Bat Ye’or and the Eurabia Thesis

Bat Ye’or is the most important scholarly proponent of the Eurabia thesis. She is the thinker behind Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan (2006) and Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept (2006). She has also exercised considerable influence on many of the most important authors warning us about the Islamization of Europe, including Daniel Pipes, Niall Ferguson, Robert Spencer, and Bernard Lewis. The major work of Bat Ye’or is Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005/2011), and this is the subject of this essay for the Council of European Canadians.

Bringing Islam into Europe

In this book she explains that the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) was established by the European Economic Community (EEC) as a response to the oil embargo of 1973 and was centered on a multilateral economic forum that aimed to strengthen economic and cultural co-operation between the Nine of the EEC and the twenty Arab League states. The EEC perceived that such cooperation would bring about economic benefits for Europe from “expanded oil, commercial, and industrial markets”, which included the “massive sales of arms, as well as of industrial and nuclear equipment” [i].

The EEC also founded the European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC) with the aim of cultivating cultural, economic, and political cooperation between Europe and the Arab-Muslim world. A PAEAC meeting in Strasbourg, June 1975, recognised the “historical contribution of Arab culture to European development” and discussed “the contribution that the European countries can still expect from Arab culture, notably in the area of human values”. The provision of the “means”, created by the Arab countries, to enable Arab immigrants “to participate in Arab cultural and religious life” in their respective European host countries was also deliberated, and included the propagation of Islam and the Arab culture throughout Europe [ii].

To a large extent these discussions were stimulated by a study on the conditions of Euro-Arab cooperation submitted to and accepted by the PAEAC by Belgian member, Tilj Declercq. He wrote that “[a] medium and long term policy must henceforth be formulated in order to bring about economic cooperation through a combination of Arab manpower reserves and raw materials, and European technology and ‘management'”.

In fact, according to Ye’or, ever since the first General Commission meeting in Luxembourg (1976) “every EAD meeting passed resolutions in support of Arab immigration, labor, and employment in Europe”, resolutions that were reaffirmed in subsequent meetings [iii].

Several immigration policies were also enacted by the EEC, like the 1978 Damascus Declaration, which gave immigrants the right to retain their cultural traditions and not integrate into the secular European culture of their host nation. Other policies, such as from the Hamburg Symposium (1983), have given immigrants the opportunity to “enjoy all the political, cultural, social, and religious rights of the host country”. In addition, Arabs have called for “special privileges” for Arab immigrants, including equal work opportunities, and have demanded that host countries “provide immigrants with vocational training, freedom of movement, suitable living conditions, and financial aid should they decide to return to their homeland”. Muslims have also insisted on the “partial incorporation of shari’a into European civil law”; since the early 1980s Islamic Sharia Councils founded in Europe have created “a parallel unofficial Islamic legal system” [iv].

Even the selection, by Europe, of source countries for immigrants have not escaped Islamic scrutiny and external Arab demands, as illustrated in the early 2000s, when the EU was on the brink of enlargement by the admission of ten Eastern European countries. The Arab States of the Mediterranean were concerned that such enlargement would affect them financially as well as affect their status as “Europe’s privileged source of immigration”. In response to these fears, in February 2003 the Euro-Mediterranean Study Commission (EuroMeSCo) issued a report that stressed that the main sources of immigration into the EU would be primarily from Muslim countries (Turkey, the countries to the east of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean Arab countries). Then, in October 2003, the High-Level Advisory Group of the European Commission issued a report that predicted that Arab Muslims along with the Muslim populations of Bulgaria, the Balkans, and Turkey, and the Turkish Muslim populations in Germany and Austria, would contribute to the “diversification of European Islam” [v].

On top of these developments, Ye’or points out that host populations have been required to “satisfy” and adapt to the “religious, cultural, and social requirements” of Muslims immigrants. This accommodation has been actively promoted by Eurocrats via their “sociopolitical directives”, which have pervaded all European institutions and include: the whitewashing of Islamism (its divorce from terrorism, jihad, and geopolitical goals), the propagation of Islamic culture and religion, and support for the ‘Arab perspective’ regarding Islam and the Islamic world. Such propaganda has been grounded in idealistic notions about respect between cultures and religions and the enrichment of human knowledge through cultural diversity and has involved pernicious concepts such as “the Andalusia utopia”, “Islamic cultural superiority”, “Christianophobia” and “European self-guilt” [vi].

