Europe's anti-Israel strategy will result in the destruction of Europe itself

 

by Bat Ye'or

  

FOREWORD BY ROBERT SPENCER

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

Bat Ye'or

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