Since the early 1970s, EU officials and bureaucrats have been seeking to merge Europe with the Islamic world through massive Muslim immigration, writes Bernard Moran.
The central mystery of resurgent Islam in Europe is: how did so many Muslims actually get there in the first place? This question excludes the Turkish guest workers in Germany from the 1950s and the Algerians in France; it is about the many hundreds of thousands of more recent arrivals forming enclaves throughout Europe and Scandinavia.
All has been revealed in the 2005 publication of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by a previously obscure Egyptian-born Jewish researcher, Bat Ye’or. Married to English historian David Littman, Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “daughter of the Nile”) now lives in a village in Switzerland.
Her research and documentation are considered unimpeachable. She describes the progress of the secretive 32-year Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), a joint initiative of the European Union (EU) and Arab governments. The meetings involving the EU political and bureaucratic elite and their Arab counterparts were closed, unpublished and, in Ye’or’s words, “shielded from scrutiny and democratic control”.
Both sides of the “Dialogue” agreed that the future of Europe and the Middle East lay in the fusion of a new geopolitical entity they termed “Eurabia”. Mass Muslim emigration was therefore officially encouraged and funded by the EU through the ideology of “multiculturalism”.
On the European side, there was the promise of security of oil supplies and privileged access to the vast Arab market for technology, products and professional expertise.
The European participants were mainly secularists and had little understanding of Islam, particularly the doctrines of Jihad, Sharia law and “dhimmitude” – the status of submission required of non-Muslims living in Islamic territory.
Their Arab counterparts viewed the EAD as providing myriad economic and technological benefits to their respective regions. As Muslims, it also provided the diplomatic weight of the EU political establishment in support of the Arab League agenda on Israel and Palestine, unprecedented opportunities for mass immigration, future demographic and political supremacy, thus achieving the long-term goal of bringing Europe into the House of Islam.
Before covering the details of the European-Arab Dialogue, it would be helpful for readers to comprehend what are, until recently, little-known concepts of Islam. Bat Ye’or (now 70) is a pioneer researcher on dhimmitude. Her three major books translated from French are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: 7th–20th Century (1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002).
In a presentation at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris (June 11, 2001), Bat Ye’or outlined the theory of jihad which regulates the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims on a global scale, codified and institutionalised by the eighth century. “This (jihadist) ideology impregnates current thinking and conduct,” she said.
She quotes the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi, speaking in 1997 on Islamic law, as dividing mainly the People of the Book – Jews and Christians – into three categories:
• non-Muslims in the lands of war.
• non-Muslims in the lands of temporary truce.
• non-Muslims protected by Islamic law, that is to say, the dhimmis.
The inhabitants of the lands of war are to be fought because they oppose the introduction of Islamic (Allah’s) law to their country. These infidels have no rights and their possessions and lives belong to any Muslim. Their very existence is considered illegal.
The infidels from a land of temporary truce are in a state of respite between two wars.
The dhimmis are those infidels who have ceded their land in exchange for protection. They have no rights beyond those specified and protected by Islamic law. This law is the source of all non-Muslim rights.
In the theological domain, Islamists believe (on the basis of numerous verses in the Koran), that Islam appeared at the beginning of Creation and therefore preceded Judaism and Christianity. Adam, Eve and Noah, were Muslims and professed Islam. Therefore mankind is Islamic and all children are born Muslim.
All the leading figures in the Bible – Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and the apostles – are prophets who were Muslims. The Jews and the Christians re-wrote a falsified Bible. They believe lies and teach their children lies.
It follows that, when offered the chance to accept the Truth – Islam – and they refuse, preferring to believe falsehoods, then as infidels they deserve death or slavery.
Another legitimate means of waging jihad is taqiyya (pronounced “tark-e-ya”), which is essentially “spin”, employed to confuse and split the enemy. Taqiyya is the deployment of subterfuge to dissemble and camouflage one’s real thinking and purpose, in the service of advancing Islam.
Bat Ye’or provides a detailed chronicle of the process beginning in May 1945 when Charles de Gaulle, embittered about France’s exclusion from the Yalta negotiations, rescued the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin, from appearing at the Nuremberg Trials as a war criminal. The Mufti had spent most of the war in Berlin, but now he offered his influence in the Arab world, and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, to advance a new alliance with France.
Growing public knowledge of his Nazi past and war crimes forced the French to facilitate his escape from Paris to Egypt, where he maintained contact with the French Embassy, through to his settling in Lebanon in 1962.