These Eurocrat directives have been “wholeheartedly embraced, applied and monitored by European leaders, intellectuals, and activists”, such as the socialist finance minister of France and 8th president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, who said that “Islam is a component of Europe’s value system, and this fact must be acknowledged in order to prevent the exclusion of Muslims” [vii].

The indoctrination of indigenous Europeans to accept the social and political goals and ideologies of the EAD, especially the presence of Islam in Europe, is being accomplished by what Ye’or calls “a gigantic machinery” that has been “planned and ordered at the top of Europe’s political, cultural, and economic establishment” and executed through “various legal, cultural and political frameworks”: the Damascus (1978) and Barcelona (1995) Declarations, the Hamburg Symposium (1983), the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Co-operation (MEDEA, 1995), the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED, 1995), the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures (Anna Lindh Foundation, 2004), and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM, 2008) [viii].

Ye’or writes that the Anna Lindh Foundation “seems to be designed to condition the minds of Europeans and mold them according to guidelines imposed by the Euro-Arab network” and has aimed:

to retain exclusive and totalitarian control on everything written and taught about the Mediterranean area in EU schools and universities. The report outlines a program to control the intellectual life, thoughts and activities of the whole Partnership area through guidelines given to the press, the schools, the universities and NGOS; through the arts, films, publications, and political pressure; and through the expurgation of history, reworking of school syllabi and other means — all in order to create a new mankind according to the Dialogue’s standards ‘in the spirit of and in support of the EU’s neighbourhood policy’ [ix].

Ye’or well knows that indigenous European populations have been “betrayed and misled by their own leaders” through the political, educational, and media systems as well as through various cultural activities. The ideologies of cultural relativism and ‘political correctness’ have also been imposed upon them by the Eurabian elites. For instance, since the 1980s anti-immigration sentiments arising from European natives has been consistently labeled as ‘xenophobic’, ‘right wing extremist’, ‘racist’, ‘Arabophobic’, ‘Islamophobic’, and even associated with Nazi anti-Semitism by “universities, books, and the media” as well as by politicians and other influential public figures, such as “the EAD’s agents and executives” [x].

A consequence of this hostile and elitist subversion has been what Ye’or calls “the mutation of European civilization” or “a hybrid culture: Eurabia”. With the support of the European elites and the legal system and the gagging of native dissent, millions of Muslims, who have been perceived as “builders of the future Euro-Arab alliance”, have immigrated to Europe with no intention of integrating into the host culture and society; they have brought their cultural norms and habits with them, have rejected the secular liberal culture of Europe in favour of their own, and have utilised the legal system to protect their interests, all of which has created a volatile situation of social fragmentation and separatism within Europe at the expense of indigenous Europeans and their ways of life [xi].

Although Bat Ye’or is highly revealing in terms of documenting and detailing the why and how of massive Muslim immigration into Europe over the last four decades, she is subject to faulty reasoning in a number of areas, to which we now turn.

Franco-German Reconciliation, Euro-Mediterranean Union, and Anti-American Strategy

Ye’or claims that after losing its colonial empire from the onset of decolonization (late 1940s) and Algerian independence (1962), France under Charles de Gaulle (and others, such as Jacques Chirac), sought to regain influence by leading the unification of Europe and by initiating cooperative economic partnerships with the Arab and African Muslim worlds. She claims that “de Gaulle’s greatest ambition” was the unification of Europe. This union rested upon the restoration of good relations between France and West Germany and these two countries collaborated together to undertake a long-term geopolitical plan that sought the integration of the Euro-Arab Mediterranean countries into “a single, interdependent economic bloc” (Eurabia) which would act as “an international counterweight to America” [xii].

