Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the EU’s thirst to destroy Israel in light of Bat Ye’or’s predictions:
Bat Ye’or is a scholar of Islamic history, and her specialty has been the study of how non-Muslims — Christians and Jews (she does not deal with those parts of Asia, beyond the Middle East, that succumbed to Muslim rule) — have been treated in lands conquered by Islam.
She is also a student of current events, as in her recent Eurabia.
And she is also, one realizes, a scriptwriter: for Eurabia and her other books, especially Islam and Dhimmitude, provide a script for the behavior of those caught in a trap of their own making, which is what the Europeans are today. The trap consists of several parts.
There was the initial indifference to what Islam was all about, and an ignoring of the misgivings and fears of the real experts (such as Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq) and instead, a heeding of the bought-and-paid for apologists, or the ideological children of this age, examples of whom can be found in Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy. This indifference led to permitting millions of people who possess an ideology that teaches them to despise Infidels, and to wish to subjugate them as is only proper, and certainly not to accept or admire or wish to be anything like them, to settle deep behind what they themselves regard, essentially, as enemy lines — in the Infidel lands that will someday, through Da’wa and demographic not military conquest, fall to them.
There has been every kind of refusal to see, every kind of refusal even to study the matter for fear of what may be found out, for then what? How can the elites of Europe, and especially of France, admit to their colossal error — to those over whom they have lorded it, in whose name they presume to rule? How can they even admit to themselves what an error, over so many decades, has been made?
And there is a refusal even to begin to consider how to put a stop to this, and even to reverse the Muslim presence in Europe. Measures which were once considered perfectly acceptable in order to protect a country from what was deemed to be a permanent security risk are now considered beyond the pale — see the Benes Decree of 1946 in Czechoslovakia, or similar measures by Poland and other governments in Central and Eastern Europe. They were attempting to put paid to the threat, as they saw it — and had had certain experiences to justify that feeling — of large discrete communities of ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche, within their borders.
Instead, it is far easier especially for the panjandrums to meet at the E.U. and find ways to appease the Arabs and Muslims — as if somehow, without the slightest evidence, this will do the trick. And the easiest coin to offer is Israel. The rights of Israel as a successor state to Mandatory Palestine, which would have to be based on all sorts of things, including the intent and words of the Mandate for Palestine as set out by the League of Nations’ Mandate Commission (and the U.N. inherited the Mandate, as it did all of the League’s Mandates, and was not free to change them), the study of the demographic data and the cadastral records of the area under the Ottomans in the 19th century and 20th centuries, the comprehension of what had been the fate of the Jews living under Islamic rule, and continued to be right up through the 20th century — all of this escapes these appeasers who will not be saved, will not for a moment be saved, from whatever fate it is that they are preparing for Israel. They do not make the connection, because in order to do so they would have to understand the unchanging contents of the canonical texts of Islam, and what the evidence of 1350 years of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims would tell them. And that would be entirely too upsetting.
So it’s the mixture as before. Forget about historic rights. Forget about the League of Nations. Forget about the Arab and Muslim rewriting of history, whether it be the claim that Jesus was a “Palestinian” Arab, or the Canaanites were Arabs, or that Muslims were in England in the 8th century greatly affecting all of English culture, and of course without the Muslim influence European civilization could scarcely be said to exist, and what about all those Muslims who not only were in Columbus’ crew, but apparently were on shore, speaking Arabic, waiting to greet that same crew?
Forget about the spectacle of murders in Amsterdam, and the Allahu-Akbar rioters and looters and arsonists in France and the twelve churches they attacked in their “Nothing-to-do-with-Islam” riots. Forget about the death threats to political leaders in Norway, the death threats to publishers of a newspaper in Denmark, the vandalism of cemeteries, the attacks on synagogues and on churches outside of France as well. Forget about the bombs in the Madrid subway and the London underground. Forget about the permanent security threat that that Muslim population now represents, because the texts cannot be changed, and one can never be sure who fully believes those texts, and is willing to act on them, or who, unobservant at one time, for any number of reasons, including the purely personal, may become observant.
So the all-purpose answer is to throw Israel to the wolves. But that will not sate their appetite. It will whet it — and meanwhile, in Europe itself, where some will continue to allow themselves to believe that abandoning Israel, ignoring its case and its rights and the minimum demands of justice, will help Europe somehow escape the same fate (how, exactly?). They fail to understand the nature of Islamic triumphalism. Compromise makes no sense in Islam. How could it? How can Dar al-Islam ever accept the permanent existence of Dar al-Harb, much less an Infidel state where once Muslims ruled (Israel, Spain, India, Sicily, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary)? It goes against all of Islam. A victory anywhere simply encourages the push forward elsewhere. This has to be understood.
Bat Ye’or has written the script. She has predicted exactly what Europe would do, how it would behave.
Her view is bleak. Understandably so. But one is sure that she would be delighted to be proven wrong. She would be delighted if only, in Europe, there were those who would behave otherwise than as she has so grimly predicted
They should try to do Bat Ye’or a favor. The only thing she wishes for, in Europe, is to be proven wrong.
A fantastic situation.