Haj Amin’s advocacy of a French-Arab alliance attracted powerful support in Gaullist and intellectual circles. They saw such an alliance with a Muslim federation extending through North Africa and the Middle East as restoring French prestige, impressing the Soviet Union and establishing a rival power bloc to the United States.
Bet Ye’or writes: “Two elements thus cemented the Franco-Arab alliance in the 1960s: French anti-Americanism fed by frustrated power ambitions, and a convergence of French Vichy anti-Semitism with the Arab desire to destroy Israel. From then on, America and Israel were inextricably linked in this policy.”
The Euro-Arab Dialogue actually dates from a meeting between the French President Georges Pompidou and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt on November 26–27, 1973, which coincided with the summit of the Arab Conference in Algiers on November 28.
The conference issued a statement specifying their conditions for cooperating with the then European Economic Community (EEC): that Europe would defend Arab claims to Jerusalem and the “occupied territories” and recognise the autonomous Palestinian people.
The Arab Declaration of Algiers was followed by President Pompidou calling for an EEC summit in Copenhagen in December 1973. European heads of state and their civil servants examined the Middle East crisis and planned for cooperation between the Arab League and EEC countries.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMagazine.com (September 21, 2004), Bat Ye’or described how Eurabia as a geopolitical reality was synchronised as an association called the Europe-Arab Dialogue (EAD) in July 1974 in Paris. She said:
“A working body composed of committees, and always jointly presided by a European and an Arab delegate, planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the applications of the decisions.
“The field of Euro-Arab collaboration covered every domain: from economy and policy to immigration. In foreign policy, it backed anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and Israel’s delegitimization; the promotion of the PLO and [Yasser] Arafat; a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy in international forums; and NGO collaboration.
“In domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media: television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centres, school textbooks, student and youth associations and tourism.
“Church inter-faith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations – a comprehensive symbiosis, with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture.”
Bat Ye’or believes that France and the rest of Western Europe cannot change their policy anymore – their future is Eurabia.
“I don’t see how they can reverse the movement they set in motion thirty years ago. Nor do Eurabians want to modify this policy. It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently though immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration.
“Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it.”
“This is the source of the strong anti-American feeling in Europe and of the paranoiac obsession with Israel, two elements that form the cornerstone of Eurabia.”
A 2003 poll conducted for the European Commission in the 15 EU countries, found that Europeans considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace – greater than Islamic terrorism or North Korea.
Mass Muslim immigration was planned at the University of Venice, in March 1977.
Under the auspices of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, there were four sessions under joint Euro-Arab chairmanship. Representatives from 14 universities in Arab countries joined 19 Arabists from European universities. The recommendations from the seminar on Arab inculturation served to end any critical public discourse about Islam and the Islamic world.
Also the recommendations on meeting the educational needs of Muslim immigrants were then approved by the foreign ministers of the European Community, the president, and their Arab counterparts on the EAD General Commission.
As Bat Ye’or notes, the EAD General Commission held closed sessions, with no public record of the proceedings. The decisions to encourage mass Muslim immigration were apparently agreed upon behind closed doors and could only be “deduced by the fact of their subsequent implementation”.
At Alexandria in October, 2003, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (in 2006 elected Prime Minister of Italy) announced the Proximity Policy which would place the Euro-Mediterranean partnership on an equal footing. The practical instrument would be the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, enabling new policies and cultural and intellectual exchanges.
Prodi encouraged the advisory group to create a “friendly neighborhood policy” in which the EU would consider its “Mediterranean partners” on a par with the Eastern European countries that had entered the EU.
The ensuing report recommended that the new Eastern European member states could themselves become open lands for southern Muslim immigration. This influx would assist Arab states concerned about their rapid demographic growth.
The Muslim populations of Bulgaria, the Balkans, Turkey, and those of Turkish origin in Germany and Austria, could combine with Arab Muslims in bringing about the diversification of European Islam.
It was believed this new European Islamic culture would dispel the notion of a rampant Islamisation of Europe.
Proximity Policy
The Proximity Policy is intended to unfold, utilising existing EU-funded support structures for the increased teaching of Arabic and other measures to assist Muslims integrate into European society.
A crucial arm of the Proximity Policy is the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation which is intended to function as a cultural or social “change agent”. The advisory group insists that no culture can claim any kind of superiority. The European and Mediterranean (PC term for Arabs) entities will together form “the cultural dimension of our unfolding history”.