Against Ye’or’s claims that France was a leading mastermind in the creation of Eurabia, certain French governments have attempted to stop labour immigration and family reunification over the years, through various laws and acts, such as the Chirac and Barre governments, the first Pasqa Law (1986), the Second Pasqa Law (1994), the Debre Law, and so on. Furthermore, none of the ideas that Ye’or originates in post WWII France and Germany were new or confined to these countries. The integration of Europe became popular in the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic and reached a high pitch in the interwar and initial post-WWII era in the Twentieth century among many leading politicians and public figures in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The notion of European alignment with the Mediterranean countries to the south (and east) as an integrated geopolitical bloc to counter America was an idea that was first disseminated by the Austrian politician and activist, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, in the form of Eurafrica and Pan-Europa and was supported by a wide-range of leading European and American elites from the 1920s onward. European integration and Euro-Mediterranean alignment were part of a long term socialist vision of a world federation of humanity, whereby the world, in an effort to maintain the balance of powers and attain perpetual peace, would be divided into five political blocs that would be lawfully ordered on a global scale.

Franco-German reconciliation was indeed a first step towards European integration and Euro-Mediterranean union and an attempt to create a disarmed and peaceful Europe, but it was an idea that did not originate in post-WWII France but instead came out of the pre-WWI Atlantic peace movements and the interwar Pan-European movement. Franco-German reconciliation was cemented by the alignment of West Germany and France in the extraction and production of coal and steel, as declared by the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 (Treaty of Paris) led by Jean Monnet, but it was not confined to France and Germany; the Benelux countries and Italy also signed and belonged to this Community.

1973 Oil Embargo: Not a Threat but a “Pretext” for European Plan of “Political Reversal”

Ye’or surmises that the Arabs used the 1973 oil embargo as a weapon to gain leverage over international foreign affairs re the Middle East conflict, and it was Europe, particularly France and Germany, that “panicked” and succumbed to the oil threat by endorsing the Arab perspective “against Israel” in exchange for guaranteed oil supplies and access to Arab markets. She claims that America knew that the oil threat was empty because the Arabs “would have been powerless without Western technology” and without revenues from oil and natural gas, and the Americans “proved”, through their policies, that this interdependent relationship meant that “there never was an oil threat” [xiii].

Ye’or claims that because “there never was an oil threat” and because Europe did not use its “political leverage” to remain ‘politically autonomous’ but instead established the Euro-Arab Dialogue and other cooperative partnerships with the Arab world, the oil embargo was really “just a pretext for a political reversal already planned by France and Germany”. This Franco-German “planned reversal” was the integration of Europe through common political and economic strategies toward core issues such as foreign policy in the Middle East, and a Euro-Arab integration that aimed towards the creation of a geopolitical bloc that would rival America [xiv].

But, as already mentioned, the integration of Europe as a geopolitical bloc that also utilised the Mediterranean countries in an effort to counter America was not new or confined to a Franco-German collusion. Although the oil embargo of 1973 was a new factor that prompted the increased need for a common European foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding the peace process, this foreign policy had already been in development since at least Coudenhove-Kalergi, and especially since the Suez crisis, which was when the Arabs began to explicitly reveal their ideological aspirations (Islamism) and geopolitical powers (via oil and pan-Islamic nationalisms) and threaten Europe’s interests in the region.

Although Ye’or attempts to convince the reader that the oil embargo was an ’empty threat’, which may have been applicable to America as it had its own oil supplies, this is just not true for Europe. Europe was dependent on Arab oil-producing countries for a large amount of its oil supplies and the biggest port in Europe, Rotterdam, was completely embargoed, which affected all the European nations, including Britain, which was not embargoed at all. The effects of rising oil prices and the reduction by 25% of oil supplies to Europe resulted in massive inflation and unemployment, hardly facts that render the embargo an ’empty threat’.

