-Christianity; the Islamization of Christian theology through the Muslim Jesus; the return to a Christian replacement theology whereby Palestine replaces Israel; the crucifixion of Palestine by an Israel born in blood and sin; the transfer of Jewish history to the Palestinians; and the Nazification of Israel.
[...]
To conclude, I would say that the new antisemitism is situated at the geostrategic level in the Euro-Arab war against Israel. Its themes belong to traditional European Judeophobia, but integrated into the context and ideology of Islamic jihad. That is why the new Judeophobia bears within it the destruction of the West, of its institutions, its culture and its soul.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Several of the readers' comments on Jihad Watch made to this articles add information.
|
tanstaafl | February 3, 2010 12:04 PM "Through the myth of Andalusia, Islam tries to prove its historical, cultural and demographical legitimacy in Europe. Several European leaders have affirmed that Islam is at home in Europe and that it is at the root of European culture." What are these people smoking? Islam is at odds with the heart of European thought. There is no freedom in Islam. None. Islam certainly has common cause with despotism and tyranny, but those qualities are hardly European inventions. |
|
Hugh | February 3, 2010 12:33 PM Islam's war on Western Christendom,the unrelenting raids of Muslim marauders up and down the coasts of Europe, mostly in the Mediterranean but also as far north as Ireland and, in one case, Iceland, killing some, seizing others and bringing them back to be enslaved (for one Cornwall example, read Giles Milton on Thomas Pellow), and the Muslim privateers who attacked Christian shipping in the Mediterranean for centuries, and the attempts in both West (the Iberian Peninsula, France up to Poitiers) and East (the repeated attempts by the Ottomans to take Vienna -- they did take much of Hungary, as well as Rumania, and the Balkans, and in that sense, the sense of being a conqueror and in no other sense, were "part of Europe." What Europe "owes" culturally to Islam is practically nothing, though it is true that Arabic-speaking translators (almost none of them Muslims, chiefly in Baghdad and then in Cordoba) did translate some Greek texts, though the amount (not "Aristotle" but one or two works by Aristotle) and significance (these works had practically no effect on Islam itself, which remained impervious to such much) have been much exaggerated. Save in one sense. When the Seljuk, and then the Osmanli Turks, conquered Anatolia and then, on May 29, 1453, Constantinople, they sent successive waves of Greek scholars, with their manuscripts, fleeing the Muslim invaders, and they fled to Italy with their learning and their manuscripts, and that flight turned into what used to be called the Revival of Learning, that is part of the Rediscovery of Classical Antiquity, and thus to the Renaissance (let's stick with the nomenclature of an earlier and more confident day, when the Renaissance was called the Renaissance instead of being subsumed, un-eurocentrically, under the dry and colorless phrase -- Burckhardt would not be pleased nor, come to think of it, Ernst Kristeller or Nicolai Rubinstein or Abby Warburg or...well, you get the point -- of "the Early Modern Period"). Yes, the Islamic invasion and destruction of the Byzantine Empire did, in that sense, "enrich Europe." In the same way, Adolf Hitler "enriched" the United States ofr America by sendiong all those Jewish physiciats and physiologists and art historians fleeing hither, but somehow the phrase "Adolf Hitler greatly enriched American cultural life" rings...well, just a little off, don't you think? Of course let's also give Islam credit for the discovery of the New World, la scoperta dell'America. Not in the sense that Muslims accompanied Columbus -- they did not, though a half-dozen Jews may have been in his crew (see the attempt, a few years ago, by a State Department spokesman, to endorese the Muslim claim of Muslims coming along with Columbus). Why do they deserve credit? Oh, because if the Ottoman Turks had not conquered Constantinople in 1453, and if the Muslims had not subsequently shut off all the trade routes to the East to the Infidels of Europe, there would not have been the impulse to find another route to the East, to the Indies and Cathay. So again, Islamic conquest helps explain Columbus' voyage, and the backing given it. But surely no one would wish to sum that connection with Islam up as "Muslims responsible for the discovery of the New World." That's about it. Until today, and possibly today, if the people of Europe, the indigenous people of Europe, whose art, science, and freedoms are unsurpassed and unsurpassable, can come to their senses in time, it may be that the meaning, and the menace, of Islam will lead them up and out of their current confusion and decadence. And the same, mutatis mutandis (which does not mean, contrary to rumor, "change your underpants"), could apply to this benighted but still lovable country. |
|
gravenimage | February 3, 2010 3:35 PM ...Europe believed that, thereby, it had a cheap solution to protect itself from Arab terrorism; for assuring its energy supplies; dominating Arab markets; and turning Arab jihadists against Israel and the USA |
|
sheik yer'mami | February 4, 2010 1:31 AM Filippo sez: " European elites endorse the same solution that is endorsed by the US, Canada, and most other countries that can be considered as pro Israel: two states living side by side within the pre 1967 borders." Neither can ever happen. The Arabs/Muslims cannot, will not and have no intention to ever coexist with Israel/Jews who are in control of their own land and destiny amidst them. Land once conquered by Islam belongs to the soldiers of Allah forever. The existence of Israel and Jews amongst them proves the Koran wrong and Islamic superiority false. The Arabs will never accept this. I don't know where you buy your delusions and I don't care about the lip-service of EUrabian 'leaders' re a 'two state solution'- which will never happen, I only care about Israel. You, Filippo, better wake up to the sad reality of Islam, which commands permanent warfare and subjugation of infidels along with genocide on Jews, until Allah rules the world. If you don't understand this, you don't understand anything.... |
|
dumbledoresarmy replied to comment from sheik yer'mami | February 4, 2010 3:08 AM I would add, too, that the fact that there are any signs of resistance appearing, in Europe, to Islamisation; that there is Pax Europa organisation endorsed by Susanne Zeller-Hirzel, sole survivor of the White Rose society that defied the Nazis; that Wilders has stepped forward; that others appear to be finding their voices, that there was a referendum about minarets in Switzerland, is not disproof at all of the reality and seriousness of Bat Yeor's warnings and the warnings of others before her, such as Jacques Ellul (d. 1994) and Oriana Fallaci, but rather, is happening *because* of Bat Yeor, and those others. To diagnose an illness is, sometimes, to shock the patient into a change of behaviour that may, just possibly, change the course of the illness. The prophets (except for Jonah!) are usually only too happy to be proven wrong, if their warnings are heeded and ruin is averted. |
Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and
Christians in the context of jihad ideology and sharia law. Recent
books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press.
Robert Spencer is Director of Jihad Watch. This article is archived at
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/02/bat-yeor-europe.html
| HOME | March-April 2010 Featured Stories | Background Information | News On The Web |