Bat Ye’or and the Coming Universal Caliphate

by Richard L. Rubenstein (January 2013)

A review essay of Bat Ye’or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). This essay was first published as “Coming Attractions: Caliphates?” in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, December issue Vol 4 #2.

In the past few years,  it has become all too apparent that the nations of the European Union (EU) have made a catastrophic mistake when they created a common, one-size-fits all currency, the euro, ignoring the vast differences in productive capacity, financial resources, work habits, and culture of the member nations. The full consequences of this mistake have yet to unfold, but the instability in the world’s financial markets may be a foretaste of darker troubles ahead.

While the financial crisis has been recognized, a far worse error of judgment has yet to be recognized, at least by Europe’s leaders, the surrender of Europe’s cultural identity as a consequence of the introduction of a largely unassimilable Muslim population into the EU. According to the U.S. Department of State’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, 2005, the EU’s Muslim population numbered 23.2 million and has continued to increase since then. In France alone, the Report estimated that there were between five and six million Muslims, about ten percent of the population. Moreover, as Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out, the fundamental problem facing Europe’s indigenous population is “senescence.”¹

This is not true of Europe’s Muslim population. With or without further immigration, it is expected to increase considerably. Moreover, as Bat Ye’or points out in her new book, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011) the rising number of Muslims constitute only a part of the problem. Far more problematic have been the political, economic, and cultural motives that led to Europe’s fateful decision to permit this unprecedented mass immigration.   

To explain that decision, Bat Ye’or begins with a discussion of the concept of dhimmitude, a term she characterizes as “concealed knowledge.” Although “few terms are as significant for the understanding of current events,” she reports that the term is “unknown by the general public and taboo in academia.”  Dhimmitude, she argues, designates the civilizations “conquered by jihad and subject to sharia law.” It is her conviction that the nations of the European Union (EU) are in the process of submitting to that subordination at the present time. Alternatively, as she demonstrates, dhimmitude can be understood as arguably the most effective and enduring system of religiously legitimated domination human beings have ever created.

A dhimmi is a non-Muslim belonging to the civilization of dhimmitude. Either he or his ancestors surrendered to the armies of jihad and consequently lost their sovereignty and their territorial rights in exchange for “protection” in the form of a contract of surrender (dhimma) against jihad. Such protection renders dhimmis essentially powerless and subject to the humiliating conditions imposed upon them by their masters. It should be further noted that dhimmitude is a condition that can only be altered by a highly unlikely reversal of military fortune or, far more likely, conversion to Islam.

According to Bat Ye’or, the concept of dhimmitude is relevant today because, with the exception of Israel, Islam’s jihad ideology of world conquest is once again flourishing in every corner of the world while the governments of most target nations are in denial concerning jihad’s existence and its global aspirations. Global jihad is driven by the 56 nation Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Since its creation in 1969, the OIC has been dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel and to the eventual implementation of sharia over the Western world. The OIC’s oft-stated objectives have not prevented either the European Union or the United States from seeking close ties with the organization. At least theoretically, dhimmitude represents an interim status in which Islam conditionally accepts defeated subject peoples into its midst, provided they abide by the controls and limitations imposed upon them by their Muslim overlords. This willingness on the part of Islam to create a religiously legitimated civilization of domination and submission is often misleadingly characterized as tolerance.  

In 1990, the OIC issued the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It represented the culmination of Muslim dissatisfaction with the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a strictly secular document. The Preamble to the UN Declaration states: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

Both statements are clearly contrary to the fundamental tenets of Islam where there is no such thing as the “inherent dignity” or the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Neither the unbeliever nor the dhimmi have “inalienable rights” nor can such “rights” be the “foundation, of freedom, justice, and peace of the world.” In Islam, Allah is the source of human rights, all of which are conditional upon faithful obedience to his law as expressed in sharia and the hadiths.  

This was clearly understood by Muslim leaders at the UN in 1948, but at the time there was little they could do about it. However, on December 7, 1984, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, Iranian Ambassador to the UN, declared that the UDHR represented “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition” that could not be implemented by Muslims. He argued that “human dignity could not be reduced to a series of secular norms and that Iran recognized no authority or power but that of Almighty God and no legal tradition apart from Islamic law.²

The sectarian character of the Cairo Declaration is clear. Article 24 states: “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’a (sic).” Lest there be any doubt about the intent of the Cairo Declaration, Article 25 states: “The Islamic Shari'a is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration (emphasis added).”

In Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate, Bat Ye’or cites Bassam Tibi, a world-class, Muslim scholar in order to clarify how utterly different the Cairo Declaration is from the UDHR. According to Tibi, “peace only exists between Muslims, and not between Muslims and non-Muslims” and non-believers can only achieve peace with Muslims through conversion or submission (dhimmitude).”  Tibi further explains that for a Muslim, “striving in the path of Allah to spread Islam in the world [a.k.a. jihad] is not war but a pious, just action and a religious duty.” Hence, non-Muslims who obstruct their nation’s Islamization must be considered aggressors. They are to blame for their resistance to Muslim conquest. Put differently, a non-Muslim who remains faithful to his own inherited tradition is ipso facto guilty of failing to accept the “truth” of Islam. By resisting Allah’s will and compelling Muslims to wage jihad against them, they alone bear the full guilt for the hostilities.”³ As Bat Ye’or comments, the logic espoused by the OIC is completely at odds with the secular values of the nations of the European Union.

There is in reality an unbridgeable gap between the way European scholars see both their own history of imperial conquest and Islam’s. Although the facts are known by both the Europeans and their Muslim counterparts, Muslims see their own conquests as historically beneficial for both conquerors and conquered alike, beneficial to the conquered because defeat offered them the opportunity to convert to the sole true religion and serve the only true God. Since the whole world is considered a waqf, a trust bestowed by Allah, its Creator, on those who obey him, military conquest and the harsh measures inflicted upon the vanquished are entirely just. In reality, what non-believers regard as conquest is, in reality, restoration to its proper owners, since Islam regards the vanquished as the true usurpers.

Western scholars have tended to regard Western imperialism and conquest as the illegitimate seizure of what was not theirs. Hence, they often feel that they must make amends to formerly conquered peoples. Unfortunately, such expressions of guilt only confirm Muslims in their conviction that they have been the historically aggrieved party and that Islam has done no wrong it its conquests.

In reality, competent Western scholars have been fully aware of the history of Muslim aggression and conquest, but they have been reluctant to spell it out. It is government policy in both the EU and the United States to characterize acts of violence committed by Islamist terrorists as “extremism,” as if there were no religious motivation involved. Thus, when on November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Hassan gunned down 45 service personnel, killing 13, at Fort Hood, Texas, while shouting, “Allahhu Akhbar,” he was charged with murder and attempted murder but not terrorism.⁴ Unfortunately, authorities in the West are in extreme denial when it comes to identifying Islamist terrorism.

Bat Ye’or claims that such denial has been a deliberate strategic choice. In the case of the EU, it has served as the basis of a policy of rapprochement with the Arab and Muslim world for forty years. That policy has been implemented through multilateralism, namely, “the practice of coordinating national policies in groups of three or more states,”⁵ and multiculturalism, the doctrine that several different cultures can coexist as equals within a single state. Unfortunately, as Bat Ye’or argues, Europe’s multiculturalism is more of a surrender of its own indigenous culture to Islam than genuine coexistence. Moreover, a principal aspect of that surrender has been the EU’s intensified hostility toward Israel and, to a certain extent, the United States. Because of its unique history and the hazards of its geography, Israel could not possibly abandon its sovereignty as have the EU nations.

Given Israel’s size in comparison to the vast territories conquered by Islam, Bat Ye’or asks, “Why would Muslims keep plotting to destroy Israel” and “do so with such poisonous hatred?” Why, she asks, “is Israel considered so alarming?” There have been many attempts to answer that question. This writer has attempted to offer an answer from social psychology, namely, the rage experienced by so many Muslims that a people whom they have known primarily as dhimmis and, as such, have been the objects of contempt and/or condescension for fourteen hundred years should have defeated Muslims militarily not once but several times since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.⁶