Port of Rotterdam, the oil terminal

Just recently a meeting of pro-Israel American neoconservatives aired on Horowitz Freedom Center TV revealed that America depends on Middle Eastern oil, and even admits that America relies on terroristic Islamic groups such as ISIS for the continued existence of the American military. What is important here, is that by denying the reliance of Europe and America on Middle Eastern oil, Ye’or can then gain credibility for her accusations against Europe — that the Europeans began the EAD and continue it with the Arabs because they are “against Israel”. Such accusations are unfounded. While the Europeans have said they recognise Palestinian rights and nationhood, a people’s sense of identity and rights, a move that was to placate Arab hostility and has not been enforced, they have not been against or sought the destruction of Israel as a nation state (not anti-Zionist) or the Jews and Israelis as a people (not anti-Semitic); rather they have requested that Israel abide by UN Resolution 242.

Ye’or: Politics and Policy on Israel and a Nazi-Jihadi Alliance

According to Ye’or, the project of Euro-Mediterranean integration has roots in ideas advocated by Adolf Hitler, as represented in his 1941 vision: “the common interests of a unified Europe within an economic zone completed by the African colonies” [xv]. She argues that this plan has otherwise manifested in the Euro-Arab Dialogue of 1974 and the successive developments towards Euro-Mediterranean union that have come after, which she considers anti-Zionist.

She claims that a Nazi-Jihadi fascist alliance between Europe and the Arab countries, a “Euro-Arab Nazism” in the form of Palestinianism, constitutes the EAD partnership and characterizes the construction of Eurabia. She explains that through the EAD the European heads of state developed, for the first time, a common European foreign policy that aligned with the Arab League’s policy on Israel. She thinks that this shared policy also involved a “common political will” of “collective hostility” toward Israel, which was revealed through EAD Declarations that recognised the rights and national identity of Palestinians and urged the withdrawal of Israel from the ‘occupied territories’ of post-1949. Therefore, according to Ye’or, Europe has endorsed the PLO’s “ideology, strategy, propaganda, and phraseology” and constructed “[a]n entire war policy for the delegitimization of Israel” [xvi].

Ye’or also thinks the supposed Nazi-Jihadi Euro-Arab alliance is the re-emergence of the same cooperation of the 1930s era and poses an existential threat to Israel: “As Judaism was the target of Nazi ideology, so Israel’s very existence is a central target of Euro-Arab policy” and claims that “anti-Zionist dogma” linking “Zionism with racism” has been spread far and wide by EAD inspired “radio, television, the press and the UN educational publications”. She also accuses Europe of using the Arab-Israeli conflict “as a tool against America to strengthen EU influence and interests in the Islamic world, while working for the disintegration of Israel” [xvii].

In contrast to these claims, the EAD and the European Union have not aimed at the destruction of Israel or the elimination of her people but rather have requested Israel withdraw to 1949 armistice lines. This shared foreign policy of Europe was actually part of a strategy to gain European unity and was an effort to appease the Arabs’ conditions for dialogue and economic partnership, and has not been enforced. In addition, the drive towards the unification of Europe has been in development since the late 19th and early 20th centuries and has been endorsed by leading figures in both Europe and America.

For Ye’or to claim that Hitler and National Socialism is connected in a vital way to Euro-Mediterranean unification and therefore the destruction of Europe from massive Muslim immigration and subsequent colonisation, is to entirely miss the significant role and lasting impact Coudenhove-Kalergi et. al. have had on this engineering project. Most importantly, the socialism of Hitler was ethnic and national, whereas the socialism of Kalergi is cosmopolitan and international.

The Palestinian Third-World socialism of Eurabia is the socialism of Kalergi, the Frankfurt School, cultural Marxism, and Fabianism. It is a socialism of anti-nationalism, open borders, and miscegenation, policies that do not bode well for both the European indigenous peoples and Israelis alike, for they aim to destroy ethnic nationalism, which means the loss of national and ethnic sovereignty and identity, and possibly and inadvertently, the transfer of this status instead to Arab Muslims in the wake of the destruction rendered by the folly of the Leftist Eurabian agenda. It was the Kalergi-Fabian-Frankfurt School socialism that gave rise to the EAD, not the National Socialism of Hitler.

