Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 31
subsequently maintained a regular correspondence with his main source
of inspiration, Bat Ye’or.31
Another central media and organizational platform for the wider in-
ternational dissemination of Bat Ye’or’s work— especially in the Nordic
countries— has been the Copenhagen- based Danish International Free
Press Society (IFPS) and its associated media outlets and publications.
Bat Ye’or is a board member of the IFPS, run from Copenhagen by the
former Danish newspaper editor and historian Lars Hedegaard. The
IFPS was established in 2009 as an extension of its Danish precursor,
the Danish Free Press Society, itself established in 2004 in the aftermath
of the so- called “cartoon crisis” of 2005– 6. The board of directors and the
board of advisors of the IFPS is a virtual who’s who of international actors
and intellectuals in the counter- jihadist movement, including the editor
of the Brussels Journal Paul Beliën; the editor of the blog Gates of Vienna
Edward S. May; Andrew Bostom, Helle Merete Brix, Brigitte Gabriel,
Frank Gaffney, Ibn Warraq, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton; the editor of
Jihad Watch Robert Spencer; Mark Steyn; and Geert Wilders. Hedegaard,
who was first convicted but later acquitted for hate speech under the
Danish General Penal Code for statements to the effect that “Muslims
are rapists” in 2009/ 10, survived an assassination attempt at his home in
Copenhagen in 2013.
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Part of Bat Ye’or’s appeal in these circles no doubt derives from the
fact that her work has been published by some academic publishers in the
US, and that her works, although anchored in generalizations and con-
spiracy theories,32 often mimic the prose style and the scholarly apparatus
of serious academic texts. There is also a discernable tendency in counter-
jihadist circles to play up nonexistent academic credentials in an intertex-
tual process of mutual citation, and to ascribe legitimacy to authors who
demonstrate a certain level of command of transliterated Arabic, readily
discernable in the case of Bat Ye’or.
Major works and concepts
Bat Ye’or is the author of eight books, six of which are available in English.
Her first book was The Jews of Egypt: An Overview of 3,000 Years of History
( Les Juifs en Egypte: Aperçu sur 3000 ans d’histoire), a short seventy- five
page booklet published in Geneva in 1971 under the pen name “Yahudiya
Masriya” (Arabic for “Egyptian Jewess”). Her major works include The
Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam in 1985; The Decline of Eastern
Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh- Twentieth Century in 1996;
Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (coauthored with David
G. Littman) in 2001; Eurabia: The Euro- Arab Axis in 2005; and Europe,
Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate in 2011. Bat Ye’or
has also published a number of essays in more obscure French and Italian
journals, as well as contributed to volumes edited by anti- Muslim activists
such as Robert Spencer.33
Though anti- Muslim sentiment has long been a staple of Bat Ye’or’s
work, it has arguably undergone a process of increasing “radicalization”
and is in her later works increasingly untethered from any serious aca-
demic scholarship on Islam and the Muslim world. As has become com-
monplace in radical literature and discourse on Islam and Muslims in
Europe and the US in recent years, Ye’or treats “Islam” and “Muslims”
as self- evident transhistorical, transnational, and determinative entities.34
Although references to the work of Bernard Lewis still appear, the “radi-
calization” in Bat Ye’or’s recent work means that her texts increasingly de-
pend on authors and intellectuals who share her worldviews and political
orientations. One may regard the counter- jihadist genre in which Bat Ye’or
moves as a form of hypertext in which authors such as Oriana Fallaci and
Robert Spencer appear over and over again, along with Bat Ye’or herself,
17
Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
177
as if they constituted authoritative sources on Islam, Muslims, and the
Muslim world.
Eurabia
The concept of “Eurabia” is a key concept in Bat Ye’or’s last three books.
The term was popularized by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in her
widely translated 2004 book The Force of Reason ( La forza della ragione) and
picked up by the Stanford historian Niall Ferguson in a 2004 New York
Times op- ed essay with the same title,35 but the term itself was not coined
by any of these authors. It originated with an obscure and by all accounts
unsuccessful French literary and cultural journal, Eurabia, published by
the European Committee for the Coordination of Friendship Associations
with the Muslim World (Comité européen des associations d’amitié avec
le monde arabe) in 1975. According to Sedgwick,36 Bat Ye’or first adopted
the term and the meaning she gives it in 2002, following an article by the
Israeli- Canadian reporter Sam Orbaum in the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem
Post.37
The original journal Eurabia published only four issues in 1975 before
it ceased publication, but for Bat Ye’or the term is nothing less than the
cornerstone of an Arab Muslim and EU- led conspiracy to establish Muslim
control over Europe and an Islamic caliphate. By virtue of this conspiracy,
hidden from public view yet discernable and decipherable for select
“seers” like Bat Ye’or herself, Europe has evolved from “a Judeo- Christian
civilization” to a “post– Judeo- Christian civilization that is subservient to
the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.”38 This
whole conspiracy, and the monumental shifts engendered by it, results
from “the oil crisis of 1973 when the European Economic Community
(EEC), at the initiative of France and the Arab League, established the
Euro- Arab Dialogue (EAD).”39 The main villain of Bat Ye’or’s account is
France. In light of what is known about the relations between French po-
litical elites and the average Muslim and Arab in postwar France, and es-
pecially during and after the Algerian War of Independence,40 it might
seem surprising that these very same elites should have conspired with
Arab Muslim leaders in spearheading a covert “Islamization of Europe.”