Bat Ye’or summarises the Foundation’s design as “nothing less than complete Euro-Arab integration under its guidance, with control over European intellectual life and education”.
She says: “This intercultural dialogue thus requires that the Europeans reinvent their identity and history in order to integrate the Southern Arab migrant populations.”
The planners intend to effect social change at every educational and cultural level. “States will have to undertake a re-examination of schoolbooks dealing with the history of the region. Study centres and networks of scholars will assume the control of publications and the diffusion of knowledge of the history of the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Foundation will create an active network of artists and writers and the media: film, television and publishing will be a vital instrument of its policy.”
Bat Ye’or reports that Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers met in Dublin on May 5-6, 2004, and agreed on the creation of the Foundation under the title: the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, whose headquarters will be in Alexandria, Egypt.
Anna Lindh was the Swedish foreign minister stabbed to death by a deranged man in September, 2002. She was a strong supporter of Yasser Arafat, personally boycotted Israeli products and condemned President Bush’s Middle East policy.
Hello,
After years of non fiction books about Islamization of Europe, a fiction book has come out called Obsequium. It’s about an American who travels to Europe to discover his roots and finds an irreversibly changed demographic that leads to the end of Europe as we know it. It pulls together a lot of current topics. I enjoyed reading it. I recommend it highly.
The reality is stranger than fiction.
This was the best place I could find to post this :-
It’s all pretty scary stuff. What is anybody able to do to prevent it? Also the following paragraph outlines one of their plans;
The planners intend to effect social change at every educational and cultural level. “States will have to undertake a re-examination of schoolbooks dealing with the history of the region. Study centres and networks of scholars will assume the control of publications and the diffusion of knowledge of the history of the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Foundation will create an active network of artists and writers and the media: film, television and publishing will be a vital instrument of its policy.”
Isn’t that what the Jews habve been doing already through Hollywood and various media?
Foreword
Jacques Ellul
Contrary to the oft-held peaceable or romanticized picture, history is not an inoffensive discipline (not to say a “science”, which would be immediately challenged). Any sound historical work, that is to say which, as far as possible, avoids prejudices and preconceptions – using the maximum available sources, without selectivity, other than on a scale of values according to their finality – hence any work undertaken with conscienciousness and rigor always causes uneasiness. Actually, such a study generally challenges preconceived images of this past, as well as the traditions and judgements concerning this or that period, opinions and, at times, ideologies, thereby giving rise to disquiet, polemics and disputes. This has been the case with all great historical works and the present book will be no exception.
I venture to say that it is a great historical work on account of its scrupulous examination of the sources, the search for those sources (1) (though it is impossible to speak of exhaustiveness!), and the boldness in tackling a historical factor of prime importance too often neglected. In the general current of favorable predispositions to Islam, about which I have already spoken in the preface to the author’s previous book, (2) there has been a reluctance to allude to the jihad. In Western eyes, it would be a sort of dark stain on the greatness and purity of Islam. Yet this book, a sequel to the previous one, considerably broadens the perspective since it adds to the previous study of dhimmitude its alternative: the jihad. Jihad and dhimmitude are posited as an “uncircumventable” alternative: two complementary institutions, and when faced with Islam, a choice between the two has to be made! This jihad still needs to be defined: there are many interpretations. At times, the main emphasis is placed on the spiritual nature of this “struggle”. Indeed, it would merely indicate a “figure of speech”, to illustrate the struggle that the believer has to wage against his own evil inclinations and his tendency to disbelief, etc. Each man engaged in a struggle within himself (which we Christians know well, and thus we find ourselves again on common ground!); and I am well aware that this interpretation was in fact maintained in some Islamic schools of thought. But, even if this interpretation is correct, it in no way covers the whole scope of jihad. At other times, one prefers to veil the facts and put them in parentheses. In a major encyclopaedia, one reads phrases such as: “Islam expanded in the eighth or ninth centuries …”; “This or that country passed into Muslim hands…”. But care is taken not to say how Islam expanded, how countries “passed into [Muslim hands]… Indeed, it would seem as if events happened by themselves, through a miraculous or amicable operation… Regarding this expansion, little is said about jihad. And yet it all happened through war!
