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Books

Essay

THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS
By Simon Kuper

Financial Times (UK)
November 10, 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4cf288ba-8c13-11dc-af4d-0000779fd2ac.html

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

Bat Ye’or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye’or is Hebrew for “daughter of the Nile," the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.

Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye’or’s genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.

The four books here provide a fair summary of the “Eurabia" genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.

A fixed trope of “Eurabia" books is the writer behaving as though only he or she and a few other resistance heroes see Europe’s impending doom. Bruce Bawer, a U.S. journalist living in Oslo, credits his aunt for coming up with his title, While Europe Slept, but Melanie Phillips sees Britain as forever asleep too. “Only if we take up this civilizational gauntlet that has been thus thrown down at us will we stop sleepwalking to defeat," she concludes her book. (Phillips writes for the Daily Mail, and reading Londonistan feels like being imprisoned with a never-ending Mail editorial.)

All these authors start with disclaimers that not all Muslims support terrorist jihad. This is then swiftly forgotten as the plans for jihad in Europe are outlined. Ye’or, for whom Muslims are always the same, describes jihad as a 1,400-year-old strategy. Like Bawer, she explains that “they" never got over losing Andalusia in 1492.

Mixed with the hysteria are kernels of truth. Phillips’ Londonistan rightly recalls that in the 1990s the British authorities let many radical jihadists settle in London. Some later plotted terrorism against the U.K. Phillips leaps from this to claiming that Britons cannot see the terrorist threat. However, this is rather negated by the fact that almost all her information about British terrorism comes from British newspapers.

About 16 million nominal Muslims live in the European Union, less than 4 per cent of the E.U. population. A tiny minority are terrorists. Nobody sane denies that. But the “Eurabia" theorists -- with the partial exception of Walter Laqueur, the most judicious of them -- seem to regard the mass of Muslims as the enemy. Phillips sees “a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other."

A favorite rhetorical trick of these writers is the pars pro toto: isolated examples of Islamic extremism come to stand for a vast Muslim movement. It’s true, as Laqueur twice notes, that one group said: “We shall hoist our flags over 10 Downing Street." But this is atypical. European Muslims almost all vote for mainstream parties, mostly of the left. In surveys the great majority profess satisfaction with their lives in Europe.

But in these books, the Islamic notion of the global umma (community) becomes reality: all Muslims, wherever they are born, Sunni or Shia, doctor and dock-worker, march behind the same green banner. (Again, only Laqueur notes the many rifts.) Because Muslims are united, it’s possible to generalize about them in ways that we sleeping Europeans might consider deeply questionable. Bawer writes: “For these *beurs* -- the universal term of the French-born progeny of North African immigrants -- the meaning of life is derived from their hatred for French society." Bawer, incidentally, is even-handed in his ethnic jibes: a white Frenchman’s remarks are dismissed as “Gallic jibber-jabber." Or here is Laqueur, on younger European Muslims: “The rapping . . . is as ugly as their language, consisting mainly of expletives and curses, the lingo of the underworld . . . devoid of even a trace of humor, as in Cockney or the Berlin patois."

According to the “Eurabia" thesis, these youths will inherit Europe. They pump out babies while white Europeans are barren. Laqueur portrays a future Europe in which some countries have Muslim majorities.

He does grant that birth rates are likely significantly to decrease “eventually in the Middle East and North Africa." In fact, they already have. In 1970 Algerian and Moroccan women averaged about seven children each. Today the Moroccan figure is below three, while the CIA World Factbook estimates the Algerian, Turkish, and Tunisian figures at below two, lower than France’s. No serious demographer expects an Islamic takeover.

The other problem with forecasting numbers of European Muslims in 2100 is the premise that sixth-generation European Muslims will still be a foreign body in the continent -- Islam as a bacillus that even secular former Muslims carry around, forever dangerous.

In the imagined “Eurabia," the Muslims are taking over. Europeans aren’t resisting. In fact, it is 1938 again, or in Bawer’s phrase, “Europe’s Weimar moment." A keyword of the “Eurabia" genre is therefore “appeasement" -- once of Hitler, now of Muslims. Phillips urges a British-American alliance, as “when they stood shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany," with the U.S. providing “muscle" and Britain “backbone." But unfortunately, Britain has gone wobbly. She expects this will prove fatal, because it is correct “at least in part" to see “Islam as a successor to Nazism and communism." It follows, for all four authors, that another exodus or Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is likely, though Laqueur grants that “by taking a low profile they might be able to survive in the new conditions."

Why is Europe supine? (Sorry -- the “Eurabia" habit of grand rhetorical questions is infectious.) Ye’or has the fullest theory. She explains that something called the “Euro-Arab Dialogue" -- with a permanent secretariat of 350 members, and a seat in Paris -- runs a plot to hand over Europe to the Arabs, and to destroy Israel. “In just thirty years (1973-2003), the Euro-Arab Dialogue has successfully brought about the mutation of European civilization, giving birth to a hybrid culture: Eurabia -- as foreseen in 1969 in Cairo by the European Committee for Coordination of Friendship Associations with the Arab World." In her book if nowhere else, the E.U. has a united foreign policy.

