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Beyond Munich - The Spirit of Eurabia

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  • Beyond Munich - The Spirit of Eurabia

    Front Page Magazine
    July 2, 2004

    Beyond Munich - The Spirit of Eurabia
    By Bat Ye'or


    The following presentation by Bat Ye'or was delivered at a seminar in
    the French Senate in Paris three weeks ago - The Editors.

    Allow me first to make a preliminary observation about the title of
    this session: the `return of the spirit of Munich' - a title which I
    find somewhat optimistic. At Munich, in 1938, France and England,
    exhausted by the death toll of the Great War, abandoned Czechoslovakia
    to the Nazi beast, in the hope that by doing so they would avoid
    another conflict. The `spirit of Munich' thus refers to a policy of
    states and of peoples who refuse to confront a threat, and attempt to
    obtain peace and security through conciliation and appeasement, or
    even, for some, an active collaboration with the criminals.

    For my own part, I would say that we have gone beyond the spirit of
    Munich, and the present situation should be seen not in the context of
    the Second World War, but in the present jihadist context.

    In fact, for the past 30 years France and Europe are living in a
    situation of passive self-defense against terrorism. This began with
    Palestinian terrorism, then Islamic terrorism, not to speak of the
    local European terrorism, including the Basques in Spain, the
    Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, and the Red Brigades of Italy of the
    1980s.

    One need only look at our cities, airports, and streets, at the
    schools with their security guards, even the systems of public
    transportation, not to mention the embassies, and the synagogues - to
    see the whole astonishing array of police and security services. The
    fact that the authorities everywhere refuse to name the evil does not
    negate that evil. Yet we know perfectly well that we have been under
    threat for a long time; one has only to open one's eyes and our
    authorities know it better than any of us, because it is they who have
    ordered these very security measures.

    In his book, La Vie Quotidienne dans l'Europe Médiévale sous
    Domination Arabe (Daily Life in Medieval Europe under the Arab
    Domination), published in 1978, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, a French
    specialist on Andalusia (Islamic Spain) and the Maghreb, described
    under the subheading `Une grande Peur' (`A great Fear') the conditions
    of life for the indigenous non-Muslim peoples in the Andalusian
    countryside. (1) Today, Europe itself is living with this Great Fear.

    At Munich war had not yet been declared. Today the war is
    everywhere. And yet the European Union and the states which comprise
    it, have denied that war's reality, right up to the terrorist attack
    in Madrid of March 11, 2004. If there is a danger as Europe proclaims
    urbi et orbi, that danger can only come from America and Israel. What
    should one understand? For can anyone seriously maintain that it is
    the American and Israeli forces that threaten us in Europe? No, what
    must be understood is that American and Israeli policies of resistance
    to jihadist terror provoke reprisals against a Europe that has long
    ago ceased to defend itself. So that peace can prevail throughout the
    world, those two countries, America and Israel, need only adopt the
    European strategy of constant surrender, based on the denial of
    aggression. How simple it all is...

    This strategy is less worthy than even Munich's connivance and
    cowardice. At Munich there was some sort of future contemplated, even
    if war, or peace, were to determine the future. There was a choice. In
    the present situation there is no choice, for we deny the reality of
    the jihad danger. The only danger comes, allegedly, from the United
    States and Israel. We conduct a propaganda campaign in the media
    against these two countries, before entering into a yet more
    aggressive phase; it's so much easier, so much less dangerous...And we
    conduct this campaign with the weapons of cowardice: defamation,
    disinformation, the corruption of venal politicians.

    In the time of Munich, one could envisage that there would be battles
    that might be won. There was at least the Maginot Line for defense. In
    Europe today, dominated by the spirit of dhimmitude - the condition of
    submission of Jews and Christians under Muslim domination - there is
    no conceivable battle. Submission, without a fight, has already taken
    place. A machinery that has made Europe the new continent of
    dhimmitude was put into motion more than 30 years ago at the
    instigation of France.

    A wide-ranging policy was then first sketched out, a symbiosis of
    Europe with the Muslim Arab countries, that would endow Europe - and
    especially France, the project's prime mover - with a weight and a
    prestige to rival that of the United States (2). This policy was
    undertaken quite discreetly, outside of official treaties, under the
    innocent-sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. An association of
    European parliamentarians from the European Economic Community (EEC)
    was created in 1974 in Paris: the Parliamentary Association for
    Euro-Arab Cooperation. It was entrusted with managing all of the
    aspects of Euro-Arab relations - financial, political, economic,
    cultural, and those pertaining to immigration. This organization
    functioned under the auspices of the European heads of government and
    their foreign ministers, working in close association with their Arab
    counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission,
    and the Arab League.