Undoubtedly there is more to it than that, and Bat Ye’or offers a very credible answer from the perspective of the history of religion and theology: “What Israel possesses is the Bible that Muhammad claimed was the unaltered version of the Koran (sic) uncreated and consubstantial with Allah before Jews and Christians falsified it” (emphasis added). The Muslim claim is astounding. Documents that were written in most instances more than as thousand years before Muhammad appeared on the scene are regarded in Islam as deliberate falsifications of the Qur’an. As is well known, there are irreconcilable discrepancies between narratives in the Bible and the Qur’an. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Patriarch Abraham is commanded by God to offer his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem (Genesis 22:1–18). At a very early stage in the Islamic tradition it was determined that Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac, at Mount Mina near Mecca. Rejecting historical evidence, Muslims solved the discrepancy between the Bible and Qu’ran by claiming that the Qur’an was the original Torah and that Jews and Christians are guilty of tahrif, that is, distorting the actual biblical text or its meaning.

Moreover, as Bat Ye’or points out, while the land of the Bible is replete with the original names of the towns, villages, and places cited in the Bible, no town or village in Israel is mentioned in the Qur’an or in the biographies of Muhammad. Nevertheless, Muslims claim Palestine as an originally Muslim land usurped by the Hebrews in ancient times and once again by the Jews in modern times. As a result, any attempt to assert the historical connection of contemporary Israeli history and settlement with the Bible is regarded by Islam as a profound act of usurpation that must be terminated by the rightful possessors of the land, the Muslims.

Thus, there is in Islam an unconditional imperative to destroy Israel’s history by destroying any trace of continuity between contemporary and ancient Israel in order to recover the land’s alleged Islamic past. Nor can this be done without Islamizing Christian origins as well, which Muslims claim are properly depicted in the Qur’an and not in the Bible. Even when Muslims refer to the three “Abrahamitic” religions, ostensibly as a means of facilitating dialogue, they are not creating a neutral space where Jews, Christians, and Muslims can meet as equals, something that Jewish and Christian partners in dialogue tend to overlook. As Bat Ye’or reminds us, Muslims insist that Abraham is a prophet of Islam rather than a Patriarch and “the father of many nations…” (Gen. 17:5) Similarly, Jesus is Isa, also a prophet of Islam, and not the divine-human person of the Trinity.

Since the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967 and especially after the 1973 War, Europeans have tended to call Israelis, “colonizers” and “occupiers.” They thereby deny any Jewish historical or religious connection to the land in spite of both the testimony of the Bible and the accumulated evidence of excavations, artifacts, inscriptions, and ancient manuscripts from the Biblical period testifying to its Hebrew roots. By contrast, there is neither effort nor serious interest among Muslims to find concrete evidence validating their claims about the Qur’an as the original document. Of course, no such scientific or scholarly validation is necessary because of the dogmatic character of Islam’s claims and the harsh penalties that can be inflicted on those who publicly question such claims.

For two millennia, Jewish memory of the loss of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel and yearning for its restoration have been expressed in daily and Holy Day prayers and ritual. Moreover, there has been a deep Christian attachment to the land, the prophets, and the heroes of Israel. Unfortunately, there have been Palestinian Christians and their Western accomplices who today are more than willing to cooperate in denying any intrinsic connection between the Bible and modern Israel. As I read about these efforts, I was reminded of the efforts of the Nazi-era Deutsche Christen to de-Judaize Scripture, nor, as we shall see, is the connection far-fetched.  

Having offered a theological explanation of Muslim attempts to deny any connection between contemporary Israel and its biblical counterpart, Bat Ye’or turns to the subject of Europe’s cooperation with Muslim hostility to both Israel and Jews. She claims that the European Community’s Arab policy was situated “in a precise, strategic, coordinated framework called the Euro-Arab Dialogue” that was in turn the fruit of agreements between the nine EEC governments and the countries of the Arab League in 1973–1975. That framework defined a semi-official, quasi-secret policy that had the effect of transforming Europe politically and demographically into Eurabia. Her pathfinding views were first published in French in December 2002 in an article “The Euro-Arab Dialogue and the Birth of Eurabia.”⁷ They have since been expanded in 2005 in a book, Eurabia,⁸  in which she argued that the mass Muslim immigration that began in the 1970s fit into a European ideology that aimed at the creation of a unified Euro-Arab Mediterranean civilization, Eurabia. Her analysis rejected the conventional wisdom that Muslim immigration, an unprecedented demographic upheaval, was a consequence of European guilt for the Holocaust and the determination not to turn its back on the contemporary victims of economic and political misfortune. Inevitably, the introduction of a very large population, ethnically and religiously alien to the European mainstream, resulted in considerable opposition from elements of the indigenous population. This led to the accusation that those opposed to the mass Muslim migration were guilty of the same sort of racism that led to the Holocaust.

