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WARRIOR BAT YEOR WEIGHS IN ON WARRIOR WILDERS: “Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery”

Bat Yeor, author of Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, warned us decades ago. She read the historical “tea leaves”, produced the evidence, and documented the deliberate Euro-Arab axis in her seminal work. She called it. All of it. If you haven’t read Eurabia, you must — if only to understand how Europe sold out to Islam. “Over the years, Euro-Arab collaboration developed at all levels: political, economic, religious and in the transfer of technologies, education, universities, radio, television, press, publishers, and writers unions. This structure became the channel for Arab immigration into Europe, of anti-Americanism, and of Judeophobia, which — linked with a general hatred of the West and its denigration — constituted a pseudo-culture imported from Arab countries.” (more here) In Bat Yeor’s piece at NRO, she explains the Islamic machine at work in the persecution of Geert Wilders and anyone who defends the West. Bat Yeor is my hero (if you missed my video interview with her, go here) Good on NRO for running this now. Bostom adds: Bat Ye’or, my inspiration, mentor, and dear friend has written an important essay, [1] published today at NRO. Elucidating how Geert Wilders is pitted against the cultural, monetary, and military machinery of the 57 Muslim member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—whose bluff as a “bulwark” against the Orwellian phantasm of “un-Islamic terrorism” I called [2] There—Bat Ye’or’s essay poses this existential question: “Does defending Western values constitute ‘inciting hatred’?” Geert Wilders and the Fight for Europe Does defending Western values constitute “inciting hatred”? By Bat Yeor Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the country because he constituted “a threat to public policy.” Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was sent back to Holland — where he has further legal troubles. Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders for “inciting hatred and discrimination” and “insulting Muslim worshippers” through his public statements and his 2008 film, Fitna. The order to proceed with the criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC’s aim is to punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.’s Wilders ban possible. The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body. The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are formidable. The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions collaborating at the highest levels with international organizations in order to implement its political objectives worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia, which puts pressure on Western governments and international bodies to adopt laws punishing “Islamophobia” and blasphemy; and the newly created Islamic International Court of Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia. In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation of the Caliphate. The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting the political, historical, religious, and human rights of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim countries — such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece — as well as Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the Muslim fight for “legitimate self-determination” in “Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.” It has condemned the “continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan,” and it expresses its full solidarity with “the just cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus” and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur. The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem) when that city has been “liberated” from Israeli control. In its efforts to defend the “true image” of Islam and combat its defamation, the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish “Islamophobia” and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities. The OIC has massive funding from oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western media and academia and in countless “dialogues.” It influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by the Western nations’ own leftist parties. Hence, we have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with impunity in the cities of Europe — where respect for human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values. Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe’s civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe’s independence from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms. He had received serious death threats even before Fitna was released. Many Muslims in the West support him, but Geert Wilders’s principal weapons are his courage and his willingness to resist even his own government, which is slowly submitting to the OIC’s pressures. Wilders’s enemies pretend that he is an insignificant personality who makes “provocative” statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation were self-interest, he could do far better by courting the OIC’s favors — as so many Europeans are doing, consciously or unconsciously — rather than risking his freedom and indeed his life. — Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Uno stralcio del libro di Bat Ye’or  ”Il declino della cristianità sotto l’islam“

La dhimmitudine è un fenomeno storico vivente, con i suoi periodi di espansione e di arretramento. Numerosi popoli ne sono stati toccati, e milioni di individui hanno subito le sue restrizioni (…) La dhimmitudine – attraverso i suoi tipici strumenti, il jihād e la sharī‘a – è stata un motore decisivo della storia umana. A partire dal suo originario nucleo di espansione, l’Arabia, ha dato luogo a continue guerre in più continenti. Ha provocato ribellioni a non finire e ripetuti interventi armati dei paesi europei e della Russia; nel XIX secolo, poi, ha letteralmente dominato la politica degli Stati occidentali, divisi tra la sua abolizione o la sua conservazione nell’area balcanica. La dhimmitudine ha inghiottito nella morte infiniti popoli e brillanti civiltà. Ha plasmato e distrutto innumerevoli generazioni, ha condizionato intere mentalità. Ancor oggi essa mobilita forze politiche e militari di livello planetario (…) Questo progetto di islamizzazione di enormi territori e miriadi di popoli (dalla Russia al Sudan, dal Maghreb all’Indo), che avrebbe potuto fallire – e spesso la storia sembra effettivamente esitare – deve il suo successo tanto all’ardore impetuoso dei combattenti islamici e all’acume dei suoi politici quanto alla venalità, ai tradimenti, all’attiva collaborazione dei leader dhimmī e dei rinnegati ambiziosi (…). qui

E sempre a proposito di religione di pace e tolleranza, in Egitto studenti musulmani hanno lanciato pietre contro chiese e case di copti per vendicare l’arresto di 4 islamici accusati di aver ucciso un cristiano sulla sessantina. E poi qui e qui

La conquista islamica è avvenuta all’insegna del jihad e della sharfa, la guerra santa contro i non musulmani e il diritto fondato sul Corano.

Così esordisce la presentazione del libro “Il declino della cristianità sotto l’Islam. Dalla Jihad alla dhimmitudine” di Bat Ye’or che compare sul blog LiberaliPerIsraele (sottotitolo  “la libertà dell’Occidente si difende sotto le mura di Gerusalemme”).

Ci ho messo un po’ a capire cos’era la sharfa. Poi, seguendo i legami sintattici, ho capito che era un refuso: si parlava di sharia.

Sulla frase ci sarebbero migliaia di righe da spendere, decine e decine di esempi da fare, ma lasciamo perdere.

Voglio solo sottolineare che questo libro è del 1991 ma in Italia esce solo nel settembre del 2009.

Lo pubblica la Lindau, editrice a me già nota per aver pubblicato un vecchissimo libro di Bernard Lewis foriero di quelle antiquate elucubrazioni riguardanti le civiltà che sono alla base della recente teoria del conflitto di civiltà.

Dò un’occhiata alle pubblicazioni della Lindau e mi si accappona la pelle. Fra gli studi di Romano Amerio e le antologie di papa Ratzinger c’è anche l’ultimo libro di Bat Ye’or, intitolato Verso il califfato universale: come l’Europa è diventata complice dell’espansionismo musulmano.

Vi riporto un pezzo di wikipedia su Bat Ye’or:

La più controversa delle idee di Bat Ye’or è l’affermazione che in Occidente è in atto un processo di islamizzazione. Per esprimere questo concetto ha coniato il termine di Eurabia (dal titolo di un suo libro: The Euro-Arab Axis). L’autrice vede questo processo come il risultato di una politica estera europea conciliante con i paesi arabi, orchestrata dalla Francia per aumentare l’influenza europea ai danni degli Stati Uniti. Secondo questa teoria, il cambio culturale europeo sarebbe cominciato all’indomani della Crisi energetica degli anni Settanta del secolo scorso, che avrebbe obbligato i dirigenti europei a fare concessioni ai paesi produttori di petrolio arabi. Per Ye’or principale conseguenza di questa politica è l’ostilità europea verso Israele.

E poi, aggiungerei, arrivano gli alieni di Mars attacks.

Con tutto il rispetto per l’autrice a cui, a quanto dice la biografia, tolsero la cittadinanza egiziana nel 1955 in quanto ebrea (nel 1959 ottiene la nazionalità britannica).

Ma concludo. Unite le considerazioni  fatte nei miei post del 9 e 10 ottobre con quelle appena fatte.  Aggiungete la visione di questo video:

E infine cercate “muslim demography” so google.

Che divertimento.

Are “Muslim Hordes” About to Overrun the West?

You may have recalled recently that LW contributor Danios did an excellent rebuttal exposing the vapid pseudo-scholarship of self-declared “Islamic scholar” Bat Ye’or. Bat Ye’or’s principle contribution has been the propagation of the wild conspiracy theory known as Eurabia. She argues with the fervor of a misguided zealot that “Europe will be vassal [state], a satellite of the Arab world.” Her “Eurabia” conspiracy theory as summed up by Danios:

[T]he theory is that Arab and Muslim immigration (of “stealth jihadists”) will soon overwhelm Europe, destroy Western culture and civilization forever, and replace the democratic governments with Taliban style theocracies.   While that does sound like an interesting plot for a fictional movie, it is pure insanity to take this seriously.

(By “stealth jihadists,” Bat Ye’or and her pet proxies like Robert Spencer intend to capture the notion of a cadre of evil Muslims who are nonetheless non-violent and work through the system. That of course opens a pandora’s box. It gives them the freedom to redefine who is good and who is bad by mere allegation alone, since they have cancelled out any universally acceptable standard for illict behavior, standards such as “illegal” or “violent.” That raises the ironic question: would Bat Ye’or and her minion Robert Spencer characterize their campaign against Muslims by the pen and keyboard as “subversive stealth propaganda”? Could their infatuation with a “stealth Muslim” operation perhaps be little more than classic projection?)

Even more ironically, other Islamophobes have latched onto transforming Bat Ye’or’s paranoid theories of a “stealth Muslim” take over through  “stealth propaganda videos” distributed on unassuming  public social networks.

On YouTube, there is a video production worthy of Goebbels, that has gone viral. The video, titled simply Muslim Demographics, couples inaccurate facts about Muslim immigration and growth in Europe with ominous foreign sounding music meant to keep you on edge. Who created it remains unknown, but as of today it can be found on other video sharing sites and has received close to 11 million hits on Youtube alone, more than some of Michael Jackson’s most famous music videos.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU 300 250]

The video can be summed up by the paranoid guy in our logo on the upper left of your screen, screaming “The Mooslims! They’re here!” As you can see the video makes wild (and patently false as will come to see) claims, such as “Muslims are reproducing a staggering 8 babies for every 1 French baby,” that “Europe as we know it will cease to exist” giving way to a “Europe dominated by Mooslims and Islamic Republics. “

Seriously? Are they going to get rid of Sauerkraut in Germany? Are they going to tear down the Louvre or Big Ben? Is the Leaning Tower of Pisa going to be replaced by the “The Leaning Minaret?” Are books going to be burned in Amsterdam, next to the shops that sell cannibas?

I digress though, the thought that anyone can believe what is in this video should give people pause. What purpose does it serve at all if not to increase paranoia, ignorance and fear of the “other” scary “Mooslims?”

It is altogether depressing that Muslims immigrating to a society should automatically be viewed as a negative. It is the same right-wing tactic that was used to smear Barack Obama as being a “Mooslim.” The thinking went: if you convince enough people he is a Muslim then no one will vote for him because everyone knows being a Muslim is bad. Instead of viewing Muslim immigration to Europe as reason to fill the demands of Europe’s economy, it is automatically assumed to be evil — that my friends is classic text book Islamophobia.

BBC Radio did a pretty decent job in rebutting the arguments made by the video.

Watch it here:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mINChFxRXQs 300 250]

The most thorough rebuttal of this inaccurate, racist, Islamophobic equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has come from a site called Tiny Frog, which laid bear all the inaccuracies,

Claim: “Historically, no culture has ever reversed a 1.9 fertility rate.”

They provide no source for this claim. However, birth rates do vary over time, and have increased. For example, here’s an image of France’s population over the past two centuries. As you can see, the population size barely changes between 1890 and 1945. Since 1945, the population has grown by 50%. The current fertility rate in France is about 2 children per person.

Wikipedia states:

After 1947 however, France suddenly underwent a demographic recovery that no one could have foreseen. It is a fact that in the 1930s the French government, alarmed by the decline of France’s population, had passed laws to boost the birth rate, giving state benefits to families with children. Nonetheless, no one can quite satisfactorily explain this sudden and unexpected recovery in the demography of France, which was often portrayed as a “miracle” inside France. This demographic recovery was again atypical in the Western World, in the sense that although the rest of the Western World experienced a baby boom immediately after the war, the baby boom in France was much stronger, and above all it lasted longer than in most other countries of the Western World (the United States being one of the few exceptions). In the 1950s and 1960s France enjoyed a population growth of 1% a year, which is the highest growth in the history of France, not even matched in the best periods of the 18th or 19th centuries.

Claim: “A rate of 1.3: impossible to reverse… There is no economic model that can sustain itself during that time.”

It’s true that declining birth rates cause a lot of problems for nations; it’s difficult for workers to pay enough taxes to support the retired generation. A lot of countries (including east-asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) are very worried about this problem.

These numbers are almost right. It’s true that these nations are declining in population. According to nationmaster (which took it’s numbers from the CIA World Factbook), the actual fertility rates are:

France	1.98
England	1.66
Greece	1.36
Germany	1.41
Italy	1.3
Spain	1.3

It’s also worth noting that the fertility rates of these nations have been rising slightly over the past five years. Here’s a look at the historical data:

Spain, historical fertility rates:

2003	1.26
2004	1.27
2005	1.28
2006	1.28
2007	1.29
2008	1.3

France, historical fertility rates: (*note: France reversed a fertility rate that dropped below 1.9)

2003	1.85
2004	1.85
2005	1.85
2006	1.84
2007	1.98
2008	1.98

Germany, historical fertility rates:

2003	1.37
2004	1.38
2005	1.39
2006	1.39
2007	1.4
2008	1.41

Italy, historical fertility rates:

2003	1.26
2004	1.27
2005	1.28
2006	1.28
2007	1.29
2008	1.3

(According to the nationmaster numbers, the UK’s and Greece’ fertility rate stayed relatively constant across the 2003-2008 time period.)

1.3-1.5 sounds approximately right. The highest fertility rate in Europe is 2.02 (Albania), and eastern Europe has some of the lowest fertility rates (Poland 1.27, Ukraine 1.25, Lithuania 1.22).

Claim: “France: 1.8 Children per family, Muslims: 8.1.”

They list of source for this claim, but it’s too small to read. This claim is almost certainly false. First, there isn’t a country in the whole world that has a fertility rate of 8 children, so I doubt that millions of Muslims in France’s are having that many children.

While it’s true that many Muslim nations have high fertility rates (Yemen 6.41, Gaza Strip 5.19, Saudi Arabia 3.89), not all of them do. While I have no source for Muslim birthrates in France, I do know where most of France’s immigrants come from: they come from France’s former colonies. Here’s a map of French immigration by nation:

You can quickly pick out that France’s Muslim immigration comes mainly from four countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Turkey.

What are the fertility rates in these countries?

Morocco	2.57
Algeria	1.82
Tunisia	1.73
Turkey	1.87

Now, it looks very suspicious when they claim French Muslims are averaging 8.1 children per person. In fact, the birthrates in their original countries are lower than birthrates in France. I have a hard time believing that they suddenly become hyperfertile when they live in France.

I had actually read an article a few years ago (again, by an Christian-Right author). He talked about how he met a Palestinian woman living in Paris who was raising her 6 children. He then implied that all French Muslims were having this many children. Of course, that was a huge generalization. It’s true that Palestinians (on average) have a lot of children, but it’s false to claim that most Muslims living in France (most of them not from Palestine) were having this many children. Yet, he tried to slide this claim past his readers.

Claim: “In the Netherlands, 50% of all newborns are Muslim.”

That same article I read a few years ago claimed that 50% of all newborns within a particular Dutch city were Muslim (which may or may not be accurate). I have to wonder if that claim was generalized to “In the Netherlands, 50% of all newborns are Muslim.”