Palestinianism, Third Worldism, and the Andalusian Myth

Ye’or claims there is a “hidden war against Israel” in the form of Palestinian Liberation Theology and Replacement Theology, socialist developments arising from Latin American Christianity, Third Worldism, Islamic supremacism, and “European pro-Palestinian lobbies” that have sought “to create a Euro-Arab population that would fight in Europe for Arab causes against Zionism” [xix].

Ye’or claims Palestinian Liberation Theology, the Muslim-Christian dialogue, counters the Jewish-Christian rapprochement of Vatican II (1960s) and harnesses the same currents, the “traditional anti-Semitism”, that led Theodore Herzl to found Zionism and which also “led to the shoah”. In this view, Islamists believe Biblical figures (Abraham, Jesus et al) are Muslim prophets, that Islam preceded Judaism and Christianity, and that Jerusalem has always been Islamic. In other words, as Judaism and Christianity came out of Islam, the Abrahamic civilization is Islamic, which means that Europe and Israel are Islamic at their roots and thus subservient to it. This “Islamization of the Jewish sources of Christianity” and the de-legitimation of the “biblical identity” and “patrimony” of Israel is, according to Ye’or, an effort to align Christianity with the Islamic “struggle against Israel” and aims to give legitimacy to the Islamist claims over the Holy Land, Al Quds/Jerusalem, as well as the Christian lands of Europe [xx].

Ye’or also claims that unlike Americans, Europeans are not “proud” of their “Judeo-Christian values”, and Islamophile Europeans, who indict the Bible because they hate Israel — “Christian Judeophobia” — and deny the Jewish-Christian relationship — the Judaic roots of Christianity — are merely dhimmi “Eurabians” who have opened the door to the Islamization of Christianity. Ye’or claims Europe delegitimizes “Israel’s sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem” because of “theological Judeophobia and subservience to Islamic threats” [xxi].

She also suggests that another vehicle for Palestinianism are the apologists for Islam, dhimmis who make the case for the historical legitimacy of Islam in Europe and who have bestowed Muslims with a “privileged status as sources of immigration”. These apologists have also promoted the utopian Andalusian myth as the model of European integration, an idyllic “coexistence” that has led to a “multicultural Eurabia”, although Andalusia was in fact characterised by “cruelty, war, and slavery” against Jews and Christians and religious minorities [xxii].

Islamophiles, dhimmis and apologists, who argue that Islam is integral and vital to the history of Europe and that Andalusia is a model to be emulated do indeed exist among the Eurocrats and Leftists (and so-called ‘moderate Muslims’), and their arguments can be refuted. However, although pro-Islamists may assert an Islamic-Christian relationship and although the centrality of Judaism to the origin of Christianity can be posited, this does not mean that Judaism or Islamism are on equal par with Christianity regarding the foundation and development of European civilization. In fact, other non-Christian elemental factors have played much more integral roles to Europe than Judaism and Islamism, such as the aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans, Greco-Roman traditions, Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the development of the sciences.

Denying the Judaic roots of Christianity does not necessarily open up Christianity to Islamization and denying the importance of these roots does not render oneself a dhimmi. What is more important in this context is Ye’or’s complete neglect of the highly influential contribution of anti-nationalist socialism and Frankfurt School cultural Marxism towards the negation of the Christian religion and the ethnic identity of Europeans, a situation that has led to a hyper-individualist materialistic Europe that has a weak ethnic identity, no traditional codes of morality, and a lack of defining judgment of the Other.

Although some Islamists may attempt to make the case that Islam is the fount of both Judaism and Christianity in an effort to delegitimize Israel and conquer both Israel and Christian lands, most reasonable people recognise the fallacious nature of this argument.

