time as that given by Guénon for the end of Tradition in the West (after the end
of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648).
20. Anton Shekhovstov, “The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo- Eurasianism: Ideas
of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s Worldview,” Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions 9, no. 4 (2008): 491– 506.
21. On Haushofer, see David T. Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in
Weimar Germany, 1918– 1933 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997).
22. Aleksandr Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii
(Moscow: Arktogeia, 1997), 12.
23. Aleksandr Dugin, Chetvertaia politicheskaia teoriia (Moscow: Amfora, 2009),
cover blurb.
24. Ibid., 209.
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Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism
169
25. See, for instance, Aleksandr Dugin, Misterii Evrazii (Moscow: Arktogeia, 1996),
as well as Znaki velikogo norda (Moscow: Veche, 2008).
26. Aleksandr Dugin, “The Long Path: An Interview with Alexander Dugin,” Open
Revolt, May 17, 2014, http:// openrevolt.info/ 2014/ 05/ 17/ alexander- dugin-
interview/ .
27. Aleksandr Dugin, “Donald Trump: The Swamp and Fire,” Katehon, November
14, 2016, http:// katehon.com/ article/ donald- trump- swamp- and- fire.
28. Aleksandr Dugin, “On ‘White Nationalism’ and Other Potential Allies in the
Global Revolution,” The Fourth Political Theory, http:// www.4pt.su/ en/ content/
white- nationalism- and- other- potential- allies- global- revolution.
29. Marlene Laruelle, “The Izborky Club, or the New Conservative Avant- Garde in
Russia,” Russian Review 75, no. 4: 626– 644.
30. A list of the lectures and their bibliographies is at available at “Kursy,” Center for
Conservative Research, http:// books.4pt.su/ issues/ kursy.
31. Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
32. Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right.
170
11
Bat Ye’or and Eurabia
Sindre Bangstad
I N S O - C A L L E D “ C O U N T E R - J I H A D I S T ” circles in Europe and the US, the
Egyptian- born Swiss- Israeli popular author Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman,
née Oreibi) is widely seen as the doyenne of “Eurabia” literature. She has
rightly been described as a “key ideologue” in the international counter-
jihadist movement.1 The Eurabia literature comes in different varieties
and formulations, but Bat Ye’or’s version describes an ongoing secret con-
spiracy, which involves both the European Union and Muslim- majority
countries in North Africa and the Middle East working under the auspices
of the Euro- Arab Dialogue (EAD) established in the 1970s, and aimed at
establishing Muslim control over a future Europe or “Eurabia.”
Bat Ye’or’s work was little known beyond the radical Right fringes be-
fore al- Qaida’s attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Her writings
are now often mistakenly referred to as the work of a historian and ac-
ademic among her sympathizers, who include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bruce
Bawer, Niall Ferguson, Irshad Manji, Melanie Phillips, Robert Spencer,
and Mark Steyn. Of these, it is noteworthy that only Ferguson, a professor
at Stanford University, is a serious academic. Although Bat Ye’or actually
appropriated the term “Eurabia” already created in the 1970s, she can un-
doubtedly be credited with having popularized it as a conspiracy theory
through quasi- academic titles such as Eurabia: The Euro- Arab Axis 2 and
Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate.3
Through its dissemination on various “counter-
jihadist” websites
and in the work of the “counter- jihadist” Norwegian blogger “Fjordman”
(pen name of Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen),4 Bat Ye’or’s work inspired the
Norwegian right- wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who executed the
17
Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
171
worst terrorist attacks in modern Norwegian history in 2011.5 In Norway,
Bat Ye’or’s work and the Eurabia conspiracy theories that underpin it have
long been promoted by the government- funded NGO Human Rights’
Service (HRS).6 The director of HRS, Hege Storhaug, and the HRS have
long- standing links with Norway’s Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), a
coalition partner in the post- 2013 government, which has campaigned on
a platform of exclusivist nationalism and opposition to Muslim immigra-
tion to Norway since 1987. State subvention of the HRS in a situation in
which anti- Muslim sentiment has become both widespread and main-
stream in the Norwegian population at large offers the Progress Party sup-
portive media platforms as well as a means by which to satisfy the most
radical part of its electoral constituency. A recent national representative
survey from Norway finds that 30 percent of those surveyed consent to
the view that “Muslims want to take over Europe,” 39 percent consenting
to the view that “Muslims are a threat against Norwegian culture,” and
28 percent declaring that they have an “aversion to Muslims.” The survey
finds that these attitudes are far more widespread among Norwegians with
electoral preferences for the Progress Party than among the voters of any
other party.7 Bat Ye’or is also widely read among, and has long- standing re-
lations with, Serbian ultranationalists, the Israeli Far Right, and many rad-
ical Right activists in Western Europe and the US. It is difficult to assess
Bat Ye’or’s international impact and influence beyond counter- jihadist and
radical Right circles. She is now quite old and has, by virtue of her limited
public presence among the more social- media- savvy new intellectuals of
the radical Right, faded from view in recent years. But it is hard not to see
traces of the influence of some of the ideas and tropes she and her like-
minded fellow travelers have put into circulation over the past thirty years,
especially in their mainstreaming in the Trump administration’s various
“Muslim bans.”