This book neatly highlights what one is concealing – I would say carefully concealing – so widespread is the agreement on this silence that it can only be the result of a tacit agreement based on implicit presuppositions. In the face of such an agreement, this book will appear blasphemous and will be described as polemical, simply because it reveals facts, series of facts, consistencies in practice – I would say a permanence, which shows that there is no question of accidental events. But despite this clarification, this book is not polemical for the author willingly recognizes all the great achievements of the Islamic civilization and in no way negates the values of this civilization. The author emphasizes that Islam’s victories were due to the military quality of its army and the high statesmanship of its leaders. Likewise – and this is another virtue that we found in The Dhimmi – the author takes the greatest account of diversities and subtleties and does not globalize or generalize from a few facts. Relying on the sources to the utmost, she notes the diversities between periods and situations.
But a major, twofold fact transforms the jihad into something quite different from traditional wars, waged for ambition and self-interest, with limited objectives, where the “normal” situation is peace between peoples – war, in itself, constituting a dramatic event which must end in a return to peace. This twofold factor is first the religious nature, then the fact that war has become an institution (and no longer an “event”). Jihad is generally translated as “holy war” (this term is not satisfactory): and this suggests both that this war is provoked by strong religious feeling, and then that its first object is not so much to conquer land as to Islamize the populations. This war is a religious duty. It will probably be said that every religion in its expanding phase carries the risks of war, that history records hundreds of religious wars and it is now a commonplace to make this connection. (3) Hence, religious passion is thus sometimes expressed in this manner. But it is, in fact, “passion” – it concerns mainly a fact which it would be easy to demonstrate does not correspond to the fundamental message of the religion. This disjuncture is obvious for Christianity. In Islam, on the contrary, jihad is a religious obligation. It forms part of the duties that the believer must fulfil; it is Islam’s normal path to expansion. And this is found repeatedly dozens of times in the Koran. Therefore, the believer is not denying the religious message. Quite the reverse, jihad is the way he best obeys it. And the facts which are recorded meticulously and analyzed clearly show that the jihad is not a “spiritual war” but a real military war of conquest. It expresses the agreement between the “fundamental book” and the believers’ practical strivings. But Bat Ye’or shows that things are not so simple. Since the jihad is not solely an external war, it can break out within the Muslim world itself – and wars among Muslims have been numerous, but always with the same features.
Hence, the second important specific characteristic is that the jihad is an institution and not an event, that is to say it is part of the normal functioning of the Muslim world. This is so on two counts. First, this war creates the institutions which are its consequence. Of course, all wars bring institutional changes merely by the fact that there are victors and vanquished, but here we are faced with a very different situation. The conquered populations change status (they became dhimmis), and the shari’a tends to be put into effect integrally, overthrowing the former law of the country. The conquered territories do not simply change “owners”. Rather they are brought into a binding collective (religious) ideology – with the exception of the dhimmi condition – and are controlled by a highly perfected administrative machinery. (4)
Lastly, in this perspective the jihad is an institution in the sense that it participates extensively in the economic life of the Islamic world. Like dhimmitude does, which involves a specific conception of this economic life, as the author clearly shows. But it is most essential to grasp that the jihad is an institution in itself; that is to say, an organic piece of Muslim society. As a religious duty, it fits into the religious organization, like pilgrimages, and so on. However, this is not the essential factor, which derives from the division of the world in the (religious) thought of Islam. The world, as Bat Ye’or brilliantly shows, is divided into two regions: the dar al-Islam and the dar al-harb, in other words: the “domain of Islam” and “the domain of war”. The world is no longer divided into nations, peoples, tribes. Rather, they are all located en bloc in the world of war, where war is the only possible relationship with the outside world. The earth belongs to Allah and all its inhabitants must acknowledge this reality; to achieve this goal there is but one method: war. War, then, is clearly an institution, not just an incidental or fortuitous institution, but a constituent part of the thought, the organization and the structures of this world. Peace with this world of war is impossible. Of course, it is sometimes necessary to call a halt; there are circumstances where it is better not to make war. The Koran makes provision for this. But this changes nothing: war remains an institution, which means that it must resume as soon as circumstances permit.
I have greatly stressed the characteristics of this war, because there is so much talk nowadays of the tolerance and fundamental pacifism of Islam that it is necessary to recall its nature, which is fundamentally warlike! Moreover, the author provides an enlightening explanation of “Islamization”, a complex process whereby Islamized populations supplanted peoples, civilizations and religions in the conquered countries. This comprised two phases: amalgamative processes (absorption of local cultures, conversions) and conflictive processes (massacres, slavery, and so on). The conflictive and amalgamative situations could in fact co-exist. Nevertheless, there actually are two phases: the first is war; the second is the imposition of the dhimmi status.
