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 ( /
). 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)