    This strategy, the goal of which was the creation of a
    pan-Mediterranean Euro-Arab entity, permitting the free circulation
    both of men and of goods, also determined the immigration policy with
    regard to Arabs in the European Community (EC). And, for the past 30
    years, it also established the relevant cultural policies in the
    schools and universities of the EC. Since the first Cairo meeting of
    the Euro-Arab Dialogue in 1975, attended by the ministers and heads of
    state both from European and Arab countries and by representatives of
    the EC and the Arab League, agreements have been concluded concerning
    the diffusion and the promotion in Europe of Islam, of the Arabic
    language and culture, through the creation of Arab cultural centers in
    European cities. Other accords soon followed, all intended to ensure a
    cultural, economic, political Euro-Arab symbiosis. These far ranging
    efforts involved the universities and the media (both written and
    audio-visual), and even included the transfer of technologies,
    including nuclear technology. Finally a Euro-Arab associative
    diplomacy was promoted in international forums, especially at the
    United Nations.

    The Arabs set the conditions for this association: 1) a European
    policy that would be independent from, and opposed to that of the
    United States; 2) the recognition by Europe of a `Palestinian people,'
    and the creation of a `Palestinian' state; 3) European support for the
    PLO; 4) the designation of Arafat as the sole and exclusive
    representative of that `Palestinian people'; 5) the delegitimizing of
    the State of Israel, both historically and politically, its shrinking
    into non viable borders, and the Arabization of Jerusalem. From this
    sprang the hidden European war against Israel, through economic
    boycotts, and in some cases academic boycotts as well, through
    deliberate vilification, and the spreading of both anti-Zionism and
    anti-Semitism.

    During the past three decades a considerable number of non-official
    agreements between the countries of the CEE (subsequently the EU) on
    the one hand, and the countries of the Arab League on the other,
    determined the evolution of Europe in its current political and
    cultural aspects. I will cite here only four of them: 1) it was
    understood that those Europeans who would be dealing with Arab
    immigrants would undergo special sensitivity training, in order to
    better appreciate their customs, their moeurs; 2) the Arab immigrants
    would remain under the control and the laws of their countries of
    origin; 3) history textbooks in Europe would be rewritten by joint
    teams of European and Arab historians - naturally the Battles of
    Poitiers and Lepanto, or the Spanish Reconquista did not possess the
    same significance on both Mediterranean littorals; 4) the teaching of
    the Arabic language and of Arab and Islamic culture were to be taught,
    in the schools and universities of Europe, by Arab teachers
    experienced in teaching Europeans.


    The Situation Today

    On the political front, Europe has tied its destiny to the Arab
    countries, and thus become involved in the logic of jihad against
    Israel and the United States. How could Europe denounce the culture
    of jihadic venom which exudes from its allies, while for so many years
    it did everything to activate the jihad by hiding and justifying it by
    claiming that the real danger comes not from the jihadists,
    themselves, but from those who resist the Arab jihadist, the very
    allies that Europe serves at every international gathering, and in the
    European media.

    On the cultural front, there has been a complete re-writing of
    history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European
    universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly
    of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to
    `The Contribution of the Islamic civilization to European culture.' It
    was reaffirmed by President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8,
    1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the
    European Commission, through the creation of a `Foundation on the
    Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations' that was to control everything
    that was said, written and taught on the new continent of Eurabia,
    which englobe Europe and the Arab countries.

    The dhimmitude of Europe began with the subversion of its culture and
    its values, with the destruction of its history and its replacement by
    an Islamic vision of that history, supported by the romantic myth of
    Andalusia. Eurabia adopted the Islamic conception of history, in which
    Islam is defined as a liberating force, a force for peace, and the
    jihad is regarded a `just war'. Those who resist the jihad, like the
    Israelis and the Americans, are the guilty ones, rather than those who
    wage it. It is this policy that has inculcated in us, the Europeans,
    the spirit of dhimmitude that blinds us, that instills in us a hatred
    for our own values, and the wish to destroy our own origins and our
    own history. `The greatest intellectual swindle would be to allow
    Europe to continue to believe that it derives from a Judeo-Christian
    tradition. That is a complete lie,' Tariq Ramadan has stated (3). And
    thus we despise George Bush because he still believes in that
    tradition. What simpletons those Americans...