There are approximately 1 million Muslims in the Netherlands, a nation of 16.6 million people. So Muslims makeup about 6% of the total population. Yet, we’re supposed to believe 50% of the children born in the Netherlands are Muslim? The fertility rate in the Netherlands is 1.66 children per person. Mathematically, Muslims in the Netherlands would need to have 26 children to makeup 50% of the births in the country.

Further, if we look at the countries of origin of these Muslims, we find that 2/3rds immigrated from Turkey (1.87 fertility rate) or Morocco (2.57 fertility rate).

Claim: “In only 15 years, half of the population of the Netherlands will be Muslim.”

It makes my head hurt to figure out how 1 million Muslims will outnumber 15.6 million non-Muslims in 15 years.

Claim: “In Russia, there are over 23 million Muslims, that’s 1 out of 5 Russians.”

According to Wikipedia:

According to the most recent estimates by the R&F Agency, there are more than 20 million officially self-identified Muslims in Russia, a number that has risen by 40% in the last 15 years, though no more than 6 million are truly orthodox. Roman Silantyev, a Russian Islamologist has estimated that there are only between 7 and 9 million people who practise Islam in Russia, and that the rest are only Muslims by ethnicity.

Also, Russia’s population is 140 million. Even if “23 million muslims” was accurate, that’s 16.4%, not 1 out of 5 (or 20%).

Claim: “Currently in Belgium, 25% of the population and 50% of all newborns are Muslim.”

Wikipedia states:

An 2008 estimation shows that 6% of the Belgian population, about 628,751, is Muslim (98% Sunni). Muslims cover 25.5% of the population of Brussels, 4.0% of Wallonia and 3.9% of Flanders.

Maybe they mixed up “Brussels” and “Belgium”. Regardless, they inflated the percentage of Muslims in Belgium from 6% to 25%.

Again, we see the same pattern of immigration as we saw in the Netherlands – 2/3rds are Moroccans and Turkish immigrants – whose home countries have relatively low birthrates (2.57 and 1.87, respectively).

Claim: “1/3rd of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025, just 17 years away.”

That doesn’t seem very likely considering that Muslims currently makeup “4 percent of the European Union’s population” (Source). This particular claim about “1/3rd of all European children” appears to come from the Right-wing Brussel’s Journal.

Claim: “The German Government, the first to talk about this publicly, recently released a public saying, ‘the fall in the German population can no longer be stopped. Its downward spiral is no longer reversible… It will be a Muslim state by 2050.”

Considering that Muslims makeup 4.0% of the German population, that statement seems over the top. More than 90% of them are Turkish (fertility rate in Turkey: 1.87). A quick google search credits Walter Rademacher, vice-president of the German statistics office, with the quote.

So, do you believe that the “German Government” issued that statement? Are you wondering what Walter Rademacher actually said?

BERLIN, Germany, November 9, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Germany’s downward spiral in population is no longer reversible, the country’s federal statistics office said Tuesday. The birthrate has dropped so low that immigration numbers cannot compensate.

“The fall in the population can no longer be stopped,” vice-president Walter Rademacher with the Federal Statistics Office said, reported Agence France-Presse.

Germany has the lowest birthrate in Europe, with an average of 1.36 children per woman. Despite government incentives to encourage larger families, the population is dropping rapidly and that trend will continue, with an expected loss of as much as 12 million by 2050. That would mean about a 15 percent drop from the country’s current population of 82.4 million, the German news source Deutsche Welle reported today.

…

Germany has one of the largest populations of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, with a Muslim community of over 3 million. That trend is expected to continue, leading some demographic trend-watchers to warn that the country is well on the way to becoming a Muslim state by 2050, Deutsche Welle reported.

The [Right Wing] Brussels Journal reported last month that one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025. There are an estimated 50 million Muslims living in Europe today–that number is expected to double over the next twenty years.

(Source)

Wow. There’s two major distortions here:

(1) They credit the “Germany Federal Statistics Office” with the statement that “[Germany] will be a Muslim state by 2050″, when it was actually a statement made by a vague group identified as “some demographic trend-watchers”. Immediately, in the next paragraph, they mention the right-wing Brussels Journal – leading me to suspect that they are the “demographic trend-watchers”.

(2) The quote was twisted from “is well on the way to becoming a Muslim state by 2050″ into “It will be a Muslim state by 2050″.

Claim: “There are currently 52 million Muslims in Europe. The German government said that number is expected to double in the next 20 years to 104 million.”

The EU population is 491 million, 4% (19.6 million) of which are Muslim (Source).

Claim: “In the United States, the current fertility rate of American citizens is 1.6. With the influx of the latino nations, the rate increases to 2.11; the bare minimum needed to sustain a culture.”

Considering that latinos makeup only 13% of the US population, it’s hard to believe they can single-handedly bring-up the fertility rate from 1.6 to 2.11.

Looking up actual data (1, 2) reveals this fertility rate for American women (2004):

White	2.05
Black	2.03
American Indian	1.73
Asian	1.89
Hispanic	2.82
Total	2.04

(I think the “White” category includes “non-hispanic white” and “hispanic white” into the same category. If that’s true, then the non-hispanic white fertility rate would be around 1.8-1.9.)

Claim: “Today, there are over 9 million [muslims in the United States]“.

Reality? No one really knows. Estimates vary between 1.1 million and 8 million.

Not very likely.

This wasn’t specifically argued in the video, but I should also add that the fertility rates among Muslims (in their own countries) is also declining.

For example:

Saudi Arabia, historical fertility rates:

2003	6.15 (* is this accurate?)
2004	4.11
2005	4.05
2006	4
2007	3.94
2008	3.89

And the three largest Muslim countries:

Indonesia, historical fertility rates:

2003	2.5
2004	2.47
2005	2.44
2006	2.4
2007	2.38
2008	2.34

Pakistan, historical fertility rates:

2003	4.1
2004	4.29
2005	4.14
2006	4
2007	3.71
2008	3.73

Bangladesh, historical fertility rates:

2003	3.17
2004	3.15
2005	3.13
2006	3.11
2007	3.09
2008	3.08

And let’s not forget that some Muslim countries have already fallen below the replacement number of 2.11 (and, supposedly, below the mythical 1.9 fertility rate that the video says is very, very bad). When you look at the three most populous countries of the Middle East (Egypt, 79 million; Turkey, 70 million; Iran, 69 million), you find that Turkey and Iran have already dropped below a fertility rate of 2.0. Egypt recently dropped below a fertility rate of 3.0, and the Egyptian government is aiming to get it down to 2.0 within 8 years. All three are experiencing a decline in their fertility rates.

Egypt, historical fertility rates:

2003	3.02
2004	2.95
2005	2.88
2006	2.83
2007	2.77
2008	2.72

Turkey, historical fertility rates:

2003	2.03
2004	1.98
2005	1.94
2006	1.92
2007	1.89
2008	1.87

Iran, historical fertility rates:

2003	1.99
2004	1.93
2005	1.82
2006	1.8
2007	1.71
2008	1.71

As you can see the video is littered with a number of factual errors, inflation and conflation of data on the pretext of furthering the makers’ odious agenda. It seems to be geared towards consumption by an American audience, for all effects and purposes attempting to scare the audience by saying, look what happened to Europe, it is going to happen to us if we don’t stop Muslims from coming here.

These sentiments are expressed by right-wing Christian Brenda Walker who writes in a piece Orwellianly titled, Dead Culture Walking: Muslim Immigration Should Frighten America that,

If there is anything that should make Americans’ blood run cold about immigration, it is the sight of Europe—and Britain, the home of Western civilization—being buried by millions of Muslim colonists. Europe is just hoping against hope that Islam isn’t going to explode into massive rioting (or worse), or impose total cultural Islamification.
…
Now the triumphs of Tours and Vienna are being trampled by immigrants, entering mostly legally. It’s a wonder the Muslims bother with terrorism at all when demography is working so well for them.

Europe’s swirl down the toilet bowl is little reported in this country largely because the Main Stream Media is not interested in showing it. The top media elites are still stuck on multiculturalism. But the European experience shows what a bogus ideology that is.

This smear against Muslims is nothing new and it really was only a matter of time before right-wingers here tried to employ the Muslim Demographic bogeyman to further their xenophobic nonsense. The truth is that Muslims in both Europe and especially America are largely integrating into their new societies. American Muslims for instance are considered the second most affluent and upwardly mobile community in America, only behind Jews. They also tend to be more educated than other citizens.

In Europe, as Dr. Tariq Ramadan noted there is a silent revolution in which Muslims have already integrated and reconciled their identities as Europeans. He says the important issue now is to move from the “integration dialogue” to a “post integration” dialogue. He also points out a double standard that Muslims are frequently subjected to, “when  you do something good and positive like Zinadine Zidane no one sees that you’re a Muslim, they see you as one of them but when they see something bad from a Muslim all of a sudden they question what you are doing here and say ‘you are not from here.’”

It is important to note that propaganda videos such as these will only increase as the visibility of Muslims in the West increases. Groups that previously saw themselves as part of the elite, such as the right-wing will paint the new multi-cultural societies they live in as oppressive, ghetto and backward. They will, and already have proclaimed victim status, and with that victim status will come a doubling of the efforts to advance one of the last accepted forms of bigotry and hate: Islamophobia.

Bat Ye’or: Anti-Muslim Loon with a Crazy Conspiracy Theory Named “Eurabia”

We all have them: crazy uncles or senile grandparents raving about one conspiracy theory or the other on the dinner table. “Man landing on the moon was a big hoax,” or “Elvis really didn’t die but went to live with Mickey Mouse in Disney World.” We’d smile and continue eating our leftover mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, then politely ask to be excused on account of work early the next morning, the car ride back home full of mirthful post-dinner analysis of the crazy dinner table conspiracy talk.

So when we first read about Bat Ye’or, a lady with no educational qualifications to speak of, who came up with the crazy conspiracy theory entitled “Eurabia,” we here at LoonWatch barely reacted. If a zany lady comes up with some insane theory, we’re certainly not going to take her seriously, at least not any more than the crazy old McCain lady.

The sad reality, however, is that Bat Ye’or is now being used by leading Islamophobes as a primary source for their research and subsequent analysis.  So who is Bat Ye’or?  Well, first of all, her name is not Bat Ye’or.  That’s just her “screen-name.”  For many years, she kept her real identity a secret, and only wrote under this moniker, which is Hebrew for “daughter of the Nile.”  She also had another screen-name, which was Yahudiya Masriya, Arabic for “Egyptian Jewess.”  Her real name is Gisele Littman, and she’s vitriolically anti-Muslim and anti-Islam.

She has written a handful of articles and books–with the basic theme that Muslims have savagely oppressed Non-Muslims (“dhimmis”) throughout history.  These resources written by her are used as reference sources by famous Islamophobes like Robert Spencer (the face behind the xenophobic websites Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch). Spencer hailed Bat Ye’or as “the pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, of the institutionalized discrimination and harassment of non-Muslims under Islamic law.”  Daniel Pipes, an Islamophobic professor, cites her work numerous times. She has emerged from relative obscurity to fame, her work being the backbone of Islamophobic (mis)characterization of Islamic history.

Pamela Geller, admin of the anti-Muslim site Atlas Shrugs, declares: “Bat Ye’or is the world’s foremost leading scholar on Islam.” Amazing how the “world’s foremost leading scholar on Islam” has no educational background and absolutely no credentials at all from a recognized university; truly amazing that anyone can become the world’s leading scholar on Islam with just a library card, a keyboard and internet connection, and of course the key ingredient of all–an all encompassing hatred of Islam.  Can one imagine the world’s leading scholar on Judaism being an Anti-Semite?  This just in: the world’s foremost leading scholar on Judaism is an Anti-Semitic Hamas member. Absurd!

Bat Ye’or is Not a Scholar

Bat Ye’or is not a scholar; she does not have the credentials of a historian from any recognized university.  She is referred to as an “independent researcher,” a euphemism for a random person who goes to the library, opens up some books, and starts writing. Adi Shwartz, a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, rightfully points out Bat Ye’or’s lack of credentials:

Europe allowed the immigration of millions of Muslims to its territories…and will ultimately…transform Europe into a continent under the thumb of the Arab and Muslim world. Europe is dead, and in its stead “Eurabia” has arisen.

This controversial thesis belongs to Bat Ye’or, the pen name of a self-taught Jewish intellectual who was born in Egypt and who currently lives in Switzerland. She refuses to reveal her real name for security reasons, she says, but her thesis is just the prologue to far-reaching conclusions and extreme statements…While her ideas were once almost completely ignored, nowadays, because of the prevailing consternation in Europe regarding its complex relations with the Muslim world, she is receiving more attention, though she is still quite far from entering the European mainstream…

Bat Ye’or’s opinions have made her a controversial figure, as has the fact that she is not an academic and has never taught at any university. She conducts her research independently.

Professor Robert Wistrich, head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, says of her:

Up until the 1980s, she was not accepted at all. In academic circles they scorned her publications…A real change toward her emerged in the 1990s, and especially in recent years.

In other words, Bat Ye’or was never taken seriously by academics; it was only recently due to the political climate of Islamophobia that her works have become oft-cited by certain elements of society.  Interestingly enough, Bat Ye’or herself admits this:

They didn’t even mention my name in publications. In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me…

It truly calls to question the legitimacy of the Islamophobes that they use as their main source a woman who has no credentials and whose work was scorned and ignored by academics and only became popular due to a wave of xenophobia:

[Professor Wistrich said:] “In a survey conducted in Germany recently 83 percent gave the answer ‘fanaticism’ to the question ‘What is Islam?’ Sixty percent said there was a clash of civilizations. This is why Bat Ye’or is getting more attention these days.”

Her opinions on the integration of the Muslims and Europe’s bleak future are acquiring many supporters for her in Europe’s extreme right-wing circles.

Those numbers are staggering, and frightening.  An overwhelming majority (83%) of Germans believe that Islam is fanaticism. (One can imagine what a similar poll conducted in the early 1930’s or 40’s-during the reign of the Nazis-would have shown had it asked what their view of Judaism was.)  It is such a climate that leads to pogroms, and it seems that Bat Ye’or wishes to tap into this potential.  She admits that her works are embraced by “the extreme right and in racist movements.” She gives them the wink and nod, with the usual half-hearted disclaimer that “attacking Muslims, sometimes even physically, is stupid.” Any bigotry short of that, of course, is fine and dandy.  Wistrich, who invited her to speak at a conference in Jerusalem, cracked a crass joke:

At the conference I said half-joking that it was possible to call this [her book] ‘the protocols of the elders of Brussels.’

It is interesting that Wistrich could be so mirthful about such a serious topic, as if it is somehow comical for a person to write a document that would result in ethnic strife.  Again, a frightening idea.  Adi Schwartz, the Israeli journalist who questioned her credentials, aptly titled his article on her “The Protocols of the Elders of Brussels.”

Bat Ye’or: Neutral Academic or Biased Ideologue?

