This is an address by Bat Ye’or at a seminar in the French Senate on June 6, 2004. It is also a foretaste of an essay collection I am editing that will appear around the end of the year from Prometheus Books: The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. This essay along with many others by Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq, Daniel Pipes, Mark Durie and other renowned authors will be included. It will also feature some never-before-published material from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that illuminates how Islamic countries are so far from being the tolerant states of myth that they often contravene elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which they are signatories.
From FrontPage:
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.” 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.
Read it all.