The “Euro-Arab Dialogue" is so secret that hardly anyone knows it exists except Ye’or and Saleh al-Mani, who wrote a book about it in shaky English in 1983. It seems probable that “European-Arab dialogue" (EAD) is a phrase European officials and academics occasionally use to describe the talking shops they convene with Arabs, as with all other regions, and that Ye’or may have decided to capitalize the “d’’ in “dialogue." Certainly she believes that history is made by conferences. Her book is full of dark references to events such as “the 1977 Euro-Arab seminar of Venice," “organized in order to promote the diffusion in Europe of the knowledge of the Arab language and civilization." The EAD’s plot accounts for Europeans’ otherwise mystifying opposition to the Iraq war. The anti-war demonstrations of 2003, Ye’or explains, were “anti-Jewish demonstrations," “in favor of Saddam Hussein," or of Yassir Arafat, or “mass anti-American demonstrations."

Phillips has a different theory about Britain’s demise. Wonderfully, it unites all the enemies of her journalistic career. Jihad is conquering Britain because intellectuals, transsexuals, judges, Antonio Gramsci, the human-rights brigade, gays who adopt children, et cetera, have destroyed the country’s confidence in its own values. So Phillips’ former employer, the *Guardian*, is “a virtual mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood," while Islamic jihad is “the armed wing of the British left."

The sailor in the Royal Navy who received legal permission “to carry out Satanic rituals aboard the frigate HMS Cumberland" crops up not once but twice in Phillips’ book, which like Ye’or’s could have been cut by half without losing substance. Tabloid-speak takes up a lot of space: “A seismic development within the Arab world was to cement and expand the Muslim hatred of the Jews being fanned by the Nazi flames."

Admittedly it’s courageous of Phillips to keep supporting the Iraq war in the face of all evidence. She is a bitter-ender. Reading her is to be transported back to the bright neocon morning of 2002. Now as then, good confronts evil. For Phillips as for Ye’or, Israel is always right, and the Palestinians (Ye’or argues there is no such thing) always wrong.

Laqueur is a more geostrategic thinker than the others (and more pompous). An august American historian born in Weimar Germany in 1921, he worries about Europe’s diminishing global role. To him history is a winner-takes-all game that Europe is losing, with its shrinking population and armies, and its modest economic growth. This is such a non-European point of view that it’s hard even to argue with. If things are so bad in Europe, why are they so good? The continent since 1945 has lost geopolitical power but gained probably the best quality of life in global history. People in the EU live longer than anywhere else ever except Japan, are richer than any previous generation, have far more leisure time than Americans, and have avoided wars on their own soil for 60 years. Laqueur acknowledges much of this. As for the future, Europe is doing more than other regions to fight climate change, a topic ignored in “Eurabia" literature. (Phillips has dismissed “the global warming fraud" as “utter garbage.") Nor will Europeans be conquered by Muslims with collapsing birth rates, the overwhelming majority of whom say in surveys that they oppose terrorism.

Yes, that leaves about 15 per cent of European Muslims who profess sympathy for violence, and a tiny group willing to commit it. Islamic terrorists have committed about as much carnage in Europe in the last dozen years as far-left terrorists did in the 1970s. This is not Armageddon. But to concede that would render “Eurabia" literature pointless. Its target market seems to be the U.S. Of the four books only Londonistan seems to have had much circulation in Britain, probably because hardly anybody who actually lives in Europe could take these dystopias seriously. The only way to interest many U.S. readers in Europe’s tame politics is to predict catastrophe. Bawer, for instance, warns of “the end of the West as we know it -- and perhaps the beginning of the end of freedom, too."

These are polemics, not reports. Any source will do: Bawer cites Ye’or, an Amsterdam taxi driver, a woman in a Swedish bar, or often no source at all. In Laqueur’s book, a planned mosque for “40,000 faithful" in east London apparently pops up again 34 pages later as “a mega mosque . . . planned to accommodate 70,000 worshippers."

But the many factual errors in most of these books may be beside the point. The “Eurabia" genre does not belong to the “reality-based community." Rather, it exists to meet emotional needs. Its anti-Europeanism is a satisfying retort to European anti-Americanism. It also has a political message: if the Europeans, America’s traditional allies, have folded before Islam, then the U.S. must go it alone.

--Simon Kuper is an FT writer based in Paris.

While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within
By Bruce Bawer
Doubleday $23.95, 256 pages

The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent
By Walter Laqueur
Thomas Dunne £12.99, 256 pages

Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within
By Melanie Phillips
Gibson Square £8.99, 384 pages

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
By Bat Ye’or
Farleigh Dickinson University Press £15.50, 384 pages