Free Republic

I first encountered Gisèle Littman, better known as "Bat Ye’or," through her book, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam while browsing through a Judaica section of a Barnes & Noble book store in Westport, Connecticut in 1985. Reading it opened my mind to the historical evidence of the subjugated treatment of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims under shari’a in the wake of Islamic Jihad over conquered lands. Her book threw into considerable doubt the then fashionable medievalist commentary that Jews and Christians had been well treated in Al Andaluz, Muslim Spain and in the far reaches of the Caliphate...

In a move that caught the Israeli government and the Jewish world by complete surprise, on October 21, 2010, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the Tomb of the Hebrew Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem "an integral part of the occupied Palestinian territories," admonishing the Israeli decision to add these biblical shrines to the list of Jewish historical and archaeological sites as "a violation of international law."[1] The United Nations has become a foremost purveyor of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement. Nowhere has this obsession been more starkly demonstrated than at the World Conference...

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...

The globalization of our world and the policies that have led to large-scale Muslim immigration, adopted by the European Community from 1973, has introduced into Europe conflictual situations and prejudices common in the Muslim world against non-Muslims that have been documented by Orientalists familiar with Islamic theology, law and history. But the politization of history initiated by Edward Said has obfuscated the root causes of Islam’s traditional hostility toward Jews and Christians from the seven century onward. Edward Said was a Christian raised in Egypt and educated in America; he taught English literature at Columbia University. A great admirer of...

Bat Ye’or is the most informed contemporary scholar of the unique Islamic institution of dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating apartheid system imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis) subjugated by Jihad. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact of centuries of Jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the Indian subcontinent: “The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil,...

Yesterday I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting a very special person. If you did not know the tiny, unpretentious and vivacious grey-haired lady whom I had the privilege of sitting next to you would never guess that she is one of the most formidable personalities of our time. When I drove to The Hague I did not know I was going to meet her, but I knew her name – or rather the pseudonym which she generally uses: Bat Ye’or. It is Hebrew for “daughter of the Nile.” She was born in Cairo but her family was expelled from...

The flames consuming thousands of automobiles, and the occasional bus, nursery, warehouse, and school across France are the result of tragic – in the original sense of the word – set of decisions made by the leaders of Europe, motivated by greed, jealousy, and hubris. The dream of a Europe restored to preeminence, isolating and vanquishing the upstart Americans, via a rock-solid alliance with the Arab world, has become a nightmare. The French cannot acknowledge their problem precisely because they cannot admit the folly of the policies pursued for the last three decades as the bedrock of their highest diplomatic,...

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab AxisBy Bat Ye'or Fairleigh Dickinson University 322pp., $23.95How is it that ten percent of France is Muslim, 15% of Denmark is Muslim and close to half of the births in the next generation will be Muslim? Imperious mosques and lawless Muslim neighborhoods dot the landscape of major European cities. And Spain willingly and meekly chose to acknowledge its Islamic past, and that pro-Arab opinion is rampant and anti-Israeli sentiment vitriolic. European appeasement apparently did not end in Munich in 1938. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye'or is a definitive work for the early 21st century. Its...

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axisby Bat Ye’or Fairleigh Dickinson. 384 pp. $49.50For the past 30 years, the Jewish scholar Bat Ye’or, born in Egypt but long resident in Geneva, has been developing formidable credentials as a chronicler of “dhimmitude,” a term with which she is closely associated. Constructed from the Arabic dhimmi, the word characterizes the submissive status of peoples conquered by Islam but allowed to live. Sometimes at the edges and sometimes in the face of an academic world that has become increasingly politically correct, Bat Ye’or (a Hebrew pen name meaning “daughter of the Nile”) has been challenging myths...

Review: The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats non-MuslimsEdited by Robert Spencer Prometheus Books (2005)“A thing without a name escapes understanding,” warns preeminent Islamic scholar Bat Ye'or of jihad and dhimmitude — the Islamic institutions of, respectively, war and perpetual servitude imposed on conquered non-Muslim peoples. Both, Ye’or notes in an essay entitled “Historical Amnesia,” are in the process of globalization.  This is not the benign economic globalization that most Westerners laud. Islamic jihad and dhimmitude trade in every available means — military, political, technological and intellectual. And if the towering collection of 63 essays (including Ye’or’s) contained...

[In a wide ranging interview with Islamic scholar Bat Ye'or comes a frank discussion of Eurabia: what it is, and what it means for Americans.  Interview by Alyssa A. Lappen]In her new book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Bat Ye'or takes a sweeping view of history, not the one that most of us consider, just past the ends of our noses. The world's preeminent historian of two unique Islamic institutions, jihad and dhimmitude—the latter, the humiliated, precarious state of non-Muslim peoples living under Islamic rule—Bat Ye'or has masterfully portrayed the means by which the Euro-Arab Dialogue unfolded over the past 30-plus...