Ye’or suggests that Europe embrace its religious identity, its Christianity, and, in particular, its Judeo-Christian roots. Yet she neglects to mention the identity of Europeans beyond the religious dimension: cultural and racial descent. She barely gives a glance to the fate of European ethnics in the face of rapid demographic colonisation from the Third World (Muslim and non-Muslim). She presents an ideological argument regarding Muslim immigrants in Europe — religious and geopolitical — and seems to be fine with large-scale immigration from the Third World if they integrate into the secular liberal democratic structure of the New Europe based on so-called Judeo-Christian values. Her argument is not about the people, the ethnicity, the homelands, or the roots of Europeans, which include a myriad of non-Judeo-Christian customs, traditions, and norms, all of which are being eroded and replaced by non-European peoples and traditions and the ideals of the Leftist Eurocrats in a radical and tragic way.

European Eurabian Elites

Ye’or accuses the European elites (whom she calls Eurabians, which include: socialists, Leftists, neo-Nazis, and fascists) of being responsible for the “mutation” of Europe into an anti-Zionist Eurabia via the EAD, large-scale Muslim immigration, and the policies of multiculturalism. She asserts that these elites have harboured Islamists and have allowed jihadist anti-Semitism to enter Europe, which has “rekindled latent Nazi and fascist vitriol in concoction of Eurabian culture”. She argues that the Eurabians have denied the reality of Islamic terrorism by ‘brushing aside’ the religious justifications given by Islamic terrorists and placed blame on “scapegoats” instead (Israel and America) [xxiii].

She makes the case that Israel is not to blame for Jihadi terrorism, for the existence of Israel does not play a role in conflicts in other parts of the world that involve Muslims and local populations, such as “the Chechen, Kosovo, Macedonian, Kurdish, Iraqi, Sudanese, Nigerian, Algerian, Kashmir, Indonesian, Philippines, and Thai conflicts”; rather, it is the concepts of jihad and sharia and the drive toward world conquest contained within Islam that are the cause of Muslim terrorism [xxiv].

She thinks the denial by European elites of Islamist terrorism and the deflection of blame onto Israel and America reveal a “subordinate collaboration, if not surrender” to Islam, collaboration in the sense of “appeasement and collusion with international terrorism” in an effort to become a “strategic rival to America” but is instead “implicitly abetting a worldwide subversion of Western values and freedoms”. She also accuses these European elites of paying dhimmi “tribute” to the Muslims for their spending of “billions…to purchase immunity” from Muslim terrorist attacks [xxv].

Dhimmi Tribute

These actions of the Eurabians, undertaken in an effort to secure ‘peace’ and ‘dialogue’ with the Muslim world and encompassed by the Proximity Policy, are, according to Ye’or, rather “cowardly” and “impotent” and reveal the European status of dhimmitude. She thinks attempts at peace and dialogue, such as the historical revisionism of British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook who claimed in 1998 that “Islam laid the intellectual foundations for large portions of Western civilization”, is “crawling behaviour”. For Ye’or, such behaviour is a sign that Europe is in “fear of conflict” and has surrendered to the “political agenda” of Islam [xxvi].

Ye’or also claims that European Leftists, Third Worldists, “Arabophiles”, Communists, and neo-Nazis have a “deeply ingrained” anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and that the constant airing of European anti-American propaganda is merely based on a false “sense of moral superiority” i.e. Europeans prefer peace and dialogue over conflict and war [xxvii].

But it begs the question whether it is logical for fascists/Nazis, who adhere to a national socialism based on ethno nationalism, to align with Leftist socialists, who are internationalists and cosmopolitans, and together promote Muslim communities, immigrants, and immigration, and then collaborate with the Muslims in a collective hostility towards Israel with the aim of essentially destroying it and together create a geopolitical rivalry against America.

It is more logical to say that neoconservatives have aligned with leftists to create Eurabia, which is based on socialistic idealizations of a future world federation of states and humanity, a global system based on perpetual peace and regulated by standardised economics, politics, and the creation of a new humankind, an abstract economic man that has no firm attachments to the roots of his particular ethnic, national, and traditional identity.

Muslim (and non-Muslim) immigration into Europe from Africa, Asia, and the Arab world, besides being the product of the EAD and other Euro-Arab partnerships, is a tool used by the neoconservative and Leftist alliance to diminish the strength of European ethnic identity in order to achieve steps towards World Federation in perpetual peace. Eurabia is merely a single instance of this striving towards World Federation.