In reality, the extermination of Europe’s Jews in 1940–1945 and the mass migration of Muslims to Europe starting in the 1970s were in no sense comparable. Mass Muslim migration, the demographic outcome of Eurabia, grew out of a Euro-Arab alliance against Israel that was allied to an Arab policy whose unconditional objective was Israel’s destruction. The Euro-Arab alliance was the source of a fundamentally Judaeophobic policy and culture in Europe, complete with attacks on Jewish targets perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists working under the protection of European police and security services, at a time when a former officer Reinhard Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst, Paul Dickopf, was president of Interpol (1968-1972). We return to Dickopf and his Nazi associates below.

The creation of Eurabia entailed a Euro-Arab alliance that sought with considerable success to revive European anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, its fundamental objectives were far more encompassing. It sought to replace Europe’s nation states with an order of world governance managed by unelected, unaccountable international bodies. 

Although the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) negotiations that led to the creation of Eurabia have never been made public, according to Bat Ye’or, the movement is known to have started in France in the 1960s among the French Catholic left and the Quai D’Orsay, the French Foreign Office. These organizations sponsored pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe, Lebanon, and Cairo that recalled the collaboration of Nazi and Fascist regimes in the 1930s and during World War II with Muslim political and religious leaders.

According to Bat Ye’or, during the war, the Germans found that Muslim defectors and prisoners of war from a region then known as Soviet Turkestan, but comprising present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, bitterly resented their communist overlords and saw the Nazis as liberators.⁹ The Nazis also found a powerful ally in Haj Amin al-Huseini, Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1937. After participating in the leadership of a failed, pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in May 1941, the Mufti made his way to Berlin, with a brief stay in Rome, during which he met Benito Mussolini. Upon arriving in Berlin, he had a 95-minute meeting with Hitler that was attended by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. The Mufti established his wartime headquarters, the Büro des Grossmufti, in Berlin and actively cooperated in the creation and indoctrination of a Muslim Waffen SS division in Bosnia in 1941. In addition to his meetings with Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, the Mufti was in close contact with officers of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the SS organization directly responsible for the implementation of the so-called Final Solution.¹⁰

In addition to the British, the Muslims and the Nazis had two other common enemies, the Soviet Union and the Jews. After the war, some of the most committed Nazis, such as Johan von Leers, who converted to Islam, and Alois Brünner, continued the war against the Jews in Egypt and Syria. In the 1960s, the Quai d’Orsay and the French Catholic Left sponsored numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe, Lebanon, and Cairo. These activities reawakened the Euro-Arab relationships that had fostered active wartime collaboration between the  Nazi and Fascist regimes in Europe and Arab religious and political leaders, especially the Palestinians. This renewed activism recalled the Nazi-Muslim partnership that developed during the war against the Soviet Union. In 1941 Hitler had appointed Alfred Rosenberg Head of the Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories). His colleague, Gerhard von Mende, director of the Ostministerium, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, became the architect of the collaboration between the Wehrmacht and the battalions made up of defecting Muslim soldiers from a region that today comprises Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan..