But for Bat Ye’or, since 1973, “the EAD has been in the vanguard of engi-
neering a convergence between Europe and the Islamic states of North
Africa and the Middle East.”41 Eurabia is ultimately directed against Israel
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and its closest Western ally, the US, and reflects “increasing Islamic pen-
etration of Europe and its growing influence on European policy.” “Euro-
Arab culture is permeating, even overwhelming, all levels of Western
European society.”42
There are any number of EU- employed and associated “Eurabians” se-
cretly working to further the Eurabia conspira
cy, for the “faceless networks
of a huge administration uniting the EU and the OIC (Organization of
The Islamic Conference)” have managed to create “a Kafkaesque world
functioning as a totalitarian anonymous system” that maintains “polit-
ical correctness and censorship.”43 Exactly how this feat of political and
societal influence is achieved by structurally and often financially weak
postcolonial states, which are linked in highly ambiguous ways to Muslim
populations in Europe, is not addressed in any detail by Bat Ye’or. She
seems either unaware of or unconcerned by the mirroring in her anti-
Muslim Eurabia theories of the anti- Semitic Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion.44
Dhimmitude
Another key concept for Bat Ye’or is the concept of “dhimmitude.” The
term is derived from the Arabic term for historically protected “peo-
ples of the book” under Islamic rule— the dhimmi— but is in fact a ne-
ologism. For Bat Ye’or, the term refers to an “obligatory submission [of
non- Muslim peoples] by war or surrender to Islamic domination.”45 “The
study of dhimmitude, then, is the study of the progressive Islamization of
Christian civilizations,” according to Bat Ye’or.46
Bat Ye’or first introduced the term in her 1991 monograph The
Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam. In Bat Ye’or’s conception,
dhimmitude includes “the whole web of disabling political, historical,
sociological, and cultural circumstances that enmesh a Christian or
Jewish population that has been brought under Islamic hegemony.”47
It even refers to a state of mind in contemporary Western societies,
which does not “develop all at once” but is rather a “long process that
involves many elements and a specific mental conditioning.”48 One
can be living in dhimmitude without knowing it, given that “the psy-
chological impact of intellectual terrorism” is such that the West had,
according by Bat Ye’or, already “entered into a phase of dhimmitude
without realizing it” by 1996.49 The apocalyptic strains of this line of
argument are apparent.
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Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
179
Jihad
The term “jihad,” understood not as Muslims themselves understand it
(as polyvalent and contextual)50 but as “war” against “infidels” pure and
simple is, furthermore, a key term for Bat Ye’or. Jihad, in Bat Ye’or’s rend-
ering, is what defines and determines Islam’s and Muslims’ essence. It
is a transhistorical and transcultural essence that is hereby defined. Bat
Ye’or argues that “wherever the ideology of jihad and its precepts have
not been rejected, Muslims relate to non- Muslims within its conceptual
framework.”51 The elaboration of the concept and doctrine of jihad “devel-
oped by Muslim theologians and jurists beginning in the eighth century
established the relationship between Muslims in terms of belligerency,
armistices, and submission.” It is, according to Bat Ye’or, “a fundamental
part of Islamic jurisprudence and literature, since it is through jihad that
the Islamic community is developed and expanded”— a “collective duty” to
be pursued “by military means or peaceful efforts— propaganda, speech,
or subversive activities— within a non- Muslim nation.”52 For Bat Ye’or,
dhimmitude is nothing but “the direct outcome of jihad.”53
This essentialist rendering of the concept of jihad in the lives of
Islam and Muslims past and present of course raises the question of why
Muslims and Christians have in historical contact zones on the whole
managed to live remarkably peacefully together, and why Muslims could
historically be both allies and foes of Christians and Western empires, co-
lonialism, and world wars.54 But such empirical details are of little interest
in the grand scheme that Bat Ye’or constructs, in which it is an article of
faith that whenever people of Muslim background engage in warfare, it is
down to an essential motive derived from Islamic tradition, rather than
matters relating to politics, interests, or resources.
