The Jerusalem Report
February 19, 2007

EUROPE’S INTELLECTUAL DHIMMITUDE

by Carine Cassuto

"Who’s afraid of Islam?" could have been the defining motto of the
recent parliamentary elections in the Nether-lands. With the murders
of outspoken anti-Muslim critics – politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and
film director Theo van Gogh in 2004 – barely digested, the body
politic chose to ignore the thorny question of integration of the
Muslim minority and, instead, to focus on less contentious issues,
such as health care and pensions.

That is until a little-known Dutch-Armenian lobby group stirred up a
hornet’s nest. FAON, the Federation of Armenian Organizations in the
Netherlands, made it known it would protest the candidacy of three
politicians of Turkish descent who had, in a Turkish-language daily,
denied the Armenian genocide.

The three politicians – one Christian Democrat and two Social
Democrats – were dropped like hot potatoes by their respective
parties, which in turn prompted the Turkish community to threaten to
boycott the elections. This soon had leaders of the main parties
bending over backwards to appease their Turkish and other Muslim
constituents.

The brouhaha over the Armenian genocide – or "unpleasantness" as some
Turks would have it – is not just indicative of the Netherlands’
inability to deal with its so-called multi-cultural society. It is
symptomatic of Europe’s kowtowing to the political and intellectual
dictates of its fast-growing – mainly Muslim – minorities. Around
Europe vocal protest by Muslims appears to leave their host societies
dazed and confused. Whether it is art that is intended to provoke,
such as the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, or fears that the proposed
staging of Mozart’s opera Idomeneo in Berlin might offend Muslim
sensitivities, more often than not it leads to an all too familiar
dance: Muslim outrage and an overabundance of caution on the side of
the authorities.

It is this chastened subservience that has led some scholars to issue
a stern warning: Europe is rapidly becoming "Eurabia," a continent
that is slowly falling under the sway of Islam. Demographically,
because of the relatively high birth rate among the Muslim
communities, and politically: Time after time, they argue, European
countries give in to ‘demands’ by outraged Muslims, thus behaving
like dhimmis, the official inferior status accorded to Jews and
Christians under Islamic shari’a law.

The sustained Muslim pressure is having a baneful influence on
European intellectual life. Two recent Dutch examples drive the point
home. After almost 40 years of lecturing at Utrecht University and
with his eyesight failing, Jewish history professor Piet van der
Horst was looking forward to delivering his retirement lecture last
summer. Van der Horst wanted to trace the myth of Jewish cannibalism
from the Hellenistic period through the Middle Ages to the Nazi-era.
He also decided to add a timely twist to his farewell lecture: the
resurfacing of the myth of Jewish cannibalism in contemporary Islamic
society. And he wanted to conclude by saying: "The Islamic world has
taken up the cause of senseless Jew-hatred from the Nazis and is
doing so with great gusto. The Islamization of European anti-Semitism
is one of the most horrifying developments of the last decades."

However, Van der Horst never got to deliver his lecture in that form.
University Dean Willem Hendrik Gispen told him that it was
academically substandard and would, if delivered, create an immediate
security risk. Van der Horst delivered a sanitized version of the
lecture.

One of the most telling examples of this modern-day intellectual
dhimmitude is the changed curriculum for Shoah education in some
Dutch vocational schools, introduced after reports that history
teachers found it impossible to address the subject in classes
comprised largely of pupils of Moroccan descent. In some cases, more
than half of the students would leave the classroom, threatening
phone calls were made and car tires were punctured. "More and more,
we hear from teachers that they are confronted with anti-Semitism
from their pupils when they teach the Second World War and the
persecution of the Jews. The fallout of 9/11 and the war between
Israel and the Palestinians are disrupting influences when it comes
to teaching the Holocaust," the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank Foundation
noted.

Enter Diversion, a "creative project agency" hired by the City of
Amsterdam to create a curriculum that would be more palatable to the
students. With the aim of teaching the students "what the
con-sequences of discrimination and anti-Semitism would be in today’s
Amsterdam," Diversion put together a textbook consisting of three
chapters on WWII and another three on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.

According to Diversion, the initial test-run was successful with
anti-Semitism down by one-third among students who had taken the
pilot course. Not surprising, considering the fact that anti-Semitism
has been redefined as "racism against Semitic people such as Jews and
Arabs." Or that concentration camps are now places where people "were
held prisoner" and had to undertake "heavy labor."

What all this might mean for future European positions on Israel and
the Middle East is truly alarming.

Carine Cassuto is an Amsterdam-based journalist and a former
editor-in-chief of the Dutch Jewish Weekly.