    The spirit of dhimmitude is not merely that of submission without
    fighting, not even a surrender. It is also the denial of one's own
    humiliation through this process of integrating values that lead to
    our own destruction; it is the ideological mercenaries offering
    themselves up for service in the jihad; it is the traditional tribute
    paid by their own hand, and with humiliation, by the European dhimmis,
    in order to obtain a false security; it is the betrayal of one's own
    people. The non-Muslim protected dhimmi under Islamic rule could
    obtain an ephemeral and delusive security through services rendered to
    the Muslim oppressor, and through servility and flattery. And that is
    precisely the situation in Europe today.

    Dhimmitude is not only a set of abstract laws inscribed in the
    shari'a, it is also a complex set of behaviors developed over time by
    the dhimmis themselves, as a way both to adapt to, and to survive,
    oppression, humiliation, insecurity. This has produced a particular
    mentality as well as social and political behaviors essential to the
    survival of peoples who, in a certain sense, would always remain
    hostages to the Islamic system.

    The dhimmis are inferior beings who undergo humiliations and
    aggressions in silence. Their aggressors, meanwhile, enjoy an impunity
    that only increases their hatred and their feeling of superiority,
    guaranteed by the protection of the law. The culture of dhimmitude
    which is expanding throughout Europe is that of hate, of crimes
    against non-Muslims that go unpunished, a culture which is imported
    from the Arab countries along with `Palestinianism,' the new European
    subculture that has been raised to the level of a European Union cult,
    and its exalted war banner against Israel.

    At Munich, in 1938, France had not renounced its own culture, its own
    history becoming German; it has not proclaimed that the source of her
    own culture was the German civilization. The spirit of dhimmitude
    which today blinds Europe springs not from a situation imposed from
    without, but from a choice made freely, and systematically carried
    out, in its political dimensions, over the course of the last 30
    years.

    The well-known scholar of Islam, William Montgomery Watt, described
    the disappearance of the Christian world from the countries which had
    been Islamized, in his book The Majesty that was Islam (1974): `There
    was nothing dramatic about what happened; it was a gentle death, a
    phasing out.'(4) But Montgomery Watt was wrong; in fact, the long
    death-throes of Christianity under Islam were extremely painful and
    tragic, as can be seen even in the 20th century, with the genocide of
    the Armenians, and the Lebanese Christians' resistance in the
    1970s-1980s, and for the last decades the genocide in the Sudan, and
    finally the relentless Arab jihad against Israel, which is only one of
    the examples of the age-old struggle by people devoted to fighting for
    freedom against dhimmitude, for the dignity of man against the slavery
    of oppression and hate. But that observation by Montgomery Watt -
    about the `gentle death, the phasing out' applies perfectly to Europe
    today.


    Notes:

    1) Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, La Vie Quotidienne dans l'Europe
    Médiévale sous Domination Arabe, Hachette, Paris, 1978; this
    book examines the Arab conquest and colonization of Andalusia - see
    chapter 1, `Les Jours de Razzia et d'Invasion'. I am grateful to Dr
    Andrew Bostom, for having brought to my attention the works of
    Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, some of which will be included in his
    forthcoming compendium of essays and documents, The Legacy of Jihad,
    New York, Prometheus Books, 2005.

    2) Pierre Lyautey (the nephew of Marshall Lyautey): `) « Le nouveau
    rôle de la France en Orient », Comptes rendu des séances de
    l'Académie des Sciences d'Outre-Mer, 4 mai 1962, p.176, voir aussi
    Jacques Frémeaux, Le monde arabe et la sécurité de la France
    depuis 1958, PUF, Paris 1995.

    3) Tariq Ramadan, `Critique des (nouveaux) intellectuels
    communautaires', Oumma.com, 3 October 2003.

    4) William Montgomery Watt, The Majesty that Was Islam. The Islamic
    World, 66-1100. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1974, p. 257.

    Bat Ye'or has written articles and scholarly studies since 1971 on
    the situation of Jews and Christians under Islam. Her books in French
    have been translated into English (www.dhimmi.org /
    www.dhimmitude.org). This presentation - translated from the French -
    was given at a seminar organized by the B'nai B'rith (Europe) in the
    French Senate (Palais du Luxembourg, Paris), on the theme: `La
    démocratie à l'épreuve de la menace islamiste' (`democracy
    faced with the Islamist menace'), in two sessions: `Les Islamistes et
    leur alliés' (`The Islamists and their allies'); `Vers un retour
    à l'esprit de Munich' (`toward a return to the spirit of
    Munich'). Her next book covers this subject in depth: Eurabia. The
    Euro-Arab Axis (Cranbury, NJ., Associated University Presses, 2005)
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