It is true that many European elites have urged the withdrawal of Israel from ‘occupied territories’ and are critical of the American neoconservative foreign policy regarding the Middle East (war on terror etc.), and Leftists continue to provide a Marxist analysis of Muslim terrorism and whitewash the religious roots of militant Islamism. However, it is hardly ‘scapegoating’ to claim that Israel and America are in some way partly responsible for Islamic terrorism against the West.

Anti-western Islamists themselves have claimed that the military interventionist acts taken by America (and certain European countries) in support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including Israel’s claim over Jerusalem — ‘the eternal city of the Jews’ — are central factors to their cause. Just as Ye’or criticises Europe for the Eurocratic whitewashing of the roots of Islamic terrorism, she herself must be criticised for dismissing certain factors that do indeed contribute to Islamist hostility against the West (war on terror, ‘occupied territories’). In addition, Islamists are not just against America and Israel but against Westernisation in general, which is called by some, ‘Westoxification’.

While it is accurate to argue that Israel is not responsible for the conflicts between Muslims and local populations in the non-Western and non-Middle Eastern world (the geopolitical goals and totalitarian character of Islamism are indeed contributing to these conflicts, as well to the conflicts in the Middle East and in the West), this does not, however, exempt Israel from its participation and contribution to Middle Eastern conflicts or alter the fact that Israel remains an issue for Muslims not just on a regional level, but most importantly, on a global level. The Ummah, the collective and international Muslim identity, unites Muslims together towards important and defining issues, such as Israel, so that Muslims from Asia may support their fellow brethren in Palestine.

Although one can make the argument that Europeans have indeed lost their will to survive as a people due to their top-down pacification and are vulnerable to a complete takeover by Muslims due to the idealism perpetuated by the elites, peace has been a central element in European integration models since at least the 18th century and has become somewhat manifest post WWII. Peace has been a long-term choice of European elites in an effort to create a new type of man based on an abstract deracinated identity, a new type of society based on disarmament, and a new type of world order based on world federation.

European pacification to some is in fact ‘morally superior’ to war mongering, but, more importantly, it is a choice that has been made in regards to a larger, overall plan: world federation in perpetual peace. Striving for peace and preferring dialogue as a method of settling disputes rather than armed conflict is not synonymous with ‘fear of conflict’, ‘dhimmitude’, or ‘submission to Islam’. Rather, it is a strategy in an effort to achieve a larger goal: Euro-Mediterranean integration and at some point in the future, the World Federation of States. This lofty goal requires the creation of a geopolitical bloc that unites the Mediterranean countries, not necessarily as a ‘rival to America’, but as a force to maintain the balance of powers at the World Federation level.

Despite accusations that Europe is anti-American, anti-Israel, and pro-Islamist because of its insistence on peace rather than warfare strategies towards the Muslim Middle East, Thomas E. McNamara, senior advisor for homeland security and counter-terrorism, has stressed that “Europe and the United States are fighting terrorism together” and that together they have “built and sustained many institutions that now play special roles in this struggle”, including EU, NATO, OSCE, OECD, the UN, IMF and so on. In addition, both have been working to fulfill Resolution 1373, passed in 2001, which has provided “the legal, political, and moral foundations for the international community to organize and act against terror” [xxviii].

Holocaust Guilt Complex Exploited

Ye’or claims that the EAD exploited the European holocaust guilt complex by conflating it with anti-immigration sentiments against Muslims (calling the opposition Nazis and racists), by equating Zionism with Hitler’s National Socialism and deflecting Muslim terrorism onto Israel and America (in effect casting victims as aggressors and Jews as the new Nazis), and by historical and theological revisionism regarding the notion of jihad (i.e. jihad is recast as a defensive rather than offensive war in terms of resistance to conquest, or the liberation of Muslim lands governed by non-Muslims).