In spite of German-Jewish rapprochement, especially under Chancellor Wily Brandt (1963-1974), former Nazis and their sympathizers found places at the highest levels of the German and French governments. A sense of solidarity was revived between the former Nazis and their collaborators and their wartime Arab partners in enmity toward both America and the Jews. This development was encouraged by the Quai d’Orsay that regarded the possibility of a Euro-Arab alliance as a means of diminishing and eventually eliminating American influence in Europe,

In November 1970, in a lecture given in Cairo, Georges Montaron, editor of the left-wing Catholic journal, Témoignage  chétien, offered his formula for countering the pro-Israel sentiment then largely prevalent in the countries of the European Union. He told his audience: “If you manage to make authentic Frenchmen or authentic Englishmen be at the same time authentic Eastern Arabs, how great will then be your influence.” Montaron was correct. Massive Muslim immigration into Europe was an important factor in transforming European politics and diplomacy. He was, however, mistaken in assuming that the vast majority of Arab immigrants had any interest in becoming “authentic Frenchmen or authentic Englishmen.”  As Bat Ye’or makes clear, Muslims did not come to Europe to assimilate to Western secular culture. Willy-nilly, the effect of the unprecedented mass migration  was to resume a 1400 year old struggle for Islamic religio-political dominance and it is Bat Ye’or’s contention that they are largely succeeding.

Montaron’s Cairo speech was an indication of what some European elites were thinking, but more than a lecture was necessary to effect the transformation. Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 can arguably be seen as one of the turning points. In the 1950s, there was a tacit alliance between France and Israel. France was Israel’s principal weapons supplier. Most of the Israeli aircraft employed in the 1967 war were manufactured by the French firm of Dassault. Moreover, the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona was built with French cooperation and assistance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The tacit French-Israeli alliance coincided with the bitter counter-insurgency war France fought to suppress the Algerian independence movement. When the war ended, De Gaulle attempted to maintain his ties to Israel while cultivating political and economic relations with the Arabs. The balancing act became untenable with the Arab-Israeli war. De Gaulle announced his pro-Arab choice in his semi-annual press interview on November 25, 1967, in which he denounced Israel for its preemptive strike against its Arab enemies and characterized the Jews as “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” As Raymond Aaron later wrote, “General de Gaulle has knowingly and deliberately initiated a new phase in Jewish history and perhaps of anti-Semitism.” As Aaron, previously a political ally of De Gaulle understood, De Gaulle was not interested in separating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. He was putting the Jews of France on notice. From then on, France took the lead in fostering a Euro-Arab alliance based on hostility to Israel, the United States, and Europe’s Jews.

Having failed to defeat the Israelis militarily in the 1973 war, the Arabs turned to their “oil weapon.”  A series of hikes in the price of crude oil were combined with an embargo against the shipment of petroleum to the United States, which had supplied Israel with replacement weapons to counter Soviet shipments to Egypt and Syria. The oil embargo was also enforced against those countries, such as the Netherlands, that had permitted American aircraft carrying military supplies to Israel to refuel at their air bases. NATO allies that had refused to permit U.S. aircraft to refuel, such as Britain, France, and Germany were exempt from the embargo. The countries of the European Community quickly fell into line and adopted a uniformly hostile policy toward Israel.

According to Bat Ye’or, October 1973 is  a “key date” when Europe definitely took sides “with the Arab League’s jihad against the Jewish state.” On November 6, 1973, the EC issued its Brussels Declaration calling upon Israel to withdraw to its 1949 armistice lines, a call echoed by President Barack Obama in 2012. The EC also officially recognized the “rights” of the Palestinians whom Bat Ye’or points out were in fact a “newly created people” hitherto known simply as Arabs. In the same month, a British and a French parliamentarian began an initiative whose purpose was to improve Europe’s relations with the Arab world. The two organized a conference in Paris in March 1975 that brought together 33 parliamentarians from seven of the nine EC countries and was the origin of the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC).

Out of the PAEAC came the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), characterized by Bat Ye’or as “the founding body of Eurabia.” Arab parliamentarians set up a counterpart organization to the PAEAC, the Arab Inter-Parliamentarian Union (AIPU) to reinforce cooperation between the Arabs and the Europeans. The policies were especially supported by Arab Christians, some of whose religious leaders sought to employ a specious “Palestinian liberation theology” to separate Christianity from Judaism and Islamize Christianity. 

The pro-Arab policy was strongly backed by France and Germany, Nevertheless, before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a number of EC countries did not share the French and German policies.  In addition to the oil embargo, it took a series of plane hijackings and repeated Palestinian acts of terror on European soil to convince hitherto reluctant European nations to conclude alliances with the Arab League countries which included the following points of agreement:

1. Recognition of the PLO at a time when the latter organization’s charter rejected the very existance of Israel.
2. Cooling off of relations with United States as a condition of Euro-Arab rapprochement.
3. And, politically the most consequential, approval of a policy of large-scale Arab immigration into Europe.