These are the foundations on which were developed both the expansion of Islam and then the evolution that resulted from the relationship of this Empire with the West – an evolution that nothing could prevent and that seemed to reverse the current, since, on the one hand the West would conquer several Islamic countries and, on the other, Western “values” would influence this world of Islam. But if some of these values (tolerance, for example) are a sort of challenge intending to prove that Islam practises them, others act in another manner to strengthen the dominant trend: nationalism, for example. But whatever the evolution, it must never be forgotten that it can only be superficial because doctrine and conduct are based on a religious foundation: even if this may seem to be weakened or modified, nevertheless what I have elsewhere called the “persistence of religiousness” remains unchanged. In other words, even if the rites, structures, and customs are all that continue to exist of a once-strong religion – today, seemingly neglected – these visible survivals only need a spark for everything immediately to revive, sometimes violently. And this process is described in a masterly fashion in this book. The situation that was thought to be dislocated and lapsed suddenly revives, and we are again faced with the fundamental choice: the world is still divided between the world of Islam and the world of war. And inside the umma, the only possible existence for the infidel is dhimmitude.
This leads the author to pose the question which has become so alarming today: “Dhimmitude of the West”? After having thus covered thirteen centuries of history, read in the light of this question, we then reach our present situation, acutely feeling its ambiguity and instability. We misunderstand this situation, for lack of a clear vision of the alternative which, whether explicit or not, existed throughout these centuries and which the present book has the immense merit to analyze rigorously. The author has the courage to examine (summarily, because this is not the purpose of the book) whether a certain number of events, structures and situations that we know in the West do not already derive from a sort of “dhimmitude” of the West vis-a-vis an Islamic world that has resumed its war and its expansion. Hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity, the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel), and, conversely, Europe’s defensive reaction (anti terrorist infrastructure, the psychological impact of intellectual “terrorism”, political and legal restraints regarding terrorist blackmail): all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional policy of Islam. Indeed, many Muslim governments try to combat the Islamist trend, but to succeed would require a total recasting of mentalities, a desacralization of jihad, a self-critical awareness of Islamic imperialism, an acceptance of the secular nature of political power and the rejection of certain Koranic dogmas. Of course, after all the changes that we have seen taking place in the Soviet Union it is not unthinkable, but what a global change that would imply: a change in a whole historical trend and the reform of a remarkably structured religion! This book thus allows us to take our bearings, so as to understand more easily our present situation, as every genuine historical study should do – without, of course, making artificial comparisons and by remembering that history does not repeat itself.
Notes
1. On this subject, the critical section of the conclusion should be read most carefully: criticism of the apriorisms of a large number of historical works, criticism of the explanations given for the legitimacy of jihad or of the unconditional adoption of Muslim theses. But also the originality consists in noting that the majority of studies are based on what the Arabs themselves have written, without taking into account the sources originating with the subjugated and vanquished peoples. As if the former were necessarily honest and the second biased. After having so often given a hearing to Islam, why not also hear all those conquered, then liberated, peoples of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere? This is the great merit and one of the innovations of this book.
2. Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, preface by Jacques Ellul, trans. from the French by David Maisel, Paul Fenton, and David Littman (Rutherford, N.J. 1985), 25-33.
3. See, for example, the collective book, Pierre Viaud, ed., Les Religions et la Guerre. JudaÃsme, Christianisme, Islam (Paris, 1991).
4. Concerning this administrative machinery, as this book shows, it can seem somewhat disorganized, but in reality that arises from the extreme complexity of this empire (and once again this book is very “nuanced”) since, in reality, there is a large degree of fundamental unity in this system.
Bordeaux, July 1991
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Jacques ELLUL died in 1994 at 82. A jurist, historian, theologian and sociologist, he published more than 600 articles and 48 books, many of which were translated into a dozen languages (more than 20 into English). From 1950-70 he was a member of the National Council of the Protestant Reformed Church of France. Professor at the University of Bordeaux, his oeuvre includes studies on medieval European institutions, the effect of modern technology on contemporary society, and moral theology. In American academic circles, he was widely known for “The Technological Society” written in the 1950’s (English edition, 1964) and recognized as one of the most prominent of contemporary thinkers.
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