Bat Ye’or has an axe to grind; there could be no one more biased than her.  Her antipathy towards Islam stems from her stormy past: in 1957, she was expelled from Egypt during the Israeli invasion of Sinai.  Although one can and should most definitely sympathize with her plight, it seems that she has–like so many racists before her–reacted to bigotry by becoming a bigot.  She was wronged by Muslims, and now she wants to take vengeance, which has blinded her.  Bat Ye’or said in an interview:

I wrote these books because I had witnessed the destruction, in a few short years, of a vibrant Jewish community living in Egypt for over 2,600 years and which had existed from the time of Jeremiah the Prophet. I saw the disintegration and flight of families, dispossessed and humiliated, the destruction of their synagogues, the bombing of the Jewish quarters and the terrorizing of a peaceful population. I have personally experienced the hardships of exile, the misery of statelessness-and I wanted to get to the root cause of all this. I wanted to understand why the Jews from Arab countries, nearly a million, had shared my experience.

This is not unbiased and dispassionate academic study; for Bat Ye’or, this is personal.  From the above quote alone, one can see the inconsistency in Bat Ye’or’s views.  During the Israeli occupation of Sinai, anti-Semitism surged in Egypt and within “a few short years” an end was brought to “a vibrant Jewish community living in Egypt for over 2,600 years.”  Does she not see the inconsistency here?  Over one thousand of those 2,600 years were during Muslim rule of Egypt, which began in 639 AD.  During that time period, there was a Jewish community which thrived, or as Bat Ye’or words it, was “vibrant.”  Surely then it makes no sense to generalize the “few short years” to all of Islamic history.

Conspiracy Theory: Palestinians Don’t Exist; Europeans Created Them

It is an irony that Bat Ye’or laments about “the hardships of exile, [and the] misery of statelessness,” which is exactly what the Palestinian people have suffered from.  Yet, Bat Ye’or, a fervent supporter of Israel goes even further than some of the most extreme Right-Wing Israelis and even denies the existence of a Palestinian people, arguing that “the Palestinian cause was created mainly in Europe.”   To put her quote into context, she says:

The Kurds, the Berbers, the Basques (Spain) and the Corsicans (France) have nationalist characteristics, but not the Palestinians.  The Palestinian cause was created mainly in Europe…

So Kurds, Berbers, Basques, and Corsicans are all peoples, but not the Palestinians, who are an imaginary peoples invented by Europe.  So why exactly did Europe create the Palestinian people?  She explains:

The Palestinian cause was created mainly in Europe, with the purpose to transfer onto the Palestinians the Jewish history in order to delegitimize Israel and to absolve Europe from the Holocaust by throwing onto Israel its own European history of Nazism, apartheid and colonialism.

Let us allow the reader to properly understand her conspiracy theory: she is arguing that the Palestinian people were created by Europe in order to paint Israel as being guilty of Nazism, apartheid, and colonialism–in order to absolve themselves of blame for the Holocaust which created the state of Israel.  One can imagine the European leaders convening in some secret lair–shoddy lighting and a room full of cigar smoke–contemplating how to absolve themselves of blame for the Holocaust.  “I got it!” exclaims one especially wily European intellectual.  “We’ll invent a people–let’s call them ‘Palestinians’–and say that they existed in the land of Israel!”  They passed it to a vote, and voila!  The Europeans then made a few calls and engineered the Palestinian race.  As Jon Stewart said mockingly about the Obama-being-a-stealth-Jihadist-from-Yemen theory: “It was just too easy.”

Bat Ye’or’s conspiracy theory is creative no doubt, but ludicrous.  This is the woman whom Islamophobes like Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller cite as a primary source for their views on Islam, thus highlighting that they have absolutely no academic integrity or credibility.

Conspiracy Theory: Europe Will Become a Vassal State to the Arab World

Bat Ye’or is a fringe conspiracy theorist who argues that “Europe will become a vassal [state], a satellite of the Arab world.” Such alarmist drivel that no sane person could take her seriously.  The irony is that the reality is the exact opposite: it is the Arab world that plays second fiddle compared to the West.  Tell us, Bat Ye’or, how will the Arabs make a vassal state out of Europe?  Them and which army?  The combined Arab might pales in front of Israel; how can the Arab world then vanquish all of Europe?  Such senseless fear mongering.

Conspiracy Theory: European Universities are Controlled by Palestinians

As part of her global conspiracy theory, Bat Ye’or argues that “[European] universities, for example, are controlled by the Palestinians.” Oh why of course!  In fact, the deans of the European universities are all “stealth Palestinians;” every year they travel to the Gaza Strip for an annual ceremony, where Hamas leaders dictate what the curriculum will be for the year, and indoctrinate them in all things jihad.  It is in fact funding from Palestine that is keeping the European universities afloat.  (deadpan face)

Can one imagine the reaction of Islamophobes if some Moozlim-looking person said that the Western universities were controlled by “the Jews?”  They would call such a person not only a crazy conspiracy theorist but a racist, and rightfully so, but the issue here is the profound double standard.  You want to say something outlandish about Jews or any other minority?  Not acceptable  (Rightfully so).  But say the same thing about Muslims?  Then you get your own show on Fox News, and your books will become best-sellers (of the “What’s Wrong with Islam” or “Why I’m Not a Muslim” variety).

Conspiracy Theory: The Rise of Eurabia

The culmination of Bat Ye’or’s theories is what she coins as “Eurabia,” a (not so) clever combination of the words “Europe” and “Arabia.”  Basically, the theory is that Arab and Muslim immigration (of “stealth jihadists”) will soon overwhelm Europe, destroy Western culture and civilization forever, and replace the democratic governments with Taliban style theocracies.   While that does sound like an interesting plot for a fictional movie, it is pure insanity to take this seriously.  Bat Ye’or is simply delusional.  David Aaronovitch, a journalist for The Times, labels Bat Ye’or as a conspiracy theorist:

Pinch me a third time while we get to grips with “Eurabia”. This is a concept created by a writer called Bat Ye’or who, according to the publicity for her most recent book, “chronicles Arab determination to subdue Europe as a cultural appendage to the Muslim world-and Europe’s willingness to be so subjugated”. This, as students of conspiracy theories will recognise, is the addition of the Sad Dupes thesis to the Enemy Within idea.

Aaronovitch would know; he wrote the book entitled Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History.  (Aaronovitch is no “dhimmi” as the Islamophobes would say; he produced a pro-Israeli documentary titled Blaming the Jews.)

Conspiracy Theory: The Churches of Europe are Colluding with Muslims

Bat Ye’or’s lunacy can be ascertained by some of her even more outlandish claims.  For example, she accuses the churches in Europe of being in a state of “collusion with the Muslims,” which she says have of their own volition become “Christian slave militias” that will “spearhead…the Islamic war against Christianity.”  According to her, the churches of Europe “reject…the Bible, which they read with a Koranic understanding.”  She goes on to say that European Christians “are more inclined to follow the Koranic Muslim Jesus, called Isa, than the Jewish Jesus.” Can any sober academic–or even sensible layman–take such drivel seriously?  But perhaps the reader thinks that we have taken her words out of context (after all, who could say something so crazy!), so let us reproduce her entire nonsensical answer verbatim so that her madness can be firmly established in the eyes of the reader:

JW: You’re accusing churches of collusion with the Muslims?

BY [Bat Ye'or]: Yes. Those churches know perfectly well the dire condition of Christians in Muslim lands. But instead of denouncing it, they adopt the militancy of the Janissaries, those Christian slave militias that were the spearhead of the Islamic war against Christianity. They forbid Christians to reveal the iniquities of modern dhimmitude in Arab countries, the enslavement of Christians in Sudan, the abductions and jihadic terror against innocent population. Those churches follow an arcionist theological line which separates the Gospels from the Hebrew Bible. They reject the historical legitimacy of Israel in its own land and, therefore, reject also the Bible, which they read with a Koranic understanding. They are more inclined to follow the Koranic Muslim Jesus, called Isa, than the Jewish Jesus. In my book, I call them the Islamized churches because their rejection of Israel’s history implies their refusal of the Bible and their acceptance of the Koranic version of the Bible that considers Christianity as a deformation of Islam.

This lunacy has been affirmed by another well-known loon–Daniel Pipes–who writes:

The historian Bat Ye’or, the first person to comprehend the gradual process of Europe accepting the dhimmi status, observes that this fundamental shift began with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when the continent began moving “into the Arab-Islamic sphere of influence, thus breaking the traditional trans-Atlantic solidarity.”

Translation: not only has Europe fallen under the Arab-Islamic sphere of influence–and not only has it become a subservient “dhimmi” to the Arab world–it is doing so willingly and of its own volition.  Riiiight, riiiight.  So Pipes is not far behind Bat Ye’or in looniness, which explains his reliance on her work.

Voice of Reason

Adam Keller, a well-known Israeli peace activist and cofounder of Gush Shalom, wrote a letter of protest to the Israeli publisher of Bat Ye’or’s book:

In 1886 the French antisemite Edouard Drumont published ‘La France Juive’ (Jewish France), creating the false nightmarish image of a France dominated by Jews, and sowing the poisonous seeds which came to fruit when Vichi French officials collaborated in the mass murder of French Jewry…

Bat Yeor’, [is] a British inflammatory writer who presumes to be a historian and who, I regret to note, is Jewish.  In this book – which, like the other works of this writer, is little more than a rabid anti-Muslim tract – ‘Bat Yeor’ follows in notorious footsteps indeed by creating the false nightmarish image of a Europe dominated by Arabs and Muslims. As Edouard Drumont sought to arouse the French people to persecute and kill their Jewish neighbours, so does Ms. Littman intend to drive Europeans into a continent-wide orgy of hatred and violence against the Muslim immigrants who are now a significant ethnic minority throughout the continent, and the great majority of whom seek nothing but to live useful and fruitful lives in their new homelands.

Ms. Littman’s reasons for writing her racist and inflammatory book are all too obvious. The reasons why you, a respectable publishing house, have chosen to present it to the Israeli public are far more obscure. Whatever these reasons might be, surely – now that you already taken this step – it would be appropriate to complete your task and produce also a companion volume, i.e. a Hebrew translation of ‘La France Juive’? After all, the informed Israeli reading public deserves to be given the chance of comparing the classical work of a master racist demagogue with that of his loyal present-day disciple and successor.

Craigh Smith of The New York Times refers to Bat Ye’or as one “of the most extreme voices” of the right:

A curious thing is happening in Belgium these days: a small but vocal number of Jews are supporting a far-right party whose founders were Nazi collaborators. The xenophobic party, Vlaams Belang, plays on fears of Arab immigrants and, unlike the prewar parties from which it is descended, courts Jewish votes…

Those fears shape some of the most extreme voices on the new Jewish right. Giselle Littman, who was expelled from Egypt in 1957 and now publishes under the pseudonym Bat Yeor, argues in her latest book, ”Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis,” that Europe has consciously allied itself with the Arab world at the expense of Jews and the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Johann Hari of The Independent writes of Bat Ye’or:

There are intellectuals on the British right who are propagating a conspiracy theory about Muslims that teeters very close to being a 21st century Protocols of the Elders of Mecca. Meet Bat Ye’or, a “scholar” who argues that Europe is on the brink of being transformed into a conquered continent called “Eurabia”.

In this new land, Christians and Jews will be reduced by the new Muslim majority to the status of “dhimmis” – second-class citizens forced to “walk in the gutter”. This will not happen by accident. It is part of a deliberate and “occult” plan, concocted between the Arab League and leading European politicians like Jacques Chirac and Mary Robinson, who secretly love Islam and are deliberately flooding the continent with Muslim immigrants. As Orianna Fallacci – one of the best-selling writers in Italy – has summarised the thesis in her hymns of praise to Ye’or, “Muslims have been told to come here and breed like rats.”

Rather than dismissing her preposterous assertions, high-profile writers like Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes and Niall Ferguson laud Ye’or as a suppressed hero, silenced by (you guessed it) “political correctness”. Her name is brandished as a gold standard in right-wing Tory circles. It’s interesting that writers so alert to anti-Semitism have lent their names to an ideology that is so startlingly similar. In this theory, the Star of David has simply been replaced by the Islamic crescent. If the term has any meaning, this is authentic Islamophobia, treating virtually all Muslims as verminous sharia-carriers. So why are these people still treated as serious and sane by the BBC and its editors?

Selective and Shoddy “Scholarship”

Bat Ye’or’s idea of history is nothing short of propaganda.  She said in one interview:

The Arab invaders arrived in [Jerusalem in] the 7th century, devastated the country, massacred and enslaved the population and expropriated the Jewish and Christian indigenous populations, as is related by contemporaneous sources.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

As for her actual work on dhimmis (Non-Muslims under Muslim rule) is concerned, it is selective and shoddy “scholarship.”  Professor Robert Brenton Betts, a well-renowned American historian who worked for the Library of Congress and the Department of State, criticizes Bet Ye’or’s book:

The general tone of the book is strident and anti-Muslim. This is coupled with selective scholarship designed to pick out the worst examples of anti-Christian behavior by Muslim governments, usually in time of war and threats to their own destruction (as in the case of the deplorable Armenian genocide of 1915). Add to this the attempt to demonize the so-called Islamic threat to Western civilization and the end-product is generally unedifying and frequently irritating.

(source: Robert Brenton Betts, “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude” Middle East Policy 5-3 ; September 1997, pp. 200-2003)

Professor Michael Sells of the University of Chicago writes:

By obscuring the existence of pre-Christian and other old, non-Christian communities in Europe as well as the reason for their disappearance in other areas of Europe [due to Christian persecution], Bat Ye’or constructs an invidious comparison between the allegedly humane Europe of Christian and Enlightenment values and the ever present persecution within Islam. Whenever the possibility is raised of actually comparing circumstances of non-Christians in Europe to non-Muslims under Islamic governance in a careful, thoughtful manner, Bat Ye’or forecloses such comparison.

(source: The New Crusades: Construction the Muslim Enemy, by Professor Michael Sells, p.364)

In other words, the comparison that Bat Ye’or–and Islamophobes in general–flee from is the one between the Muslim lands in the pre-modern era with the contemporaneous Christian Europe.  Instead, they choose to compare medieval Islamdom with post-enlightenment and postmodern standards, a most unequal and unusually obtuse comparison.  Jan Platvoet sums it up best with a very nuanced answer (emphasis is mine):

Arab scholars praise the tolerance of Islam towards the ‘protected population’.  The Egyptian Qasim ‘Abduh Qasim, for instance, who has published several works on the dhimmis in Muslim lands in general, and Egypt in particular, emphasizes the positive attitude of Muslims towards non-Muslims, even under the regime of the eleventh-century Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, known for his persecution of minorities, especially the Christians.

The opposite point of view is represented by a number of researchers, notably a writer who [uses] the pseudonym Bat Ye’or, i.e. Daughter of the Nile.  She has managed to select from the body of historiographical evidence, chronicles and documents, only that material which portrays the negative aspects.  Some such materials can occasionally be found, relating to various episodes, periods, and areas; it is therefore no wonder that she has succeeded in filling a complete volume, now published in several languages, on the maltreatment of the dhimmis by Muslims.  Bat Ye’or has recently published a new book dedicated exclusively to the long history of Christians under Muslim rule; this book is characterized by the same spirit as her previous book on the dhimmis.

…It seems that the truth lies somewhere in between [Qasim and Bat Ye'or's version]…The life of the dhimmis in the shade of Islam was certainly not easy, but at least their physical security (aman) and the safety of their property was assured, almost without exception.