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is on board with historical revisionism, alluding to the erasure of “hostile oriental stereotypes” regarding Islam, and the EAD has emphasised the dhimmi mentality in university teaching, through such channels as the resolutions of Strasbourg and others, which, according to Ye’or, has led to a “growing Judeophobic culture” in universities and mainstream media [xxix]. The political myth of an idyllic Andalusia or La Convivencia, have, according to Ye’or, prevente: open discussion on immigration, the rise of anti-immigration movements, and accurate understandings of the geopolitical intentions of Islamism [xxx].

But Ye’or does not provide much information on how European natives are actually affected by the imposed white guilt complex or the holocaust exploitation trend other than a few comments here and there about the loss of ethnic identity, the prevention of criticism about immigration, the prevalence of the guilt complex in universities and mainstream media, and dhimmitude. The consequences for European natives of such pernicious developments stemming from the EAD and Leftists require much more research and must be addressed fully, but Ye’or is more concerned about how these developments in Europe are affecting Israelis and the Jewish population in Europe and emphasises these consequences throughout her books while neglecting the much larger population of European natives.

There is no doubt that Leftists want to rid the world of ethno-national identities, and this would include the ethnic identities of Europeans as well as the Zionists of Israel. Yet, in contradiction, Leftists also strive to defend the national identity of the Palestinians and their rights as a ‘people’ against the Israeli occupation of Arab territories that go beyond the 1949 armistice lines. They also protect and promote the ethnic identities of non-European immigrants in Europe through multicultural policies and immigrant rights.

Islamists in Europe employ the Leftist cultural and political discourse of white privilege, white racism, affirmative action, human rights, and collective multicultural rights, so as to gain further ground on all spheres of life in their attempt to counter Western hegemony inside and outside the West and establish a world-wide Caliphate. Although Islamists utilize Leftism for their cause, Islamists ultimately consider Leftists as decadent infidels who produce spiritually and morally vacuous societies and thus ultimately reject them.

The great majority of ethnic Europeans are being drowned out by a Europhobic EAD, by Leftism, by the rapidly growing demographic of Muslim and non-European immigrants, and also by accusations from neoconservatives and Zionists that claim ethnic European anti-immigration sentiments are right-wing extremist and merely a new form of anti-Semitic National Socialism and that European ethnic identities are backward, tribal, and intolerant and therefore must be eradicated.

The Eurabia thesis, for all its insights, does not serve the ethno-nationalist interests of Europeans since, ultimately, the riving preoccupation behind this thesis is the survival of Israel.

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[i]. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, (Maryland/Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005/2011), 70
[ii]. Cited in ibid, 66.
[iii]. Ibid, Declercq cited 64, 93
[iv]. Ibid, 75, 137, 106
[v]. Ibid, 140-141, 233-234.
[vi]. Ibid, 94, 103, 161
[vii]. Ibid, 77, 143
[viii]. Ibid, 239, 129, 243
[ix]. Ibid, 236-237, my emphasis.
[x]. Ibid, 143, 103, 252.
[xi]. Ibid, 102, 164
[xii]. Ibid, 41, 39-40.
[xiii]. Ibid, 47-48, 101, 230
[xiv]. Ibid, 230, 201, 225, 39-40
[xv]. Hitler cited in ibid, 148.
[xvi]. Ibid, 181, 89, 56, 86, 73
[xvii]. Ibid, 156, 87, 113
[xix]. Ye’or, Eurabia, 59, 180, 46-47
[xx]. Ibid, 177, 215
[xxi]. Ibid, 207, 223, 214, 115
[xxii]. Ibid, 163, 167, 166
[xxiii]. Ibid, 73, 102, 205, 157, 227
[xxiv]. Ibid, 159, 184
[xxv]. Ibid, 77, 158, 111, 227
[xxvi]. Ibid, 242, Cook cited 172, 77
[xxvii]. Ibid, 75, 242.
[xxviii]. Thomas E. McNamara, “Despite Divisions, Europe and the United States Are Fighting Terrorism Together”, European Affairs 4, no. 2 (Spring 2003)
[xxix]. Ye’or, Eurabia, 189, 196, 241
[xxx]. Ibid, 187.