The man who insists that the U.S. is currently fighting “World War IV” against “Islamofascism” (World War III was the Cold War) and who said, “the only prudent—indeed, the only responsible—course is to assume that Ahmadinejad may not be bluffing…and to strike at him as soon as it is logistically possible” also wrote this:
- Looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process…[that] has been called, rightly, Islamization. … In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, “schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils….” But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional values of the West…. Yet rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly giving in to the Muslims’ outrageous demands. … Already some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.
Our friend Norman Podhoretz is more than a solitary crank, he is a founding father of neoconservatism and a key foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential frontrunner Rudolph Guiliani. I was wondering what he meant by “some observers,” so I googled “Eurabia,” a term I had never heard before, though it conjures for me the kind of racial paranoia that caused white supremacists of a century ago to go crazy about the Yellow Peril. I’m an innocent, I guess, because I wonder honestly, would it be so bad to live in a Europe full of Arabs, Turks and Pakistanis? to blend in marketplace or on the Metro with people wearing the traditional clothing of those lands, or hear the Islamic call to prayer in European streets? I guess I’m just a traitor to my race, because I could even imagine my own children belonging to such a “foreign” culture, only first I need to find the right partner, it’s not something I can do alone. The fear-mongering is lost on me.
Anyway, the first thing that came up in my google search was the book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by “the world’s preeminent historian of Islam,” Bat Ye’or. (Never heard of her? Me neither.) She has coined the term “dhimmitude” to refer to the supposedly humiliating condition of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, a situation that she feels has already destroyed Europe, with the U.S. in danger of being next.
- Eurabia cannot change direction; it can only use deception to mask its emergence, its bias and its inevitable trajectory. Eurabia’s destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States…. Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people.
For those who want it, here is a collection of links to articles by and about Bat Ye’or, and the Eurabia concept. Here is the wikipedia article that defines Eurabia as “a scenario where Europe allies itself and eventually merges with the Arab world.” Here is a profile from The New Yorker of Oriana Fallaci, another proponent of the Eurabia concept, who accused Muslims in The Force of Reason of “invading and conquering and subjugating” Europe. She called it “the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created.”
I don’t want to go any further with this for now, because I feel like I’m digging in a nest of maggots. It astonishes me that such views could exist at all, and even more so that they seem to be the dominant view in the West. In my view, it isn’t an Islamic invasion that is destroying Western culture. Our culture of tolerance and enlightenment is being eroded from within by people like Podhoretz, Ye’or and Fallaci who refuse to adapt to the diversity of the global era.
hi Marcel and thanks for this article
I wasn’t myself aware of all those theories
I know Fallaci for being what she is (I don’t even want to find a word for it)
But what is amazing me is that all this way of thinking is starting to spread among quebecers where we start hearing that muslims whenever they go somewhere they impose their way of being and that probably in no time, they will impose the veil to them and that they will have to wear it
I was wondering where such idiotic statements are coming from, and believed that it was just some isolated weird ideas that came from a lack of knowledge a lack of culture or whatever lack it can be
I realise that I was the one lacking awareness here
Those theories are aggressively being pushed upon the public by a lot of media, in the Netherlands for sure. Those ideas do give some kind of an explanation to what has been happening. Remember the murder of van Gogh? It paralyzed society.
* Cartoon riots. * Women insisting on the right to hide their face. * Attacks on homosexuals.
It maybe strange to someone who didn’t notice, but all that has an impact on society. People look for an explanation, are afraid are looking for a way to deal with it. These theories are pretty stupid – but where are the alternatives?
Sure we need them!
Oriana Fallaci, a great admirer of the Shah of Iran is dead now. Podhoretz is to the Arab World what Dulles was for the communism: a frantic paranoid.
An extreme-rightist coming from the left side of the American spectrum, he became one of these theoretician that we see around more and more (in France we have Finkielkraut, much smoother today than this good ol’ Norman, but wait;-).
Thriving on fear, shortcut-lovers, they draw a straight line that starts from their craving for influence to the increasign need for someone or something-anything-that could stand as the last rempart of civilisation…
Ten years ago, everybody would have had a good laugh at them.