A quarter-century ago, author Bat Ye'or set out to debunk the myth that Jews and other non-Muslim minorities enjoyed a golden age of freedom while living in countries under the sway of Islam. Her ground-breaking book, Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, shined a spotlight on the plight of those who found themselves under Muslim rule. But after several other works that also focused on the concept of the dhimmi — the word used by Muslims to describe those who lived as their legal inferiors — the author has expanded her focus. For Ye'or (a pen name), the question is...

A review of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'or. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 384 pages, $23.95One of the first requirements in any conflict is to know the enemy — how he thinks, what he values, what his goals are. In the current war against Islamism, we in the West have done and are doing a poor job of understanding our enemy on his terms; rather, we have reduced his behavior to our own particular prejudices and categories. Indeed, our enemy has been much better at knowing where we come from and exploiting our cultural ideals and weaknesses than we...

It was just a coincidence that "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" appeared in the mail the same day a New York Times article on the subject of Eurabia landed on the doorstep. "Eurabia," the long-awaited book by Bat Ye'or, is a comprehensive, even overwhelming and absolutely shocking explication of how and why it is that Europe is transforming itself into what the Egyptian-born historian calls "a new geopolitical entity " Eurabia." The New York Times article, on the other hand, a muddled analysis by Craig S. Smith about the "fear of Islamists" and the "far right" in Belgium, is one more...

Q: Are you familiar with the work of Bat Ye’or and the issue of Dhimmitude, as well as her more recent research into the issue of Eurabia? I tend to be somewhat skeptical of ‘conspiracy’ theories (not that her views on Eurabia are conspiratorial in the classic sense), but it does suggest some rather worrying possibilities with regard to European alliances with Arab causes (and personalities) and the long term implications this has for American-European relations. Hanson: Yes, I am familiar with her work. She is not a conspiracist at all, but an empiricist, whose work is based on observation,...

On October 29, 2004, just before the U.S. presidential election, Osama bin Laden delivered a taped speech that confirmed the jihadist strategy. His declaration “Any US state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security," epitomizes the Palestinian terror threat to Europe in the 1970s. It is precisely this threat that has engineered a Euro-Arab and Palestinian solidarity. It has fueled the frantic European devotion to Arafat and Europe’s neurotic insistence that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the prime danger to its own security and world peace. This fear motivates the European countries’ adamant refusal to recognize...

Frontpage Interview's guest today is Bat Ye'or, the world's foremost authority on dhimmitude. Her latest study is Islam and Dhimmitude. Where Civilizations Collide. Her forthcoming book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, will be published in January 2005. FP: Bat Ye'or, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Bat Ye'or: Thanks for inviting me to your prestigious magazine. FP: First things first, can you explain the term "Eurabia" to our readers? Bat Ye'or: Eurabia represents a geo-political reality envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC)which, enlarged, became the European Union...

Last Tuesday, the 25 nations of the European Union (EU) voted unanimously to support  a United Nations Resolution condemning Israel’s defensive fence (ignoring that this barrier was constructed to keep jihadist murderers from entering the nation via Judea and Samaria). The EU’s craven, morally bankrupt stance was sadly consistent with Eurabian policies evident now for three decades. In fact, the EU has been completing a slow metamorphasis into the "Christian" arm of the Pan-Arab world, different in religious observation (or lack of same) but united in its views of Israel and America. The European Community (EC), and later the EU, has been aligned with Arab...

Allow me first to make a preliminary observation about the title of this session: the ‘return of the spirit of Munich’ – a title which I find somewhat optimistic. At Munich, in 1938, France and England, exhausted by the death toll of the Great War, abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Nazi beast, in the hope that by doing so they would avoid another conflict. The “spirit of Munich” thus refers to a policy of states and of peoples who refuse to confront a threat, and attempt to obtain peace and security through conciliation and appeasement, or even, for some, an active...

The pro-Saddam Hussein European manifestations of February 15th that brought millions into the streets of European capitals are the culmination of Charles de Gaulle’s political vision of a European destiny led by France. During World War II de Gaulle was the leader of French resistance against the Nazis, but his post-war anti-Americanism rallied many of his previous enemies. Hostility to America and antisemitism were strong in various French circles: the communists, the left, and particularly among the numerous politicians, civil servants, intellectuals and businessmen, who had willingly collaborated with the Germans. Those political currents had important links with the Arab-Muslim...