(Pluralism and Identity, by Jan Platvoet, p.169)

In other words, Bat Ye’or scours historical texts to find all the negative points she possibly can, and then she compiles them into a book.  Naturally, the span of Islamic history was over a thousand years, so she can easily fill up hundreds of pages, giving the credulous reader the false impression that Islamic history was incredibly dastardly.  To give a suitable analogy, let’s say Rodney King were to scour all the reports throughout the country for the last fifty years for all acts of police brutality–and then compiled them into a book–he could easily fill hundreds of pages.  A person who relied on his book would get the false impression that the police were–and are–always brutal, or at least more so than not.  One gets a skewed picture from such a selective analysis.

The Islamophobe Robert Spencer argues that Bat Ye’or’s book is convincing because it is “full…[of] almost half primary source documents so that one can see the voracity of what she is saying from very ancient texts.” Yet it is convincing only because it is selective and biased; Bat Ye’or simply sifted throughout Islamic history to selectively find all the instances of anti-Jewish and anti-Christian persecution, ignoring the overwhelming majority of Islamic history which was characterized according to the overwhelming number of scholars by relative tolerance (for the times, and certainly compared to Christendom); if Bat Ye’or could fill a book with her quotes, it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that we could fill an entire anthology with quotes highlighting the relative tolerance of Muslims.  Taken selectively, Bat Ye’or’s choice of quotes seem damning, but diluted within the proper context, they would be less convincing of an argument.  One can easily carry out such a hatchet job on Christian (and even Jewish) history in a similar fashion.

World renowned Jewish-Israeli historian Nissim Rejwan warns:

By way of conclusion, a word of caution is in order…It must be pointed out that the picture has not been uniformly so rosy and that instances of religious intolerance toward and discriminatory treatment of Jews under Islam are by no means difficult to find. This point is of special relevance at a time in which, following a reawakening of interest in the history of Arab-Jewish relations among Jewish writers and intellectuals, certain interested circles have been trying to…[question the] Judeo-Arabic tradition or symbiosis by digging up scattered pieces of evidence to show that Islam is essentially intolerant…and that Muslims’ contempt for Jews was even greater and more deep-seated than that manifested by Christians…

Such caricatures of the history of Jews under Islam continue to be disseminated by scholars as well as by interested publicists and ideologues. Indeed, all discussion of relations between Jews and Muslims…is beset by the most burning emotions and by highly charged sensitivities. In their eagerness to repudiate the generally accepted version of these relations (a version which, it is worthwhile pointing out, originates not in Muslim books of history but with Jewish historians and Orientalists in nineteenth-century Europe), certain partisan students of the Middle East conflict today seem to go out of their way to show that, far from being the record of harmonious coexistence it is often claimed to be, the story of Jewish-Muslim relations since the time of Muhammad was “a sorry array of conquest, massacre, subjection, spoilation in goods and women and children, contempt, expulsion-[and] even the yellow badge…”

Informed by a fervor seldom encountered in scholarly discourse, some of these latter-day historians have gone so far as to question even the motives of those European-Jewish scholars of the past century who virtually founded modern Oriental and Arabic studies and managed to unearth the impressive legacy of Judeo-Arabic culture, a culture that was undeniably an outcome of a long and symbiotic encounter between Muslims and Jews.

…[But] by the standards then prevailing-and they are plainly the only ones by which a historian is entitled to pass judgment-Spanish Islamic tolerance was no myth but a reality of which present-day Muslim Arabs are fully justified in reminding their contemporaries…Tolerance, then, is a highly relative concept, and the only sensible way of gauging the extent of tolerance in a given society or culture in a given age is to compare it with that prevailing in other societies and cultures in the same period…

The only plausible conclusion one could draw from the whole debate is that, while Jewish life in Muslim Spain-and under Islam generally-was not exactly the idyllic paradise some would want us to believe, it was far from the veritable hell that was the Jews’ consistent lot under Christendom.

Bat Ye’or: The Pioneer of “Dhimmitude”

It should be noted that the Islamophobe Robert Spencer refers to Bat Ye’or as “the pioneering scholar of dhimmitude” (emphasis is ours).  The word “pioneer” indicates that she is the first to voice such views.  In other words, the traditional and long-established understanding of academics and historians is at variance with Bat Ye’or’s assessment: Muslim history was characterized by relative lenience and tolerance towards dhimmis.  (Again, all things are relative; while certainly it wouldn’t be considered tolerant to today’s standards and norms, back then it certainly was, evidenced by historical statements from the “dhimmis” themselves.)

The fact that Bat Ye’or is the first to challenge traditional and established opinion is evidenced by what J.G. Jansen, an outspoken Dutch critic of militant Islam, says:

In 1985, Bat Ye’or offered Islamic studies a surprise with her book, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, a convincing demonstration that the notion of a traditional, lenient, liberal, and tolerant Muslim treatment of the Jewish and Christian minorities is more myth than reality.

While Jansen’s view that Bat Ye’or’s book is “convincing” is certainly questionable coming from him, his quote is significant in that it shows that up until Bat Ye’or’s book the traditional and predominant scholarly opinion was that Islamic history was characterized by relative tolerance, certainly in comparison to contemporaneous Christendom. Bat Ye’or is after all the one who coined the term “dhimmitude,” which Islamophobes–including Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes–make recurrent use of.

The fact that Bat Ye’or is the first to counter traditional opinion does not mean that the predominant view of scholars has changed, as Bat Ye’or “is still quite far from entering the European mainstream,” according to Shwartz.  But–according to Wistrich–”a real change toward her emerged in the 1990s, and especially in recent years,” as she became accepted in “extreme right-wing circles.”  It is this motley group which is trying through sheer force and fear to influence academia, and push pseudo-intellectuals like Bat Ye’or into the arena of historical discourse.  The fact that the leading Islamophobes reference her (including Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller) indicates the weakness of their sources, and calls to question their own credibility.

Spencer argues that it is only “political correctness” that prevents people from taking Bat Ye’or seriously; no, my Islamophobic friend, it is not political correctness, but academic integrity.  When you consider an Islamophobe to be the leading scholar of Islam in the world, then something is profoundly wrong.  Simply substitute the word “Jews” for “Muslims” in the following sentence and the matter becomes clear: “Muslims will take over Europe.”  Anyone who said that about Jews would be branded an Anti-Semite and academically ostracized, yet hey, it’s open season for Muslim-bashing!

The Bottom Line

Even if we were to accept the fallacious argument that Muslim history was characterized by profound and incessant intolerance, then what does that mean for us today?  The Mongols were historically known to be intolerant, at least the Genghis Khan variety; how should that affect our opinion of Mongolians today?  Do we discriminate against them based on their historical record?  What do the present day Mongolians have to do with those of the past?  Do people inherit sins?

The relevance of Islamic history to today’s popular discourse is questionable.  It is in fact designed to demonize Muslims, but the reality is that the question shouldn’t even arise.  Why is it that Muslims of today are on trial for what their ancestors supposedly did?  Should all nations now demand their pound of flesh from all who wronged their people in ancient times?  Maybe we should create a system of reparations…?

Then what is the end goal for Islamophobes like Bat Ye’or?  Why does she spend so much time pontificating about the historical record?  It all boils down to one thing: immigration. She has highlighted the negative aspects of Islamic history in order to push the argument for a tight control (or rather, full cessation) of Arab and Muslim immigration to Europe.  Indeed, Islamophobia is simply another flavor of xenophobia.

In every generation, there have been xenophobes, who have this irrational fear of the other.  In American history, it started with the Irish and Italian immigrants who were both heavily discriminated against due to their religion and skin color.  Then it was against the Chinese who were brought to build railroads, the Japanese in World War II, and so on.  What history has born out consistently however is that the xenophobes always end up with egg on their faces.  They are on the wrong side; tolerance and multiculturalism always win out over intolerance and bigotry.  The question is: which side are you on?

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016: Altfrauen-Umwerfen: Jungtürken-Übung in Tirol  015: Islamische Kehlschnitt-Kultur in Hartberg  014: 20-jährigein Krems vergewaltigt  013: 4 Türken vergewaltigten 12-Jahrige  012: 7 Türken verletzten 2 Innsbrucker  011: Rankweil: 6 Türken schlugen willkürlich zu  010: 3 Türken schlugen Salzburgerin von hinten nieder  009: Haidershofen: Wenn Moslems schlägern, ist der Tod nah  008: 5 bosnische Moslems gegen 2 Oberösterreicher  007: 4 Moslems vergewaltigten autochthone Tirolerin  006: Raub nach dem Bankbesuch  005: 15-20 Türken schlugen 2 Ethnoeuropäer  004: Zeitung „Österreich“ warnt vor Gefahren nicht detailliert 003: 6 Disco-Gäste bei Rauferei verletzt  002: Warum die Moslems Europa verängstigen wollen  001: Erziehung zur Überheblichkeit 

016:                20090826       KATEGORIE: ANALYSEN ZUM TAG

ALTFRAUEN-UMWERFEN:  JUNGTÜRKEN-ÜBUNG IN TIROL

Rum, 24. August 2009 

Die Pensionistin wurde von den jungen Männern zu Boden gestoßen und beraubt.  Samstag gegen 18 Uhr überfielen drei Jugendliche an der Kreuzung Buchenstraße und Birkenstraße eine 83-jährige.

Die Täter pöbelten ihr Opfer an und rempelten die Frau um. Sie stürzte und verletzte sich dabei leicht. Die jungen Männer flüchteten mit der weißen Lederhandtasche. Wie hoch der entstandene Schaden ist, stand noch nicht fest.

Die Polizei sucht nun nach den Tätern, unter anderem auch mithilfe eines Hubschraubers des Innenministeriums. Die Täter waren nach Auskunft des Opfers zwischen 16 und 20 Jahren alt und möglicherweise türkisch-stämmig.

http://www.oe24.at/oesterreich/chronik/tirol/83-Jaehrige-von-Jugendlichen-ueberfallen-0518647.ece

==============

MEINE ANALYSE:

1. ungläubig, 2. Frau, 3. alt. Das bedeutet für junge Moslems sogar ein 3-fach unwertes Leben. An solchen “Lebewesen” können sie gut üben, wie sie in den nächsten Jahrzehnten alle EthnoeuropäerInnen behandeln werden. Die moslemische Herrenrasse will diese noch im 21.Jh nur als Sklaven und Dienerinnen halten. Schon jetzt ist erkennbar, wie sogar schon die europäischen Intellektuellen durch den Devisenabfluss in die moslemischen Länder verarmen und versklaven. Sie machen mehrere Jobs nebeneinander, haben keine festen Verträge, bekommen eine lachhafte Bezahlung.

Als in den 60er Jahren die erste Generation der Moslems nach Europa kam, war diese unterwürfig, weil sie keine Chance sah, einmal die Mehrheit zu sein. Die dritte Generation erkennt und spürt sehr genau, wie sie auf dem Weg zur Mehrheit in Europa ist. Deshalb kann sie sich in froher Erwartung nicht mehr länger zügeln und schlägt und sticht immer öfter zu. Mit Messern, die anscheinend alle jungen Moslems schon eingesteckt haben.

Viele Humanisten in den meisten Parteien und Kirchen verleugnen den Anstieg der Moslems in Europa von der ersten Generation bis zur dritten im Ausmaß von knapp 1 Million auf sag und schreibe 55 Millionen. Sie vermeinen deshalb immer noch, die unterwürfige liebe kleine erste Moslem – Generation integrieren zu müssen. O.k. – die erste Generation war unterwürfig, aber nicht aus Freundlichkeit, sondern weil Moslems nur in Strukturen von Unterwerfung und Herrschaft denken können.

Auf gleicher Ebene stehende Menschen in einer Gesellschaft – das ist für sie unvorstellbar. Ab nun, der 3. Generation Moslems, haben es die EthnoeuropäerInnen eben mit moslemischen Herren – Generationen und deren Fußtritten und Messern zu tun.

Und was ist mit den Medien? Außer manchmal kurzen Berichten ist Schweigen im Zeitungswald. Während der Fall Zongay nun schon monatelang analysiert wird, verschwindet obiger Fall nach einer kurzen Meldung im Orkus. Die Medien biedern sich eben heute schon an die ihrer Meinung nach zukünftigen moslemischen Machthaber an.

Bat Ye´or schrieb dazu treffend:

“Daher laufen die Europäer ganz stark Gefahr Spielzeug und Opfer religiösen Hasses zu werden, wie auch das von politischen und wirtschaftlichen Interessen, die vom arabisch-israelischen Konflikt maskiert wird; dieser wird absichtlich aus aller Verhältnismäßigkeit hinausgeschossen, um den globalen Jihad zu verstecken, der auch auf die Europäer zielt.”

(aus: Bat Ye`or, “Der euro-arabische Dialog und die Geburt von Eurabia”, Original: “The Euro-Arab Dialogue and The Birth of Eurabia”).

Die 83-jährige Frau wurde zwar glücklicherweise körperlich nur leicht verletzt, aber sie hätte bei dem Sturz auch sterben können, was die jungen Moslems nicht abhielt, sie niederzustoßen, vielleicht hat das ihnen sogar einen Spaß-Faktor bereitet. Wie es der Frau jetzt psychisch geht, wie ihr das Vertrauen in die Welt, die sie bisher so lange friedlich getragen hat, vielleicht genommen wurde, das interessiert die kaltherzigen Medien nicht weiter.

      arouet8  -  against mohammedanism+hitlerism+sheikhism

Per Newsweek non esiste. Ne parliamo con Bat Ye’or la studiosa che ha coniato il termine Al di là dei numeri, è il destino di “un continente in balia della paura e del silenzio

William Underhill di Newsweek avrebbe potuto leggersi le statistiche dei delitti d’onore in Germania e discuterne con Seyran Ates, l’avvocatessa di Berlino che ha chiuso lo studio legale dopo l’ultima aggressione subita a una fermata del metrò. Seyran era con una cliente musulmana che voleva divorziare dal marito. Lui le pesta entrambe, gridando “hure!”, puttana. A pochi chilometri da lì avrebbe potuto visitare la Deutsche Oper, che ha cancellato dalla stagione lirica l’Idomeneo di Mozart per timore di rappresaglie islamiste. Sempre a Berlino avrebbe potuto parlare con il direttore del quotidiano tedesco Die Welt, Roger Köppel, che stava per essere pugnalato a morte da un giovane ingegnere di origine pakistana entrato nel suo ufficio armato di coltello. Avrebbe potuto studiarsi i numeri delle “ragazze scomparse” in Inghilterra, vittime dimenticate delle centinaia di matrimoni forzati che Benjamin Whitaker, in un rapporto per le Nazioni Unite, ha inserito tra le nuove schiavitù.
Avrebbe potuto andare a Stoccolma e prendere tra le mani una t-shirt di gran moda fra i giovani musulmani: “2030 – Poi prendiamo il controllo”. Avrebbe potuto vedere come nella penisola scandinava, austera e lontana, dove durante la guerra si ebbero straordinari gesti di protezione degli ebrei, a Stoccolma, Göteborg e Malmö, prima città europea a maggioranza islamica, le comunità ebraiche sono costrette a spendere un quarto del budget in misure di sicurezza. Lì avrebbe scoperto anche il cadavere di Samira Munir, la politica norvegese di origine pakistana minacciata di morte dagli islamisti per la sua difesa dei diritti delle donne. Il suo corpo è stato trovato non lontano dal centro di Oslo.

