The following presentation by Bat Ye'or was delivered at a seminar in the French Senate in Paris three weeks ago - The Editors.
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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 IRA in Great
Britain, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades
in Italy.
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, misinformation,
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 de-legitimizing
of the State of Israel, both historically and politically, its shrinking
into non viable borders, and the Arabizationof 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 encompass 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). This recent presentation, “Beyond Munich – The
Spirit of Eurabia,” along with many other pieces by Bat Ye’or and others,
will appear in the essay collection, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (forthcoming
from Prometheus Books), edited by Robert Spencer.