Life and context
Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”) is a pen name for Gisèle
Littman. Littman has at times claimed that she cannot disclose her real
name out of “security concerns,”8 but her real name and identity have
long been a matter of public record. Littman was born the daughter of an
Italian- French couple under the name of Gisèle Oreibi in the upper- class
area of Zamalek in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933. Oreibi’s father was an Italian
Jew who had fled his native Italy under Mussolini. Like many Jews in
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M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
Egypt, the Oreibis left Egypt in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War as
conditions for Egyptian and foreign Jews worsened in the wake of the
newly formed Israeli state’s support for the failed British and French- led
invasion of the Suez canal zone,9 and during the rise of Arab nationalism
under Nasserite decolonization.10 In the light of Bat Ye’or’s later attitudes
to Islam and Muslims, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the
trauma of the Oreibis’ and other Egyptian Jews’ exodus from Egypt was
formative for her.
Bat Ye’or is reported to have attended undergraduate courses at
University College London in the UK in 1958 and at the University of
Geneva in Switzerland in 1960. In fact, she never obtained any academic
degrees from either of these institutions. She is, in the words of Adi
Schwartz of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who in a 2006 profile of Bat
Ye’or’s work referred to her 2005 Eurabia monograph as “The Protocols
of the Elders of Brussels,” “not an academic and has never taught at any
university.”11
At the age of twenty- six, in 1959, Bat Ye’or married the British Jewish
historian David G. Littman (1933– 2012) and became a British citizen.
A year later, in 1960, she moved to Lausanne in Switzerland with her
husband. The couple had three children.12 Bat Ye’or’s husband, David,
and his close associate René Wadlow represented the Association for
World Education and the World Union for Progressive Judaism at the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) in Geneva,
Switzerland, for many years.
Littman and Bat Ye’or were also involved in Operation Mural, a secret
operation led by the Israeli foreign intelligence services Mossad, which in
1961 managed to evacuate some 530 Moroccan Jewish children to Israeli
from Morocco via Switzerland under cover of an NGO, Swiss Aid to North
African Children (Ouevre Suisse de Secours aux Enfants de l’Afrique du
Nord). Morocco, like most other Arab countries, did not recognize the
State of Israel after Moroccan independence from France in 1956. Hence,
Moroccan Jews who wanted to emigrate or undertake aliyah to Israel (and
who were encouraged to do so by the Jewish Agency) were prevented from
doing so because the Moroccan government would not issue exit visas
for Israel. Moroccan Jews faced increasing hostilities and persecution
linked to the rise of Arab nationalism after the Suez crisis.13 Operation
Mural involved the Littmans posing as Christians in Morocco, and led
to David G. Littman later being awarded the “Hero of Silence” decora-
tion by the Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2009. It is clear from the
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Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
173
late Littman’s own publications and his coauthorship of one of his wife’s
books14 that he shared his wife’s convictions regarding both Eurabia and
“dhimmitude.” Bat Ye’or has throughout her publishing career mainly
published in French, and a number of her works had been translated, ed-
ited, and coauthored by her late husband.