A Copenaghen avrebbe potuto far visita a Kurt Westergaard, il vignettista che disegnò Maometto col turbante-bomba e che oggi deve vivere con un sistema di protezione che allerta la polizia in caso di pericolo. Avrebbe potuto recarsi a Bruxelles e apprendere che il primo nome dei nuovi nati non è più da molto tempo François, ma Mohammed.
Avrebbe potuto fare un salto in Italia, dove ci sono circa trentamila donne musulmane che hanno subìto la mutilazione genitale. Qui, in mezzo a noi, ora. Avrebbe potuto vedere con i propri occhi come la croce rossa di San Giorgio sia scomparsa da aeroporti, taxi e pompieri in Gran Bretagna su pressione islamica. La stessa Gran Bretagna che oggi vede triplicare il numero delle corti islamiche. Avrebbe potuto andare nella moschea El Mouchidine di Osdorp, in Olanda, dove l’imam ha gridato “cani infedeli” ad alcuni studenti appena arrivati in  gita scolastica davanti alla locale moschea. Da lì avrebbe potuto passare per Rotterdam, con i suoi quartieri segregati come monoliti e con i minareti dai quali si incita all’uccisione degli omosessuali. Già che c’era avrebbe potuto intervistare quell’insegnante di scuola elementare a Mozaiek che ha raccontato come i suoi studenti musulmani, in visita al museo Anna Frank di Amsterdam, le abbiano detto che “i nazisti avrebbero dovuto uccidere più ebrei”. Nella stessa città dove, oltre a Galileo, arrivarono gli ebrei spagnoli in fuga dall’Inquisizione e oggi invece regna la paura più glaciale. Avrebbe potuto sfogliare la fitta black list di scrittori, artisti, professori, giornalisti e politici minacciati di morte dal fondamentalismo. Pochi mesi fa, all’uscita da un supermercato, un islamista ha aggredito Robert Redeker, il filosofo francese costretto a nascondersi nel proprio paese per un articolo scritto tre anni fa: “Sei Redeker, hai insultato l’islam. Sei un mascalzone. Sei protetto, altrimenti finiresti male”.

William Underhill di Newsweek non ha fatto nulla di tutto questo. Perché, in piena legittimità, ha preferito esercitare una potenza rassicurante e dissuasiva su milioni di lettori del grande settimanale americano. Il giornalista americano ha cercato di spiegare che “Eurabia” è un mito, uno spauracchio,“una speculazione basata sulla speculazione”, una finzione costruita ad arte, la proiezione allarmista di una manciata di studiosi e politici della “far right”. La destra nasty, cattivissima, sporca, intollerante e xenofoba in cui secondo il cronista di Newsweek tutto si equivale, dal filoisraeliano e atlantista Geert Wilders all’antisemita, negazionista dell’Olocausto e suprematista bianco Nick Griffin del British National Party.
Dell’Eurabia il Foglio è andato a parlarne con la grande studiosa che ha coniato quel termine, ripreso e reso incandescente da Oriana Fallaci qualche anno dopo. Si tratta di Bat Ye’or, resa famosa in tutto il mondo da “Eurabia” (Lindau), ormai un modo di dire per indicare il rischio che l’occidente corre. Nel dicembre del 2002 apparve su Internet un suo articolo, tradotto in diverse lingue, dal titolo “Le dialogue Euro-Arabe et la naissance d’Eurabia”. Oriana Fallaci ne rimase folgorata e rese celebre questa storica durissima. In molti altri ripresero la tesi di Bat Ye’or, a cominciare da Niall Ferguson e Bernard Lewis. Nata in Egitto, cittadina britannica, residente in Svizzera, Bat Ye’or l’Eurabia la chiama anche “dhimmitude”, da dhimmi, cioè sottomessi, come venivano definiti i cristiani e gli ebrei che dall’ottavo secolo sono stati obbligati alla tassa sulle minoranze.

La dottoressa Rachel Ehrenfeld, una delle autorità mondiali in materia di finanziamento occulto al terrorismo e direttrice dell’American Center for Democracy di New York, nel suo libro “Funding Evil” ha seguito le tracce lasciate dalle varie organizzazioni non governative che servono da facciata per l’incanalamento dei fondi occulti verso l’islamismo in Europa. Il suo libro venne pubblicato negli Stati Uniti dalla casa editrice Bonus Books. Dopodiché Ehrenfeld riceve una email spedita dagli avvocati inglesi di un milionario saudita da lei citato, in cui le intimano, fra l’altro, di togliere dalla circolazione e distruggere tutte le copie invendute del libro, scrivere un pubblica lettera di scuse e fare una donazione a un ente di carità indicato dai sauditi. Per intentare la causa di diffamazione contro Rachel Ehrenfeld, ai sauditi basta acquistare una ventina di copie del libro “Funding Evil” su Internet e farsele recapitare in territorio inglese. La battaglia legale, durata due anni, è terminata il 20 dicembre 2007 alla Corte d’Appello dello stato di New York. Ehrenfeld è stata condannata.
Il caso Ehrenfeld è pura Eurabia. “Se William Underhill cervava di contestare la crescente influenza islamica in Europa e la sua ostilità ai valori occidentali, ha fallito”, dice al Foglio Rachel. “Sostiene che le proiezioni demografiche sui musulmani come maggioranza in Europa nel 2025 sono false. Ma quali studi porta a suo favore?”. E comunque “il vero problema non è la demografia, ma l’imposizione di norme basate sulla sharia e che contraddicono la società libera, democratica e capitalista”. Come nel suo caso. “Il reporter di Newsweek ignora l’influenza politica, finanziaria, sociale e culturale, la rapida espansione della sharia basata su istituzioni finanziarie in Europa. I leader islamici in Europa non propongono integrazione, ma cinque volte al giorno incitano alla distruzione degli ‘infedeli’ che hanno aperto loro la porta. E distruzione non significa necessariamente violenza, ci sono molti modi per indebolire ed eliminare la cultura e i valori occidentali. Fondi sauditi o provenienti da Golfo, filantropia islamica e fondi finanziari di Hezbollah e Hamas, Hizb ut-Tahrir e Al Muhajiroun, per citare soltanto alcune organizzazioni terroristiche internazionali, stanno esportando la sharia nella vita di tutti i giorni in Europa. La politica stessa degli europei riflette l’influenza islamica. I discorsi dell’odio contro gli ebrei sono in crescita, così come ogni critica dell’islam e dei musulmani è proibita. Questa non è l’Europa liberale di dieci anni fa”.
Ciò che non emerge dall’analisi di Newsweek è la sottomissione delle donne musulmane europee. Psicologa alla City University di New York, Phyllis Chesler è una madrina del movimento femminista (il suo “Le donne e la pazzia”, è stato un libro di culto alla fine degli anni Settanta). “Bat Ye’or ha ragione quando descrive Eurabia”, dice Chesler al Foglio. “Perché mentre molti immigrati musulmani amano l’occidente, ce ne sono altrettanti ostili alla modernità, alla democrazia, agli ‘infedeli’. Non vogliono assimilarsi o integrarsi. Hanno il compito di convertire i dhimmi e governare lo stato secondo la sharia. Vivono in Europa, ma è come se non avessero mai lasciato il Pakistan, la Turchia, l’Afghanistan, l’Algeria. Hanno creato un universo parallelo, pericoloso per l’Europa. In questo senso l’islam è il più grande esecutore al mondo di un apartheid di genere e religioso. Donne in burqa, niqab, hijab, sono ovunque nelle strade europee. I delitti d’onore infestano l’Europa e, come ho sempre cercato di dimostrare, sono omicidi ben diversi dalla violenza domestica dell’occidente. L’Europa ha accolto il flusso di immigrati ostili per dimostrare che non era ‘razzista’, che non erano stati gli europei a uccidere sei milioni di ebrei. Oggi si ritrovano così a giustificare l’olocausto di Israele predicato dai musulmani”.

Arriviamo a lei, la teorica di Eurabia, Bat Ye’or. “La copertina di Newsweek e l’articolo di William Underhill pretendono di spiegare che l’emergenza dell’Eurabia è una speculazione. Ma Eurabia esiste, viviamo nell’Eurabia, non è il domani, ma oggi, qui. Eurabia rappresenta un’ideologia che, per raggiungere i suoi obiettivi, fa leva su numerosi strumenti strategici, politici e culturali. E’ un nuovo ‘spazio della dhimmitudine’ creato dai politici, dagli intellettuali e dai media europei, Eurabia è un’entità culturalmente ibrida, fondata sull’antioccidentalismo e sulla giudeofobia. Quando le sinagoghe e i cimiteri ebraici devono essere sorvegliati come nei paesi islamici dove i mausolei cristiani ed ebraici sono distrutti perché la libertà di espressione e di fede non è un diritto costituzionale, questa è Eurabia. Il dialogo euro-arabo ha importato in Europa la tradizione anticristiana e antiebraica dell’islam inscritta nell’ideologia jihadista da tredici secoli. Quando in Europa critici dell’islam, musulmani e non musulmani, devono nascondersi o vivere sotto la protezione delle guardie del corpo, come Geert Wilders e molti altri, questa è Eurabia. Le celebri caricature di Flemming Rose, riprese anche da altri giornali, a cui hanno fatto seguito le minacce di morte al filosofo francese Robert Redeker, autore di un articolo, ritenuto blasfemo, apparso su Le Figaro il 19 settembre 2006, hanno esasperato l’opinione pubblica. Quando l’insegnamento nelle università, nella cultura, nell’editoria viene controllato in gran parte dalla Anna Lindh Foundation o dalla Alleanza delle civilizzazioni (strumento dell’Organizzazione della conferenza islamica, ndr), questa è Eurabia. Quando i bambini ebrei non possono frequentare una scuola pubblica senza essere aggrediti e i ragazzi ebrei sono minacciati per strada, o rapiti e uccisi come il francese Ilan Halimi, questa è Eurabia. Quando dimostrazioni islamiche di massa nelle città europee invocano la distruzione di Israele, questa è Eurabia. I nostri multiculturalisti non ci danno le chiavi per conciliare i valori della sharia con quelli della laicità europea, i contenuti della Carta islamica dei diritti umani con quelli della Dichiarazione universale, l’espandersi dell’imperialismo islamico e i principi di libertà e uguaglianza tra i popoli e tra i sessi”.

Nell’analisi di Bat Ye’or, Eurabia è un continente in balia della paura, del silenzio, della dissimulazione e della diffamazione, che non ha ormai più niente a che vedere con l’Europa che conoscevamo. “Eurabia è un coacervo di società lacerate tra la xenofobia, il desiderio di riscatto, l’autodifesa e la disperazione, nel graduale sfaldarsi dei loro leader politici, disperatamente aggrappati ai cliché che hanno costruito in trent’anni. Eurabia esiste laddove ci sono donne velate e le leggi della sharia sono applicate, quando l’ideologia islamica e antisionista fiorisce, dove le istituzioni democratiche non sono che il ricordo scarnificato del proprio passato”.
Da alcuni anni la morsa dell’apartheid politico, economico, culturale, artistico e scientifico di Eurabia si è stretta intorno a Israele. Di questo Newsweek non parla affatto. “E’ stata la questione palestinese lo strumento utilizzato dal jihad per disgregare l’Europa: essa ha costituito infatti il fondamento e l’impianto organico su cui è sorta Eurabia, il cuore dell’alleanza e della fusione euroarabe, germogliate sul terreno dell’antisionismo. Ora, i rapporti tra Europa e Israele, cristianesimo ed ebraismo, non investono soltanto l’ambito geostrategico, ma rappresentano il vincolo ontologico e la linfa vitale di tutta la spiritualità dell’Europa cristiana. Israele, infatti, si è costruito sulla liberazione dell’uomo, mentre la dhimmitudine lo imprigiona nella schiavitù. Eurabia è figlia del ‘palestinismo’ e non mi meraviglierei se un giorno, sotto la bandiera dell’Eurabia palestinizzata, i soldati eurabici corressero a sterminare in Israele i discendenti della Shoah. Il secondo Olocausto sarà chiamato: ‘Pace, amore e giustizia per la Palestina’ e ‘Liberazione dall’apartheid’”.
Leggendo Newsweek e gli altri campioni del giornalismo liberal si capisce quanto l’America sia ben lontana per capire Eurabia, che è un’idea e un destino più che una geografia o un flusso migratorio. L’oceano separa le certezze ireniche di William Underhill dalla paura che striscia nelle nostre città. Sebbene proprio in Eurabia sia nato l’11 settembre 2001. In un quartiere di vecchie case d’anteguerra in mattoni rossi, in una larga e squallida strada che fronteggia una ringhiera di sbarre. E’ a Wilhelmsburg, il quartiere industriale di Amburgo, in tre locali al terzo piano, che abitava e pregava Mohammed Atta, il capo degli attentatori delle Twin Towers. Furono pianificate in Eurabia quel milione di tonnellate di detriti e tremila esseri umani trasformati in un mucchio di rovine fumanti.

© 2009 – FOGLIO QUOTIDIANO

di Giulio Meotti

http://www.ilfoglio.it/soloqui/2974

• Home
• See Part 1 ‘Analysing Islam’ Bostom/Jacoby/Wilders
• Jump (below) to Mark Durie’s breakdown of just some of the differences his research has uncovered

Comment at end

20th March, 2009

This December 4th 2006 article raises the question of monotheism – the ONE God-ness of God. It refers to the book by Mark Durie – “Revelation? Do We Worship the same God?” which would seem to conclude in the negative. Perhaps this book should be read by all religious and/or political leaders in today’s unsettling world. We need to know the truth. It seems such a pity not to know The Truth, while insisting that one’s God is Truth. Especially if in reality (?) there IS more than one God. He may not be as we have been taught to know Him.

Excerpt, Mark Durie’s publication – “Revelation? Do We Worship The Same God?”:

“Today many people are asking the question – Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?

It may seem like a simple questions, but it’s not. Muslims will insist that they do worship the same god, and indeed the witness of the Quran demands that they believe this. In REVELATION? Durie demonstrates that Christians have good reasons to challenge this Islamic position.

REVELATION? Compares the LORD (YHWH) of the Bible with Allah of the Quran and clearly shows from careful study of both Islamic and Christian Scriptures that the LORD God of the Bible and Allah of the Quran are different in many respects. They have such different personalities and different capacities that they cannot be said to be the same.
- Publisher.”

“Durie’s book could not have been more timely. He offers a well-balanced analysis, acknowledging the important similarities of the two faiths, without ever misrepresenting the real disagreements or ignoring the hard issues. In this time of globalization, when crucial challenges are emerging for the West’s post-Christian societies, Durie’s reflections provide essential and fundamental guidance that will enable Christians to engage in a dialogue based on truth.

This is all the more urgent now that the cultural jihad in the West is preventing the free expression of thought and belief, and is subverting the whole ethical foundation of Judeo-Christianity.”

Which One God?
Comparing the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God.

By Bat Yeor

With the passing of time, hidden challenges, which for a long time had been growing unnoticed and unaddressed, can suddenly emerge into the full-blown light of current events with a force which seems quite overwhelming. Today the Western world, or Judeo-Christian civilization, shaken by jihadist terror, is being rudely awakened to theological realities blurred for decades. From clashes of civilizations to the jihad that is declaring to the planet its genocidal intentions, rational discourse concerning faith is becoming increasingly fraught.