Not today.
Not today, because people listen to that kind of junk thought, of loose delirium.
We have Mitt Romney forgetting the lessons of History and claiming Al-Qaida to be the most dangerous threat the USA ever had to face, Rudy singing his contempt for UNO, etcetc.
But then, We also have at our disposal the other side of paranoids, like the conspiracy freaks and their theories of Bush and Cheney storing tons of explosives inside the World Trade Center just before 9/11.
We sure know that, in order to prevent the rise (or fall) of Amabia, our freedom-loving, God-fearing President and his VP would do a lot, but we also know they never proved efficient enough to carry out such a task ;-)…
Oriana Fallaci did not admire the Sjah of Iran. To give a glimpse of her mindset I’ll mention just one fact: she joined the resistance against the nazi’s as a teenager.
Get yourself well informed at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriana_Fallaci
@Ferry — In the U.S. it’s not uncommon, unfortunately, for people with a narcissistic attachment to the Left in their youth to swing over to the extreme Right in later life. Norman Podhoretz himself is an example, and Fallaci seems to me to be a European example of the same syndrome. I read the wikipedia article before writing my original post, and although it says nothing about whether Fallaci admired the Shah (she did interview him) there is this anecdote which told me a lot about her:
“During the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre [in Mexico] prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Fallaci was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican forces. According to The New Yorker, her former support of the student activists ‘devolved into a dislike of Mexicans…. “I don’t love the Mexicans,” Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’ I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”‘”
Broken her balls…!? This melodrama indicates to me that something “snapped” in her at some point, transforming what had been a passionate support for the excluded and downtrodden into its opposite, an equally passionate rejection based on her own inflated sense of victimization. Norman Podhoretz is a similar case, switching from liberal to neocon in the 1970s based in part on his need to feel “tough” after being beaten up as a boy by Negros (as they were called then) yet admiring them for their strength. See this recent analysis in the New York Review of Books of Podhoretz’ 1963 essay “My Negro Problem—and Ours” and what it reveals about his current psychology. For Fallaci, see the New Yorker profile “The Agitator” that I linked in my original post.
Fallaci is a great feminist icon in showing that bravery, hipocrisy, stupidity, stubbornness, clarity, wit, charisma, idiotic speech, logical fallacies, paranoia, righteous anger, acerbity and weakness for amusingly empty speech isn’t exclusive to men even though it seems that way.
I, for one, am against islam the minute it places force over freedom, collectively sides with a muslim just for her muslimhood and not the actual quality of her character or tries to get special treatment. That I am against careless polemicists – who erroneously think right-wingers have the best defense of Kantian enlightenment and the best response to Islamist supremacism – like Oriana is also something I am proud of
@Xel — I guess Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are right in the Fallacian feminist mold!
When you say, “I am against islam the minute it places force over freedom” or emphasizes group identity over individual character, I know quite a few Muslims in various states of belief or doubt who are in total agreement with you. The more believing of them would say that the things you dislike are in fact un-Islamic, because the core of Islam is that we stand naked before God, as individuals, so no label of “Muslim” is going to get a special pass from God if a person’s actions are unjust, or her thoughts vain or hypocritical.
Something to keep in mind is that there is no institution called “Islam” like there is the Catholic Church, so anyone claiming to preach Islamic doctrine is, in the end, speaking only for himself depite the centuries of tradition he may claim, or the number of followers he may be able to muster. Those wishing to know “what God asks of Muslims” need to go straight to the Qur’an, where they will need to wrestle with seeming contradictions and multiple levels of meaning; but if they are paying attention, they will understand that the heart of Islam is compassion, coupled with individual responsiblity, from which follows forbearance in relations with others, and a live-and-let-live approach to “outsiders.”
As someone who has grown up with and indulged in the Western freedoms, I remain unconvinced that “Islamic supremacism” is a threat to my way of life. What I do believe is that the world is in flux, and the historic supremacy of the West is under challenge. The West has its own forms of supremacism, its belief that its values are the best or only values. For me, seeing that knocked down a peg or two isn’t a bad thing. Meanwhile, like you I think, I will continue to defend against bigots whether of the religious or any other kind.