Conclusion
Bat Ye’or’s representations of Islam and Muslims are, for all her claims
to be writing history, profoundly ahistorical. There is, however, a constant
throughout Bat Ye’or’s work, which opposes the myth of an interfaith
utopia past or present to the idea of a non- Muslim choice between either
willing “submission to Islam” (as in dhimmitude) or opposition and re-
sistance to it. It is in this sense that it is hardly surprising that Bat Ye’or’s
theories have come to inspire violent acts by individuals who self- identify
with the counter- jihadist movement of which she is a central part.
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Notes
1. Arun Kundnani, “Blind Spot? Security Narratives and Far-
Right Violence
in Europe,” ICCT Research Paper, 2012; Hope Not Hate, The Counter- Jihad
Movement: Anti- Muslim Hatred from the Margins to the Mainstream (London: Hope
Not Hate, 2012), https:// web.archive.org/ web/ 20121011225433/ http:// www.
hopenothate.org.uk/ counter- jihad/ .
2. Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro- Arab Axis (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press,
2005).
3. Bat Ye’or, Europe, Globalization and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate
(Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).
4. Sindre Bangstad, “Eurabia Comes to Norway,” Islam and Christian- Muslim
Relations 24, no. 3 (2013): 369– 391.
5. Sindre Bangstad, Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (London: Zed
Books, 2014).
6. Sindre Bangstad and Frode Helland, Serving the Norwegian State with
Islamophobia: The Case of Hege Storhaug and Human Rights Service (HRS)
(forthcoming).
7. Christhard Hoffman and Vibeke Moe, eds., “Holdninger til jøder og muslimer i
Norge 2017,” HL- Centre report, 2017.
8. Adi Schwartz, “The Protocols of the Elders of Brussels,” Haaretz, June 20, 2006,
https:// www.haaretz.com/ 1.4919785.
9. Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation
of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
10. Craig S. Smith, “Europe’s Jews Seek Solace on the Right,” New York Times,
February 20, 2005, http:// www.nytimes.com/ 2005/ 02/ 20/ weekinreview/
europes- jews- seek- solace- on- the- right.html, stated that the then twenty- four-year- old Gisèle Oreibi was formally expelled from Egypt along with her parents.
This was never the case, but she did arrive in London as a stateless person
in 1957.
11. Schwartz, “The Protocols of the Elders of Brussels.”
12. John W. Whitehead, “Eurabia: The Euro- Arab Axis– An Interview with Bat Ye’or,”
Oldspeak, June 9, 2005, https:// www.rutherford.org/ publications_ resources/
oldspeak/ eurabia_ the_ euro_ arab_ axis_ an_ interview_ with_ bat_ yeor.
13. Michael M. Laskier, “The Emigration of the Jews from the Arab World,” in A
History of Jewish- Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, tra
ns. Jane
Marie Todd, ed. Michael B. Smith, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Benjamin Stora
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 415– 433.
14. Bat Ye’or and David Littman, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide,
trans. Miriam Kochan (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 2001).
15. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984), 194.
18
Bay Yeʼor and Eurabia
181
16. Mark Sedgwick, “The Origins and Growth of the Eurabia Narrative,” undated
and incomplete draft manuscript provided to the author.
17. According to the coverage of this conference in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, it
was a French Muslim academic who reacted to Littman’s appearance and lecture
at this conference. See Schwartz, “The Protocols of the Elders of Brussels.” The
author of this essay has however been in contact with non- Israeli academics of
Jewish background who were present at this conference, and who deemed her
presence and appearance there “bizarre.” Haaretz’s rendering of what transpired
at this conference appears to be attributable to Wistrich’s comments. Wistrich,
a leading scholar of antisemitism, had by the time of inviting Littman to this
conference also involved himself in the production of Islamophobic ideas and
sentiments: he is listed as the academic advisor on the controversial 2005 doc-
umentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, funded and produced
in the US by the so- called Clarion Fund. According to the sociologist Cristopher
A. Bail, the Clarion Fund was a “non- profit organization funded in 2006 to ‘edu-
cate the American public on the most urgent threat of radical Islam.’ ” Its advi-
sory board “featured prominent members of anti- Muslim organizations such as
Frank Gaffney . . ., Daniel Pipes . . . and Walid Phares.” The film “made frequent
comparisons between radical Islamic groups and the Nazis, claiming to pro-
vide an “insider’s view of the hatred . . . radicals are teaching . . . and their goal
of world domination.” Christopher A. Bail, Terrified: How Anti- Muslim Fringe
Organizations Became Mainstream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2015), 83.
18. Sydney H. Griffith, review of The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to