It is within this tumult and confusion that Mark Durie, an Anglican minister, has written Revelation? Do We Worship the Same God?, in which he raises a couple of fundamental questions: Who is God? Is God Allah? Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

To answer these questions, he analyzes Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God in Christianity and Islam. The reader is given a concise representation of Muslim and Christian arguments. Such an endeavor needs both solid scholarship and theological training. Mark Durie possesses both, being a theologian and a graduate in the language and culture of the Acehnese, a Muslim people from the north of Sumatra in Indonesia. In addition, the subjects he addresses, in the current context, request much intellectual integrity and courage.

But how to know the identity of “God” in the Koran and in the Bible? The author stresses that this profound and deep question requires engaging with the very essence of God’s identity. With perspicacity and great objectivity, Durie delineates the diverse aspects of his investigations, but he warns that his book should be seen only as guidance, and not the last word.

Durie’s questioning grows from the Koran’s statement that Jesus is a Muslim prophet, named Isa — a prophet whose birth, life, teaching, and death are found to be totally at odds with the testimony of the Gospels and with Biblical theology. The Koran — which for Muslims is the literal word of Allah that cannot be doubted — affirms that Muhammad’s prophetic message is exactly the same as that expressed by the Torah and the Gospels. Since there are many contradictions between the Koran and the Bible, Muslim orthodoxy considers the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity as falsifications of the primal and unique Islamic revelation. It is this accusation that provided the doctrinal justification for the discriminatory legal status of Jews and Christians living under Islam.

In the first section, the author provides information about and reflections upon the Muslim Jesus (Isa). He stresses as fundamental the Koran’s teaching that Islam is the first, primordial religion, preceding Judaism and Christianity, which are dismissed as invalid traditions, being falsified versions of Islam. Because Christianity and Judaism are thought to be a corruption of the pure message of Islam, anything true in these religions comes from their Islamic roots. Consequently, to obey their true religion, Jews and Christians should “revert” to Islam and accept the prophethood of Muhammad.

This implies, writes Durie, that anyone who opposes Muhammad is not a true Christian, nor a true Jew. Seen in this light, the Koranic verses sympathetic to Jews and Christians refer to those who will see the light and find it to be Islam. If Islam recognizes only itself in Judaism and Christianity, one can wonder whether this replacement theology is not the negation of the very principle of recognition of other religions.

Many Christians profess that Christianity is closer to Islam than to Judaism, because of a common reverence of Jesus/Isa and his mother Mary. They will be astonished to learn from Durie that according to hadiths — acts and sayings attributed to Muhammad, and endowed with theological and legislative authority — Isa, the Muslim Jesus, will be the ultimate destroyer of Christianity.

Durie examines the characters of Jesus and Isa, separated by six centuries; he compares their name and biographies and explains the differing understandings of the prophecy in the Bible and the Koran. While Christianity accepts Jewish Scriptures as the foundation of their belief and practice, and as an integral part of Christian ministry, read in churches around the world, Muslims disregard the Bible. They claim that it is Islam that is the common heritage of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and that Jews and Christians should work to recover this heritage. Durie comments that, in this process, the Islamization of Jesus and the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets destroys both Christianity and Judaism.

The author analyses with great clarity and depth the fundamental principles of the two religions and, in a powerful chapter that raises essential questions, he discusses the concept of “Abrahamic Faith” that has become so fashionable today as a framework for dialogue. This definition, he points out, originates from the Koranic statement that Abraham was a Muslim prophet and from Islam’s core doctrine that Islam was the one revelation given to humanity by Allah through the Biblical figures and through Jesus. For Durie, the many “Abrahamic Faith” conferences throughout the world point to the Islamization of Christian understandings of interfaith dialogue. How should Christians respond to this claim which is a fundamental point of Muslim doctrine? Durie develops several arguments based on a rational analysis of history and the texts.

In his conclusion, Durie writes that profound contrasts exist in Islam and Christianity in their understanding of the identity of God. These have far-reaching implications, affecting attitudes, ethics, and politics. The clarification of misunderstandings and false assumptions, masterly exposed by Durie, is a condition to open the way for more constructive dialogue.

Durie’s book could not have been more timely. He offers a well-balanced analysis, acknowledging the important similarities of the two faiths, without ever misrepresenting the real disagreements or ignoring the hard issues. In this time of globalization, when crucial challenges are emerging for the West’s post-Christian societies, Durie’s reflections provide essential and fundamental guidance that will enable Christians to engage in a dialogue based on truth.

This is all the more urgent now that the cultural jihad in the West is preventing the free expression of thought and belief, and is subverting the whole ethical foundation of Judeo-Christianity.

— Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both at Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

MARK DURIE LISTS SOME OF THE DISCREPANCIES SUPPORTING THE TWO-NESS (AT LEAST) OF GOD

‘Isa, the Muslim Jesus by Dr Mark Durie

“The word Christian is not a valid word, for there is no religion of Christianity according to Islam”. – http://www.answering-christianity.com

Today we increasingly hear and read that Christianity and Islam ’share’ Jesus, that he belongs to both religions. So also with Abraham: there is talk of the West’s ‘Abrahamic civilization’ where once people spoke of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’. This shift of thinking reflects the growing influence of Islam.

These notes offer some information and reflections on the ‘Muslim Jesus’, to help put this trend in its proper context.

References in brackets are to the Qur’an. Numbering systems for the Qur’anic verses are not standardized: be prepared to search through nearby verses for the right one.

Islam the primordial faith

Islam regards itself, not as a subsequent faith to Judaism and Christianity, but as the primordial religion, the faith from which Judaism and Christianity are subsequent developments. In the Qur’an we read that Abraham ‘was not a Jew nor a Christian, but he was a monotheist, a Muslim’ (Âl ‘Imran 3:66). So it is Muslims, and not Christians or Jews, who are the true representatives of the faith of Abraham to the world today. (Al-Baqarah 2:135)

The Biblical prophets were all Muslims

Many prophets of the past received the one religion of Islam. (Ash-Shura 42:13) Who were these previous prophets? According to Al-An’am 6:85-87 they include Ibrahim (Abraham), ‘Ishaq (Issac), Yaqub (Jacob), Nuh (Noah), Dawud (David), Sulaiman (Solomon), Ayyub (Job), Yusuf (Joseph), Musa (Moses), Harun (Aaron), Zakariyya (Zachariah), Yahya (John the Baptist), ‘Isa (Jesus), Ilyas, Ishmael, Al-Yash’a (Elisha), Yunus (Jonah) and Lut (Lot).

The Muslim ‘Isa (Jesus)

There are two main sources for ‘Isa, the Muslim Jesus. The Qur’an gives a history of his life, whilst the Hadith collections – recollections of Muhammad’s words and deeds – establish his place in the Muslim understanding of the future.

The Qur’an

‘Isa, was a prophet of Islam

Jesus’ true name, according to the Qur’an, was ‘Isa. His message was pure Islam, surrender to Allah. (Âl ‘Imran 3:84) Like all the Muslim prophets before him, and like Muhammad after him, ‘Isa was a lawgiver, and Christians should submit to his law. (Âl ‘Imran 3:50; Al-Ma’idah 5:48) ‘Isa’s original disciples were also true Muslims, for they said ‘We believe. Bear witness that we have surrendered. We are Muslims.’ (Al-Ma’idah 5:111)

‘The Books’

Like other messengers of Islam before him, ‘Isa received his revelation of Islam in the form of a book. (Al-An’am 6:90) ‘Isa’s book is called the Injil or ‘gospel’. (Al-Ma’idah 5:46) The Torah was Moses’ book, and the Zabur (Psalms) were David’s book. So Jews and Christians are ‘people of the Book’. The one religion revealed in these books was Islam. (Âl ‘Imran 3:18)

As with previous prophets, ‘Isa’s revelation verified previous prophets’ revelations. (Âl ‘Imran 3:49,84; Al-Ma’idah 5:46; As-Saff 61:6) Muhammad himself verified all previous revelations, including the revelation to ‘Isa (An-Nisa’ 4:47), and so Muslims must believe in the revelation which ‘Isa received. (Al-Baqarah 2:136) However, after ‘Isa the Injil was lost in its original form. Today the Qur’an is the only sure guide to ‘Isa’s teaching.

The biography of ‘Isa

According to the Qur’an, ‘Isa was the Messiah. He was supported by the ‘Holy Spirit’. (Al-Baqarah 2:87; Al-Ma’idah 5:110) He is also referred to as the ‘Word of Allah’. (An-Nisa’ 4:171)

‘Isa’s mother Mariam was the daughter of ‘Imran, (Âl ‘Imran 3:34,35) – cf the Amram of Exodus 6:20 – and the sister of Aaron (and Moses). (Maryam 19:28) She was fostered by Zachariah (father of John the Baptist). (Âl ‘Imran 3:36) While still a virgin (Al-An’am 6:12; Maryam 19:19-21) Mariam gave birth to ‘Isa alone in a desolate place under a date palm tree. (Maryam 19:22ff) (Not in Bethlehem).

‘Isa spoke whilst still a baby in his cradle. (Âl ‘Imran 3:46; Al-Ma’idah 5:110; Maryam 19:30) He performed various other miracles, including breathing life into clay birds, healing the blind and lepers, and raising the dead. (Âl ‘Imran 3:49; Al-Ma’idah 5:111) He also foretold the coming of Muhammad. (As-Saff 61:6)

‘Isa did not die on a cross

Christians and Jews have corrupted their scriptures. (Âl ‘Imran 3:74-77, 113) Although Christians believe ‘Isa died on a cross, and Jews claim they killed him, in reality he was not killed or crucified, and those who said he was crucified lied (An-Nisa’ 4:157). ‘Isa did not die, but ascended to Allah. (An-Nisa’ 4:158) On the day of Resurrection ‘Isa himself will be a witness against Jews and Christians for believing in his death. (An-Nisa’ 4:159)

Christians should accept Islam, and all true Christians will

Christians (and Jews) could not be freed from their ignorance until Muhammad came bringing the Qur’an as clear evidence (Al-Bayyinah 98:1). Muhammad was Allah’s gift to Christians to correct misunderstandings. They should accept Muhammad as Allah’s Messenger, and the Qur’an as his final revelation. (Al-Ma’idah 5:15; Al-Hadid 57:28; An-Nisa’ 4:47)

Some Christians and Jews are faithful and believe truly. (Âl ‘Imran 3:113,114) Any such true believers will submit to Allah by accepting Muhammad as the prophet of Islam, i.e. they will become Muslims. (Âl ‘Imran 3:198)

Although Jews and pagans will have the greatest enmity against Muslims, it is the Christians who will be ‘nearest in love to the believers’, i.e. to Muslims. (Al-Ma’idah 5:82) True Christians will not love Muhammad’s enemies. (Al-Mujadilah 58:22) In other words, anyone who opposes Muhammad is not a true Christian.

Christians who accept Islam or refuse it

Some Jews and Christians are true believers, accepting Islam: most are transgressors. (Âl ‘Imran 3:109)

Many monks and rabbis are greedy for wealth and prevent people from coming to Allah. (At-Taubah 9:34,35)

Christians and Jews who disbelieve in Muhammad will go to hell. (Al-Bayyinah 98:6)

Muslims should not take Christians or Jews for friends. (Al-Ma’idah 5:51)

They must fight against Christians and Jews who refuse Islam until they surrender, pay the poll-tax and are humiliated. (At-Taubah 9:29) To this may be added hundreds of Qur’anic verses on the subject of jihad in the path of Allah, as well as the ‘Book of Jihad’ found in all Hadith collections.

Christian beliefs

Christians are commanded not to believe that ‘Isa is the son of God: ‘It is far removed from his transcendent majesty that he should have a son’. (An-Nisa’ 4:171; Al-Furqan 25:2) ‘Isa was simply a created human being, and a slave of Allah. (An-Nisa’ 4:172; Âl ‘Imran 3:59)

Christians are claimed by the Qur’an to believe in a family of gods – Father God, mother Mary and ‘Isa the son – but ‘Isa rejected this teaching. (Al-Ma’idah 5:116) The doctrine of the Trinity is disbelief and a painful doom awaits those who believe it. (Al-Ma’idah 5:73)

‘Isa (Jesus) in the Hadith

‘Isa the destroyer of Christianity

The prophet ‘Isa will have an important role in the end times, establishing Islam and making war until he destroys all religions save Islam. He shall kill the Evil One (Dajjal), an apocalyptic anti-Christ figure.

In one tradition of Muhammad we read that no further prophets will come to earth until ‘Isa returns as ‘a man of medium height, or reddish complexion, wearing two light garments, looking as if drops were falling down from his head although it will not be wet. He will fight for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill pigs, and abolish the poll-tax. Allah will destroy all religions except Islam. He (‘Isa) will destroy the Evil One and will live on the earth for forty years and then he will die’. (Sunan Abu Dawud, 37:4310) The Sahih Muslim has a variant of this tradition: ‘The son of Mary … will soon descend among you as a just judge. He will … abolish the poll-tax, and the wealth will pour forth to such an extent that no one will accept charitable gifts.’ (Sahih Muslim 287)

What do these sayings mean? The cross is a symbol of Christianity. Breaking crosses means abolishing Christianity. Pigs are associated with Christians. Killing them is another way of speaking of the destruction of Christianity. Under Islamic law the poll-tax buys the protection of the lives and property of conquered ‘people of the Book’. (At-Taubah 9:29) The abolition of the poll-tax means jihad is restarted against Christians (and Jews) living under Islam, who should convert to Islam, or else be killed or enslaved. The abundance of wealth refers to booty flowing to the Muslims from this conquest. This is what the Muslim ‘Isa will do when he returns in the last days.

Muslim jurists confirm these interpretations: consider, for example, the ruling of Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368).

“… the time and the place for [the poll tax] is before the final descent of Jesus (upon whom be peace). After his final coming, nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent (upon him and our Prophet be peace) …” (The Reliance of the Traveller. Trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, p. 603).

Ibn Naqib goes on to state that when Jesus returns, he will rule ‘as a follower’ of Muhammad.

Critical Comments on the Muslim ‘Isa (Jesus)

‘Isa not an historical figure

The Qur’an’s ‘Isa is not an historical figure. His identity and role as a prophet of Islam is based solely on supposed revelations to Muhammad over half a millennium after the Jesus of history lived and died.

Jesus’ name was never ‘Isa

Jesus’ mother tongue was Aramaic. In his own lifetime he was called Yeshua in Aramaic, and Jesu in Greek. This is like calling the same person John when speaking English and Jean when speaking French: Jesu, pronounced “Yesoo”, is the Greek form of Aramaic Yeshua. (The final -s in Jesu-s is a Greek grammatical ending.) Yeshua is itself a form of Hebrew Yehoshua’, which means ‘the Lord is salvation’. However Yehoshua’ is normally given in English as Joshua. So Joshua and Jesus are variants of the same name.

It is interesting that Jesus’ name Yehoshua’ contains within it the proper Hebrew name for God, the first syllable Yeh- being short for YHWH ‘the LORD’.

Yeshua of Nazareth was never called ‘Isa, the name the Qur’an gives to him. Arab-speaking Christians refer to Jesus as Yasou’ (from Yeshua) not ‘Isa.

