Rael Jean Isaac

Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis is that rare and astonishing book which describes immensely important developments that somehow had gone unnoticed — even though they shape the fate of all of us. What Bat Ye’or uncovers is, as Daniel Pipes has noted, “a nearly secret history of Europe.”

The story begins in the early 1960s when President Charles de Gaulle, returned to the leadership of France after many years in the political desert, resolved to restore France’s grandeur (a notion with which he was obsessed) by creating a counterweight to American power. He set out to do this with a double-pronged strategy: creating a unified Europe based on an alliance with Germany and reorienting French policy (which had been supportive of Israel – it was French-built mirage jets that destroyed Egypt’s air force in the 1967 war) toward the Arab world. De Gaulle had been forced to relinquish Algeria but he would turn this setback to French gloire into an opportunity to expand French influence to the entire Arab world. A unified Europe under French leadership commanding the energy resources upon which the developed world depended – in de Gaulle’s grand scheme this Euro-Arab geostrategic bloc could be a force to rival and challenge the United States on the world stage.

European unification has, of course, been carefully chronicled, the story known to all who care to follow it. But it is the details of the second aspect of de Gaulle’s strategy, the effort to achieve close rapprochement with the Arab world, that have gone largely unremarked. And while European unification has proceeded in good part as de Gaulle hoped, the ties with the Arab world, as Bat Ye’or shows, have scarcely developed as de Gaulle, with his fixation on the superiority of French culture, could have imagined. For what has happened is that Europe has become an instrument of Arab policy. The countries of the European Union, France in the lead, impelled by a mixture of ambition for power, greed and, increasingly, fear of Arab terror have become satellites of the Arabs, obedient to their will, in effect, dhimmis.

Bat Ye’or chronicles the series of conferences and institutions which European leaders established to promote Arab-European concord, the most important of which, the Euro-Arab Dialogue, conceived by the French, began in 1973. It is true that many of the resulting agreements, signed by the leaders of European and Arab governments, contain verbiage about mutual respect for religious freedom, human rights, equality of women, etc. But these are totally ignored by the Arabs while the Europeans submissively fulfill their side of the bargain. The most crucial demand on Europe is that it join the Arabs in their war on Israel and the EU slavishly follows the Arab political line on Israel. But more than this, writes Bat Ye’or, the EU has become the strategic center of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda with the result that “the war against Israel is now fought throughout European institutions, in universities and schools, the media, in trade agreements, among NGOs, by churches and even in the streets where Jews have to hide their identity.”

The bargain also requires that Europeans accept a host of Arab economic, political, cultural and religious demands. Arab countries are to be the continued privileged source of mass immigration into Europe (without the immigrants adapting to European mores). Huge payments must be made to Arab causes (the EU has provided billions to the Palestinian Authority, for example, and France still refuses to label Hezbollah a terrorist organization, enabling it to raise vast sums in Europe for its terrorist activities). In addition money collected from European taxpayers, says Bat Ye’or, “is generously distributed to Arab dictatorships as a modern ‘poll tax’ to buy Europe’s security.” School curriculums propagate what Bat Ye’or calls “the Andalusian myth” of a supposed vastly superior Islamic culture forming the basis of European civilization. In November 2003, French premier Jacques Chirac dutifully declared that “Europe’s roots are as much Muslim as Christian.”

The most breathtaking demand of Europe’s Arab “partners” is for the redefinition of Christianity. Bat Ye’or calls this the “cult of Palestinianism” but the phrase does not convey the depth of what is involved here. For in a sense this is worse than the old dhimmitude. Traditionally Christians in Arab countries may have been subservient but in pre-modern times at least they kept the sense of who they were, what their religious beliefs were and the origins of those beliefs. Now the Arabs demand that Christianity itself be Islamized, its roots in Judaism cut off and denied. The historical Jesus is no longer a Jew, but an Arab Palestinian. The suffering of Palestinians continues the suffering of the Palestinian Jesus and this holy synthesis, writes Bat Ye’or, literally sanctifies the Palestinian Arab cause.. The mission of Palestinian Liberation Theology is to liberate the world by unveiling Israel’s diabolic character and cement through Palestinianism a worldwide Muslim-Christian alliance. It becomes a divine mission to remove Israel from Arab Palestine, thus upholding the honor and truthfulness of both Christianity and Islam. The Gospels are to be attached to the Koran through adopting the Muslim interpretation of Jesus as a Muslim prophet (along with Abraham, Moses and other Biblical figures) and the Moslem belief that Islam is the first religion common to the whole of humanity. As Bat Ye’or notes: “It may seem of no consequence to a post-religious Europe whether Jesus was a Muslim prophet who preached Islam or a Jew inspired by the Bible, but on this question depends the core of Christian belief – as well as the fundamental values of the Judeo-Christian civilization, and their survival.”

Bat Ye’or observes that an aging, confused and timorous Europe vainly hopes to guarantee its own security through tribute, support to terrorist states and groups and anti-Zionism – in other words, dhimmitude, which is based on peaceful surrender, subjection, tribute and praise. She records a telling symbol of creeping dhimmitude: the first page of the report establishing the aims of the recently established Anna Lindh Foundation (named after the venomously anti-Israel Swedish Foreign Minister murdered in 2003 and designed to advance European-Arab relations) is adorned with a thirteenth century map of the Mediterranean, unusual in that it is turned upside down, with the Arab Islamic world at top in the north sitting above Europe.

French pride was the foundation of Eurabia. What it produced can only serve to corroborate the validity of the Christian view that pride is the worst of the deadly sins – with the most deadly consequences.

Please note: "Eurabia" is available from Americans for A Safe Israel
$20.00 includes postage and shipping.