Although a 1980 French publication of Bat Ye’or’s on the “dhimmis
of Islam” was referenced by the historian and later neoconservative
Bernard Lewis in a footnote to his widely cited 1984 monograph The Jews
of Islam,15 Bat Ye’or’s publications by and large existed in a state of obscu-
rity prior to al- Qaeda’s 9/ 11 terrorist attacks on the US. Mark Sedgwick
rightly notes that “her work is not highly regarded by professional
historians.”16 The aftermath of the 9/ 11 attacks led to her invitation to ad-
dress the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 2002, as well as to pre-
sent lectures at the universities of Georgetown, Brown, Yale, and Brandeis
that same year. Her website makes much of these appearances to bolster
her supposed academic credentials. To the consternation of a number
of the distinguished international scholars invited, Bat Ye’or also made
an appearance at an academic conference on anti- Semitism at the Vidal
Sassoon Memorial Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem in 2006.17
Bat Ye’or’s personal links and ideological affiliations with anti- Muslim
extremists, and her provision of anti- Muslim ideas and sentiments,
are long- standing. In an interview with a US- based counter- jihadist
publication from 2011, Bat Ye’or claimed to have coined the neologism
“dhimmitude,” a term first recorded as having been used by the Lebanese
Maronite civil war president Bashir Gemayel in 1982.18 In an interview
with a sympathetic online media outlet in 2011, Bat Ye’or alleged that her
term “dhimmitude” had become known to Gemayel through “mutual
friends” earlier that year.19
The civil war in Lebanon from 1976 to 1991 provides an important
rhetorical and ideological template for Bat Ye’or. Here, she casts Israel’s
Lebanese allies among Maronite Christians as defending an allegedly
“Western” “Judeo- Christian” civilization against the “barbarian hordes” of
Muslims, and advances the civil war in Lebanon as a harbinger of a future
that awaits Europe unless Eurabia is stopped in its tracks. This claim of a
historical civilizational “unity” between Christians and Jews is problem-
atic in the light of centuries of European Christian and Christianist perse-
cution, discrimination, and exclusion of European Jews until after World
War II, and the very fact that the very notion of a shared “Judean- Christian
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tradition” was coined by American Lutheran and Catholic theologians op-
posed to fascism in Europe as late as the 1930s.20 By the 1950s, however,
the notion of a shared tradition uniting Jews and Christians had migrated
to the mainstream American conservative Right and was used as an ideo-
logical instrument against communism, in a similar manner as it is used
today by radical Right activists and politicians as an ideological instru-
ment against Islam and Muslims.21 The notion allows Bat Ye’or to portray
terrorism— almost whenever and wherever perpetrated by Muslims— as a
shared threat uniting Christians and Jews in Europe and elsewhere— and
as intimately linked to alleged wider Muslim ambitions of conquest and
rule, thus casting the contemporary state of Israel as a foremost defender
and avant- garde of Western European Enlightenment, and having shared
interests with the people, if not the leaders, of Europe.
Bat Ye’or is also able to rhetorically cast historically secular and nation-
alist Palestinian movements such as the PLO and Fatah as “Islamic” and
“Muslim” pure and simple, so that the civil war in Lebanon, as well as the
Palestinian struggle for independence since 1948, are rewritten as simply
a struggle for Muslim “global domination.” In Bat Ye’or’s view, echoing
the view of the former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, “Palestinians”
simply do not exist, the term being an alleged historical fabrication by
Arabs bent on denying Israeli Jews’ historical rights to a state. Bat Ye’or’s
theories are— as observers have noted— unthinkable without reference to
the idea of Israel as a frame around which all global politics ultimately
revolve.22 In this, Ye’or’s work ultimately and paradoxically mirrors the
work of the many pro- Palestinian activists— whether secular nationalist
or Islamist— who often reduce Middle East pol
itics to the question of
Palestine.
In the context of the attempted genocide of Muslims in Bosnia in the
1990s, Bat Ye’or also moved in the circles of Serbian ultranationalists and
their Western European and American supporters. In the midst of the
Balkan Wars in the 1990s, she spoke to the Lord Byron Foundation for
Balkan Studies in Chicago. This foundation was established by Alfred
Sherman, a one- time advisor to the British conservative prime minister
Margaret Thatcher and a respected member of Britain’s Jewish commu-
nity, and Srdja Trifkovic, a close associate of and political advisor to Serbian
ultranationalists Radovan Karadžić and Biljana Plavšić. Bat Ye’or had by
this time begun to be widely read by Serbian ultranationalist intellectuals.
In 1994 she declared to Midstream, a Jewish monthly journal in the US, that
Bosnia was a “spearhead” for the impending “Islamization” of Europe.23
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Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
175
Her speech to the Lord Byron Foundation in Chicago in 1995 was titled
“Myths and Politics. The Tolerant Pluralistic Islamic Society: Origin of a
Myth.” Bat Ye’or’s contrived and tendentious representation of Bosnian
Islam, with its long- standing secular and pluralistic traditions, stands in
stark contrast with the ethnographic work of anthropologists on Bosnian
Muslims before and during the Bosnian War.24 Her speech would later
be reproduced in its entirety in Breivik’s 2011 cut- and- paste tract 2083: A
European Declaration of Independence.25 The radical Right and counter-
jihadist authors who inspired Breivik were all authors who promote
Eurabia theories. The term “Eurabia” is mentioned in Breivik’s 2083 no
less than 171 times.26 In blogposts dating back to 2009, Breivik names Bat
Ye’or, Robert Spencer, and Fjordman as his main sources of inspiration.27
It was Fjordman, by far the most influential on Breivik’s ideas of these
three,28 who introduced the work of Littman in Norwegian mainstream
media in the form of an op- ed in the Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang
as early as in 2003.29 Fjordman was introduced to Bat Ye’or and Robert
Spencer at a counter- jihadist conference in commemoration of the slain
Dutch right- wing populist Pim Fortuyn in The Hague in 2006.30 Fjordman
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 30