Jesus did not receive a ‘book’

According to the Qur’an, the ‘book’ revealed to ‘Isa was the Injil. The word Injil is a corrupted form of the Greek euanggelion ‘good news’ or gospel. What was this euanggelion? This was just how Jesus referred to his message: as good news. The expression euanggelion did not refer to a fixed revealed text, and there is absolutely no evidence that Jesus received a ‘book’ of revelation from God.

The ‘gospels’ of the Bible are biographies

The term euanggelion later came to be used as a title for the four biographies of Jesus written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the ‘gospels’. This was a secondary development of meaning. Apparently this is where Muhammad got his mistaken idea of the Injil being a ‘book’.

Most so-called prophets of Islam received no book

Virtually all of the so-called ‘prophets’ of Islam, whose names are taken from the Hebrew scriptures, received no ‘book’ or law code. For example, the Psalms are not a book revealing Islam, as the Qur’an claims, but a collection of songs of worship, only some of which are David’s. There is not a shred of evidence in the Biblical history of David that he received a book of laws for the Israelites. They already had the Torah of Moses to follow. So David was not a prophet in the Qur’an’s sense of this word. Likewise most of the prophets claimed by Islam were neither lawgivers nor rulers.

Biblical prophecy and Islamic prophecy are not the same thing

The Biblical understanding of prophecy is quite different from Muhammad’s. A Biblical prophecy is not regarded as a passage from a heavenly eternally pre-existent text like the Qur’an, but a message from God for a specific time and place. A biblical prophet is someone to whom God reveals hidden things, and who then acts as God’s verbal agent. When a Samaritan woman called Jesus a prophet (John 4:19) it was because he had spoken about things in her life that he could only have known supernaturally. Christianity teaches that Jesus was a prophet, but he brought no ‘book’: he himself was the living ‘Word of God’, a title used of ‘Isa in the Qur’an.

By no means all prophecies referred to in the Bible became part of the Biblical text. The Bible consists of a wide variety of materials originally written for many different purposes, including letters, songs, love poetry, historical narratives, legal texts, proverbial wisdom as well as prophetic passages. These are regarded as inspired by God, but not dictated from a timeless heavenly book.

As prophetic history, the Qur’an contains many errors and anachronisms

The claim that Jesus was not executed by crucifixion is without any historical support. One of the things that all the early sources agree on is Jesus’ crucifixion.

Mariam the mother of ‘Isa is called a sister of Aaron, and also the daughter of Aaron’s father ‘Imran (Hebr. Amram). Clearly Muhammad has confused Mary (Hebr. Miriam) with Miriam of the Exodus. The two lived more than a thousand years apart!

In the Bible Haman is the minister of Ahasuerus in Media and Persia (The Book of Esther 3:1-2). Yet the Qur’an places him over a thousand years earlier, as a minister of Pharoah in Egypt.

The claim that Christians believe in three Gods – Father, son Jesus and mother Mary – is mistaken. The Qur’an is also mistaken to claim that Jews say Ezra was a son of God. (At-Taubah 9:30) The charge of polytheism against Christianity and Judaism is ill-informed and false. (Deuteronomy 6:4, James 2:19a)

The story of the ‘two horned one’ (Al-Kahf 18:82 cf also Daniel 8:3, 20-21) is derived from the Romance of Alexander. Certainly Alexander the Great was no Muslim.

The problem with the name ‘Isa has already been discussed. Other Biblical names are also misunderstood in the Qur’an, and their meanings lost. For example Elisha, which means ‘God is salvation’, is given in the Qur’an as al-Yash’a, turning El ‘God’ into al- ‘the’. (Islamic tradition did the same to Alexander the Great, calling him al-Iskandar ‘the Iskander’). Abraham ‘Father of many’ (cf Genesis 17:5) might have been better represented as something like Aburahim ‘father of mercy’ instead of Ibrahim, which has no meaning in Arabic at all.

The Qur’an has a Samaritan making the golden calf, which was worshipped by the Israelites in the wilderness (Ta Ha 20:85) during the Exodus. In fact it was Aaron (Exodus 34:1-6). The Samaritans did not exist until several centuries later. They were descendants of the northern Israelites centuries after the Exodus.

Many Qur’anic stories can be traced to Jewish and Christian folktales and other apocryphal literature. For example a story of Abraham destroying idols (As-Saffat 37) is found in a Jewish folktale, the Midrash Rabbah. The Qur’anic story of Zachariah, father of John the Baptist, is based upon a second-century Christian fable. The story of Jesus being born under a palm tree is also based on a late fable, as is the story of Jesus making clay birds come alive. Everything the Qur’an says about the life of Jesus which is not found in the Bible can be traced to fables composed more than a hundred years after Jesus’ death.

Jesus’ titles of Messiah and Word of God, which the Qur’an uses, find no explanation in the Qur’an. Yet in the Bible, from which they are taken, these titles are well integrated in a whole theological system.

The Qur’an mentions the Holy Spirit in connection with Jesus, using phrases which come from the gospels. Ibn Ishaq (Life of Muhammad) reports Muhammad as saying that this ‘Spirit’ was the angel Gabriel (cf also An-Nahl 16:102, Al-Baqarah 2:97). However the Biblical phrase ‘Spirit of God’ (Ruach Elohim)

or ‘Holy Spirit’ can only be understood in light of the Hebrew scriptures. It certainly does not refer to an angel.

Jesus’ alleged foretelling of Muhammad’s coming (As-Saff 61:6) appears to be based on a garbled reading of John 14:26, a passage which in fact refers to the Spirit.

The Hebrew scriptures were Jesus’ Bible. He affirmed their authority and reliability and preached from them. From these same scriptures he knew God as Adonai Elohim, the Lord God of Israel. He did not call God Allah, which appears to have been the name or title of a pagan Arabian deity worshipped in Mecca before Muhammad. Muhammad’s pagan father, who died before Muhammad was born, already bore the name ‘Abd Allah ’slave of Allah’, and his uncle was called Obeid Allah.

We read that An-Najm 53:19-23 seeks to refute the pagan Arab belief that Allah had daughters named al-Uzza, al-Ilat and Manat. (See also An-Nahl 16:57 and Al-An’am 6:100).

The Biblical narratives are rich with historical details, many confirmed by archaeology. They cover more than a thousand years, and reveal a long process of technological and cultural development. In contrast the Qur’an’s sacred history is devoid of archaeological support. Its fragmentary and disjointed stories offer no authentic reflection of historical cultures. No place name from ancient Israel is mentioned, not even Jerusalem. Many of the supposed historical events reported in the Qur’an have no independent verification. For example we are told that Abraham and Ishmael built the Kaaba in Mecca (Al-Baqarah 2:127), but this is totally without support. The Biblical account, more than a thousand years older, does not place Abraham anywhere near Arabia.

The Qur’an is not a credible source for Biblical history

The Qur’an, written in the 7th century AD, cannot be regarded as having any authority whatsoever to inform us about Jesus of Nazareth. It offers no evidence for its claims about biblical history. Its numerous historical errors reflect a garbled understanding of the Bible.

Islam appropriates the history of Judaism and Christianity to itself

When Muhammad linked the name of Allah to the religious histories of Judaism and Christianity, this was a way to claim them for Islam. In the light of later events, the claim that Islam was the original religion, and that all preceding prophets were Muslims, can be regarded as an attempt to appropriate the histories of other religions for Islam. The effect is to rob Christianity and Judaism of their own histories.

Consider that many Biblical sites, such as the tombs of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the Temple Mount, are claimed by Islam as Muslim sites, not Jewish or Christian ones. After all, the Qur’an tells us that Abraham ‘was a Muslim’. Under Islamic rule all Jews and Christians were banned from such sites.

The place of the Jewish scriptures in Christianity is completely different from the place of the Bible in Islam

There is a fundamental difference between Christian attitudes to the Jewish scriptures and Islamic attitudes to the Bible. Christians accept the Hebrew scriptures. They were the scriptures of Jesus and the apostles. They were the scriptures of the early church. The whole of Christian belief and practice rests upon them. Core Christian concepts such as ‘Messiah’ (Greek ‘Christos’), ‘Spirit of God’, ‘Kingdom of God’ and ’salvation’ are deeply rooted in the Hebrew Biblical traditions.

We note also that Christian seminaries devote considerable effort to studying the Hebrew scriptures. This is an integral part of training for Christian ministry. The Hebrew scriptures are read (in translation) every Sunday in many churches all around the world.

In contrast Islam’s treatment of the Bible is one of complete disregard. Although it purports to ‘verify’ all earlier prophetic revelation, the Qur’an is oblivious to the real contents of the Bible. The claim that Christians and Jews deliberately corrupted their scriptures is made without evidence, and this only serves to cover up the Qur’an’s historical inadequacies. Muslim scholars rarely have an informed understanding of the Bible or of biblical theology and so remain ignorant of these realities.

Some contemporary Muslim voices on Jesus

Yasser Arafat, addressing a press conference at the United Nations in 1983 called Jesus “the first Palestinian fedayeen who carried his sword” (i.e. he was a freedom fighter for Islam).

Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, employee of the Palestinian Authority, broadcast live in April 2002 on Palestinian Authority television: “The Jews await the false Jewish messiah, while we await, with Allah’s help… Jesus, peace be upon him. Jesus’s pure hands will murder the false Jewish messiah. Where? In the city of Lod, in Palestine.”

Author Shamim A. Siddiqi of Flushing, New York put the classical position of Islam towards Christianity clearly in a recent letter to Daniel Pipes, New York Post columnist:

“Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all prophets of Islam. Islam is the common heritage of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim community of America, and establishing the Kingdom of God is the joint responsibility of all three Abrahamic faiths. Islam was the din (faith, way of life) of both Jews and Christians, who later lost it through human innovations. Now the Muslims want to remind their Jewish and Christian brothers and sisters of their original din [religion]. These are the facts of history.”

This historical negationism – appearing to affirm Christianity and Judaism whilst in fact rejecting and supplanting them – is a lynchpin of Muslim apologetics. What is being affirmed is in fact neither Christianity nor Judaism, but Jesus as a prophet of Islam, Moses as a Muslim etc. This is intended to lead to ‘reversion’ of Christians and Jews to Islam, which is what Siddiqi refers to when he speaks of ‘the joint responsibility’ of Jews and Christians to establish ‘the Kingdom of God’. By this he means that American Christians and Jews should work to establish shari’ah law and the rule of Islam in the United States.

Conclusion

‘Isa (Jesus) of the Qur’an is a product of fable, imagination and ignorance. When Muslims venerate this ‘Isa, they have someone different in mind from the Yeshua or Jesus of the Bible and of history. The ‘Isa of the Qur’an is based on no recognized form of historical evidence, but on fables current in seventh century Arabia.

For most faithful Muslims ‘Isa is the only Jesus they know. But if one accepts this Muslim ‘Jesus’, then one also accepts the Qur’an: one accepts Islam. Belief in this ‘Isa is won at the cost of the libel that Jews and Christians have corrupted their scriptures, a charge that is without historical support. Belief in this ‘Isa implies that much of Christian and Jewish history is in fact Islamic history.

The Jesus of the gospels is the base upon which Christianity developed. By Islamicizing him, and making of him a Muslim prophet who preached the Qur’an, Islam destroys Christianity and takes over all its history. It does the same to Judaism.

In the end times as described by Muhammad, ‘Isa becomes a warrior who will return with his sword and lance. He will destroy the Christian religion and make Islam the only religion in all the world. Finally at the last judgement he will condemn Christians to hell for believing in the crucifixion and the incarnation.

This final act of the Muslim ‘Isa reflects Islam’s apologetic strategy in relation to Christianity, which is to deny the Yeshua of history, and replace him with a facsimile of Muhammad, so that nothing remains but Islam.

“The Muslim supersessionist current claims that the whole biblical history of Israel and Christianity is Islamic history, that all the Prophets, Kings of Israel and Judea, and Jesus were Muslims. That the People of the Book should dare to challenge this statement is intolerable arrogance for an Islamic theologian. Jews and Christians are thus deprived of their Holy Scriptures and of their salvific value.”

- Bat Ye’or in Islam and Dhimmitude: where civilizations collide, p.370.

APPENDIX: The historical evidence for Jesus (Yeshua)

of Nazareth and his death by crucifixion

Non-Christian sources for Jesus

. Tacitus (AD 55-120), a renowned historical of ancient Rome, wrote in the latter half of the first century that ‘Christus … was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also.’ (Annals 15: 44).

. Suetonius writing around AD 120 tells of disturbances of the Jews at the ‘instigation of Chrestus’, during the time of the emperor Claudius. This could refer to Jesus, and appears to relate to the events of Acts 18:2, which took place in AD 49.

. Thallus, a secular historian writing perhaps around AD 52 refers to the death of Jesus in a discussion of the darkness over the land after his death. The original is lost, but Thallus’ arguments – explaining what happened as a solar eclipse – are referred to by Julius Africanus in the early 3rd century.

. Mara Bar-Serapion, a Syrian writing after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, mentions the earlier execution of Jesus, whom he calls a ‘King’.

. The Babylonian Talmud refers to the crucifixion (calling it a hanging) of Jesus the Nazarene on the eve of the Passover. In the Talmud Jesus is also called the illegitimate son of Mary.

. The Jewish historian Josephus describes Jesus’ crucifixion under Pilate in his Antiquities, written about AD 93/94. Josephus also refers to James the brother of Jesus and his execution during the time of Ananus (or Annas) the high priest.

Paul’s Epistles

. Paul’s epistles were written in the interval 20-30 years after Jesus’ death. They are valuable historical documents, not least because they contain credal confessions which undoubtedly date to the first few decades of the Christian community.

Paul became a believer in Jesus within a few years of Jesus’ crucifixion. He writes in his first letter to the Corinthians ‘For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas (Peter), then by the twelve.’ This makes clear that belief in the death of Jesus was there from the beginning of Christianity.

The four gospels

. The four gospels were written down in the period 20-60 years after Jesus’ death, within living memory of the events they describe.

The events which the gospels describe for the most part took place in the full light of public scrutiny. Jesus’ teaching was followed by large crowds. There were very many witnesses to the events of his life. His death was a public execution.

Manuscript evidence for the Bible and its transmission

The manuscript evidence for the Greek scriptures is overwhelming, far greater than for all other ancient texts. Over 20,000 manuscripts attest to them. Whilst there are copying errors, as might be expected from the hand of copyists, these are almost all comparatively minor and the basic integrity of the copying process is richly supported.

Futhermore, when Western Christians studies the Hebrew scriptures during the Renaissance, they found them to agree remarkably closely with their Greek and Latin translations which had been copied again and again over a thousand years. There were copying errors, and some other minor changes, but no significant fabrications of the stupendous scale which would be required to concoct the story of Jesus’ death.

Likewise when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered they included Hebrew Biblical scrolls dating from before the time of Jesus. These too agreed very closely with the oldest Hebrew Masoretic manuscripts of more than a thousand years later. Again, no fabrications, but evidence of remarkably faithful copying.

Conclusion: Jesus of Nazareth is a figure of history

Clearly there are events recorded in connection with Jesus’ life that many non-Christians will not accept, such as the miracles, the virgin birth, and the resurrection. However what is beyond dispute is that Yeshua (‘Jesus’) of Nazareth was a figure of history, who lived, attracted a following in his life time amongst his fellow Jews and was executed by crucifixion by the Roman authorities, after which his followers spread rapidly. Both secular and Christian sources of the period agree on this.

The primary sources for the history of Jesus’ public life are the gospels. These were written down relatively soon after his death – within living memory – and we have every indication that these sources were accepted as reliable in the early Christian community, during a period when first and second hand witnesses to Jesus’ life were still available.

We conclude that any statements about ‘Isa (Jesus) in the Qur’an, made six centuries after Jesus’ death, must be judged against the historical evidence from these first century sources, and not vice versa.

Some useful discussions of these issues are found at: http://www.debate.org.uk/topics/theo/islam_christ.html http://www.debate.org.uk/topics/theo/qur-jes.htm http://www.answering-islam.org/Intro/replacing.html

Further reading: The Jesus I never knew, by Philip Yancey.

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The author of these notes is an Anglican Minister at St Hilary’s Anglican Church Kew. He is also a senior associate of the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, with the honorary title of Associate Professor, and was formerly head of the Department of Linguistics and Language Studies. He has written several books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, an Islamic people of Indonesia, and was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1992 for this research work. He served as a member of the Council of the Academy for a term during the 1990’s.

http://answering-islam.org.uk/Intro/islamic_jesus.html

See also:  Feb 2008 - Andrew Bostom: ‘Deception & Gullible Dhimmitude are not dialogue’

My thoughts on Mark Durie’s research & writings:

Well researched and worth considering seriously. Certainly, the Christian Loving God and historical Jesus are at wide variance from the Islamic Allah and Mohammed, if this is to be believed.

All in all, and even as a “secular Christian” (who does not feel the presence of a deity) I lean towards the gospels’ historical view of Christ’s death.

His immaculate conception? I am not convinced.  His resurrection? Even less so. But the Islamic idea that Jesus will return and convert Christians to Islam?

Don’t hold your breath.

See Part 1 ‘Analysing Islam’ Bostom/Jacoby/Wilders

The religious cleansing of Bangladesh – Hindu man killed by Muslims after Friday prayer meeting (picture)

British Mullah – Anjem Choudary (video) – “Killing of non-Muslims is legitimate” (This man is still free to preach his hate speech in MY country)

Watch video (scroll down a little on page) to see British Police running scared of Islamic rioters (January 2009) – from the Religion of Peace, purportedly protesting over Gaza. The British Police are NOT scared. They were acting under “appeasement” instructions of Gordon Brown’s government.

Video (sound only) of American Muslim children telling of abuse

ETCETERA …

• Obama’s un-pc gaffe! Be careful, now Big O. They’ll get you for this.
• Counter-terrorism Blog: ‘Is Bin Laden worried about his relevence?’
• British Police to incorporate the hijab into uniform! No, it is NOT April Fool’s Day

National Review
By Bat Yeor
February 16, 2009

Does defending Western values constitute “inciting hatred”?

Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the country because he constituted “a threat to public policy.” Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was sent back to Holland — where he has further legal troubles. Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders for “inciting hatred and discrimination” and “insulting Muslim worshippers” through his public statements and his 2008 film, Fitna. The order to proceed with the criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC’s aim is to punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.’s Wilders ban possible.

The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body.

The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are formidable.

The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions collaborating at the highest levels with international organizations in order to implement its political objectives worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia, which puts pressure on Western governments and international bodies to adopt laws punishing “Islamophobia” and blasphemy; and the newly created Islamic International Court of Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia. In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation of the Caliphate.

The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting the political, historical, religious, and human rights of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim countries — such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece — as well as Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the Muslim fight for “legitimate self-determination” in “Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.” It has condemned the “continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan,” and it expresses its full solidarity with “the just cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus” and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur. The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem) when that city has been “liberated” from Israeli control.

In its efforts to defend the “true image” of Islam and combat its defamation, the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish “Islamophobia” and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities. The OIC has massive funding from oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western media and academia and in countless “dialogues.” It influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by the Western nations’ own leftist parties. Hence, we have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with impunity in the cities of Europe — where respect for human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values.

Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe’s civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe’s independence from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms. He had received serious death threats even before Fitna was released.

Many Muslims in the West support him, but Geert Wilders’s principal weapons are his courage and his willingness to resist even his own government, which is slowly submitting to the OIC’s pressures. Wilders’s enemies pretend that he is an insignificant personality who makes “provocative” statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation were self-interest, he could do far better by courting the OIC’s favors — as so many Europeans are doing, consciously or unconsciously — rather than risking his freedom and indeed his life.

— Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

From National Review

Geert Wilders and the Fight for Europe
Does defending Western values constitute “inciting hatred”?

By Bat Yeor, NRO, February 16, 2009

Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the country because he constituted “a threat to public policy.” Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was sent back to Holland – where he has further legal troubles. Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders for “inciting hatred and discrimination” and “insulting Muslim worshippers” through his public statements and his 2008 film, Fitna. The order to proceed with the criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC’s aim is to punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.’s Wilders ban possible.

The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah – the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body.

The OIC is a unique organization – one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican – which speaks for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics – is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are formidable.

The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions collaborating at the highest levels with international organizations in order to implement its political objectives worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia, which puts pressure on Western governments and international bodies to adopt laws punishing “Islamophobia” and blasphemy; and the newly created Islamic International Court of Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia. In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation of the Caliphate.

The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting the political, historical, religious, and human rights of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim countries – such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece – as well as Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the Muslim fight for “legitimate self-determination” in “Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.” It has condemned the “continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan,” and it expresses its full solidarity with “the just cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus” and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur. The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem) when that city has been “liberated” from Israeli control.

In its efforts to defend the “true image” of Islam and combat its defamation, the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish “Islamophobia” and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities. The OIC has massive funding from oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western media and academia and in countless “dialogues.” It influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by the Western nations’ own leftist parties. Hence, we have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with impunity in the cities of Europe – where respect for human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values.

Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe’s civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment – and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe’s independence from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms. He had received serious death threats even before Fitna was released.

Many Muslims in the West support him, but Geert Wilders’s principal weapons are his courage and his willingness to resist even his own government, which is slowly submitting to the OIC’s pressures. Wilders’s enemies pretend that he is an insignificant personality who makes “provocative” statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation were self-interest, he could do far better by courting the OIC’s favors – as so many Europeans are doing, consciously or unconsciously – rather than risking his freedom and indeed his life.

- Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Det finns en intressant artikel i gårdagens SvD, Integrationen präglade al-Andalus. Artikeln är skriven av Karl Steinick och handlar om den spanska medeltiden under muslimskt styre. I artikelns inledning beskriver Steinick två motstridiga historieskrivningar. Enligt den ena betraktas den muslimska erövringen av Spanien bara som en del av islams expansionism, som hejdades vid slaget vid Poitiers 732. Den andra historieskrivningen talar om muslimernas välde som ett multikulturellt samhälle där människor av olika trosriktningar levde sida vid sida i jämlikhet och harmoni.

Professor Bernard Lewis vid Princetonuniversitetet, en av de främsta kännarna av islams historia, skriver i sin bok Jews of Islam (s 17):

Two stereotypes dominate most of what has been written on tolerance and intolerance in the Islamic world. The first depicts a fanatical warrior, an Arab horseman riding out of the desert with a sword in one hand and the Qur’an in the other, offering his victims the choice between the two.
[...]
The other image, almost equally preposterous, is that of an interfaith, interracial utopia, in which men and women belonging to different races, professing different creeds, lived side by side in a golden age of unbroken harmony, enjoying equality of rights and of opportunities, and toiling together for the advancement of civilization.
[...]
Both images are of course wildly distorted; yet both contain, as stereotypes often do, some elements of truth. Two features they have in common are that they are relatively recent, and that they are of Western and not Islamic origin.

Det är bra att Steinick inte hänfaller åt någon av dessa stereotyper. Morernas välde är ofta, kanske mer än någon annan period i islams historia, föremål för dessa mytbildningar. Mytbildningarna har en politisk dimension också, vilket en annan historieprofessor vid Princetonuniversitetet, Mark Cohen, skriver om i sin artikel Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History, publicerad bl a i antologin Jews among Muslims: Communities in the Precolonial Middle East:

How did Jews fare under Islamic rule in the Middle Ages?
[...]
Two radically divergent answers to this question have been offered. One is the well-known thesis – or rather, myth – of the Jewish Islamic interfaith utopia, a ‘golden age’ of toleration, of political achievement, and of remarkably integrated cultural efflorescence. This myth was created by nineteenth-century European Jewish intellectuals frustrated by the tortuously slow progress of their own integration into gentile society in the age of emancipation; it went hand-in-hand with the so called ‘lachrymose conception’ of European Jewish history, according to which Jewish life in medieval Christian Europe was one long chain of suffering.

Originally promulgated by Jewish writers, the myth of Judeo-Islamic harmony (contrasted with Judeo-Christian conflict) has in our own time been appropriated by Arabs and Western sympathizers with the Arab struggle against Israel, who attempt, through the use of history, to explain and in fact justify modern Arab anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. They argue, explicitly or implicitly, that the current disharmony between Jews and Arabs is not to be attributed to any long-standing Arab or Islamic anti-Semitism. Rather, as Jewish historians themselves have claimed, Jews and Arabs lived in peace and friendship for centuries; therefore, the source of modern Arab antipathy towards Israel is the Jews themselves who destroyed the old harmony when they began to threaten Muslim-Arab rights to the land of Palestine.
[...]
Dismayed by contemporary Arab exploitation of the myth of the interfaith utopia in the service of the cause against Israel, some Jewish writers have, lamentably, invented a ‘counter-myth’ to take its place. Echoing and often citing Maimonides’ dark view of Islamic treatment of the Jews, these writers indict Islam as congenitally and relentlessly persecutory. And, by transposing the theory of Jewish suffering from Christendom to Islam, they have created what we may call the ‘neo-lachrymose’ conception of the Jewish past.
[...]
While the myth of the interfaith utopia was certainly in need of correction, the counter-myth, with its implicit transvaluation of the older conception of the relative status of the Jews of the West and the East, does not represent a fairer reading of the past.

Det är lätt att hitta exempel på den politiska användningen av båda dessa myter:

• Anita Berqvist, stabsassistent på Internationella staben på Socialdemokraternas partiexpedition, skrev i Västerbottens Folkblad den 12 autugsti 2008 att
  

  Palestinier och judar hade levt tillsammans i fred innan tanken på att bilda staten Israel uppkom.

  I en replik svarade jag att

  Alla de judar som plundrades, våldtogs (både kvinnor och män), mördades och torterades under den 33 dagar långa pogromen i Safed 1834 skulle nog inte kalla det fredlig samexistens.

• Bloggaren “Baba U” skriver
  

  Religioner som tidigare levt i fred sida vid sida har blivit dödsfiender. Judar har inte trakasserats i Mellanöstern. Det skedde i Europa, i kristenheten. Varför ska araberna få lida för Europas skändligheter?

• På socialdemokratiska Palmecentrets hemsida kan man läsa
  

  Det ironiska i situationen är att det i Hebron, liksom i många andra av Palestinas städer, finns en gammal tradition av tolerans mellan judiska och arabiska invånare, etablerad under flera hundra år av samlevnad. Detta har i grunden förändrats av de nya bosättarna, många av dem fd sovjetiska eller ryska medborgare som anlänt till Mellanöstern först de senaste åren.

  - Vi levde i fred här i hundratals år. Problemet är inte striden om landområden, problemet är snarare fanatismen, den fanatism som finns hos många av bosättarna som ser en framtid utan araber, sa Khaled Qawasmi.

• Den motsatta myten har ivrigt förespråkats av historikern Bat Ye’or, själv judisk flykting från Egypten.

Ibland känns ord lite futtiga. Steinicks artikel är genomgående fri från de ovan nämnda myterna, men en mening är på tok för luddigt formulerad;

Judarna utsattes ibland för övergrepp från muslimer, ibland från kristna.

Övergrepp? Det kan betyda i stort sett vad som helst. I det här fallet döljer sig en av medeltidens största massakrer på judar bakom ordet – massakern i Granada 1066, då en muslimsk mobb på en enda dag mördade ca 4.000 judar.

Några muslimska massakrer på judar före 1948. Klicka för att se en större bild.

Det debatteras ibland hur “toleranta” religioner är. Den diskussionen är, åtminstone i historiskt perspektiv, meningslös. Bernard Lewis skriver vidare i Jews of Islam (s 17-18):

For Christians and Muslims alike, tolerance is a new virtue, intolerance a new crime. For the greater part of the history of both communities, tolerance was not valued nor was intolerance condemned. Until comparatively modern times, Christian Europe neither prized nor practiced tolerance itself, and was not greatly offended by its absence in others. The charge that was always brought against Islam was not that its doctrines were imposed by force – something seen as normal and natural – but that its doctrines were false. Similarly on the Muslim side, the claim to tolerance, now much heard from Muslim apologists and more especially from apologists for Islam, is also new and of alien origin. It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam have begun to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those that willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.

Och på s 106:

The simplified and idealized nineteenth-century accounts of the history of the Jews in Spain present a black and white picture of Christian intolerance and Muslim intolerance, with the Jews fleeing from the one to the other. It was not always so. During the centuries when both Muslim and Christian states existed in the Iberian peninsula, there were times and places, as in Maimonides’ own birthplace, when it was the Muslims who persecuted and the Christians who offered refuge.

SvD 2 3 4
Sydsvenskan

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om islam, antisemitism, Spanien, morerna, Granada, Karl Steinick, Bernard Lewis, Mark Cohen, Bat Ye’or, socialdemokraterna, Palmecentret, Anita Bergqvist

According to Dagen.se the Swedish parliament, Riksdagen, will on Wednesday vote over resolutions that will make Sweden recognize the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians by the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Turkey has always denied these accusations, but substantial research concludes that genocides against theses people happened. The genocide killed between 500,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians. Also, large numbers of Assyrians were killed in a way that can only be described as genocide. Estimates of Assyrians killed, range from 500,000 – 750,000 people.

Rev. John Eshoo, who miraculously managed to escape, writes that:

The Assyrian refugees were kept under guard for eight days, without anything to eat except a handful of popcorn served daily to each individual. This consideration was by no means intended as a humanitarian act, but merly to keep the victims alive for the infliction upon them of the most revolting tortures at a convenient time set for their execution. At last they were removed from their place of confinement and taken to a spot prepared for their brutal killing.

The helpless Assyrians marched like lambs to their slaughter, and they opened not their mouth, save by saying: “Lord, into thy hands we commit our spirits.” The procession of the victims was led by two green turbaned Sayids (the highest religious order in Islam), one with an open book in his hand, reading from it aloud the passages pertaining to the holy war, and the other carrying a large bladed knife, the emblem of execution.

According to Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye’or the massacres was a jihad, thus they had a religious character. This is completely in line with a statement by Cevdet Paşa the governor of Van, who is reported to have held a meeting in February 1915 at which he said, “We have cleansed the Armenians and Syriac [Christian]s from Azerbaijan, and we will do the same in Van”.

I welcome a Swedish recognition of these crimes against humanity, that they rightfully will be labeled genocide.

Picture:
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Catholicos of all Armenians Garegin II at the Armenian Genocide monument in Yerevan for a torch lighting ceremony for the genocide victims in Darfur. The two men are standing on purple cloth, with Garegin on the left and Williams on the right.