In addition, European Jews and their institutions were subjected to attacks in public places and schools partly facilitated by indifferent public authorities. Or so it seems, but we now know that there was active connivance on the part of important European authorities with Palestinian and other Muslim terrorists.  Bat Ye’or makes known something of the extent of the malicious betrayal of a community that was under the illusion that they enjoyed the protection of their own government on territory under its control. For example, at the end of the war, the Italian government offered all Jews on Italian soil full citizenship. Almost all declined. They understood that in times of stress, citizenship as a minority in a European nation-state might prove as worthless as had been that of Germany’s Jews.

The sad wisdom was partially validated by a July 8, 2008 interview in Corriere della Sera by Francesco Cossiga, who served in a series of Italian government positions from 1976 to 1992 as minister of the interior, prime minister, president of the Senate, president of the republic, and senator for life. In the interview, Cossiga revealed the existence of an agreement dating from the early 1970s between Prime Minister Aldo Moro and Yasser Arafat’s PLO in which the PLO was granted the freedom to come and go, as well as stock weapons on Italian soil, in exchange for immunity for Italy’s domestic and foreign interests. Cossiga admitted that Italian Jews had been excluded from that protection.^{11, 12} The results were soon forthcoming. On October 9, 1982, six terrorists fired on members of Rome’s Great Synagogue, wounding dozens and killing a two year old child. The congregation’s police protection had been withdrawn several hours before the attack. There were other such attacks. One of the worst was the Strage di Bologna (Massacre at the Bologna Railway Station) in which 85 were killed and 200 wounded. Italian authorities blamed Neo-Fascists, but in his interview Cossiga acknowledged that the railroad station explosion was an accident and that the real perpetrators were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who intended to target Jews, not Italians, with their explosives. The Italian government made no attempt to prosecute the perpetrators. In December 1985, Palestinian terrorists killed sixteen people and wounded thirteen at the El Al ticket counter at the Rome airport. (Bat Ye’or incorrectly writes that “eighty people” were killed, but the pattern was the same. According to Cossiga, Italian security agencies received prior warning of the attack but did not bother to share their information with the Israelis.)¹³

There were other horror stories, nor were they confined to Italy. The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics was one of the most spectacular Palestinian terror attacks. On July 23, 2012, the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, revealed that “Explicit warnings that a terrorist attack might take place at the 1972 Munich Olympics.”¹⁴ On the basis of “previously classified documents” made available to Der Spiegel by various official agencies, the journal was able to assert that there were extraordinary efforts to cover up the extent of the failure of German authorities to prevent the murder of the Israelis. There had been a number of accurate warnings that an Olympic attack was being planned. For example, the same issue of Der Spiegel noted that on August 14, 1972, three weeks before the games, a German embassy officer in Beirut reported that “an incident would be staged by from (sic) the Palestinian side during the Olympic Games in Munich.” On September 2, three days before the athletes were taken hostage, the Italian publication Gente wrote that Black September were planning a “sensational act during the Olympic Games.” The prediction proved accurate, but it was ignored for several days by German authorities.

The unwillingness of German authorities to act upon available information concerning the peril facing the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics becomes more understandable when one considers the role of so-called “former” Nazis in both the German police and Interpol. Bay Ye’or draws our attention to Paul Dickopf (1910 -1973). As a young man in the nineteen-thirties, Dickopf was a fully committed Nazi, a member of both the Sturmabteilung (Brown Shirts) and the SS. He began his police career in 1937 in the Kriminal-Polizei (Kripo) which during the Third Reich was under the control of the SS. In 1939, Dickopf, by then an officer, became a member of the general SS. There is little record of his wartime activities because his SS file for the period is, not surprisingly, incomplete.

After the war, Dickopf continued his police career. As Bat Ye’or points out, in 1965 Dickopf became head of the German criminal police, Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), and from 1968 to 1972 served as president of Interpol, a position he got with the support of the Arab States. His former Nazi connections proved no obstacle. It is worth noting that in 1938, Interpol, previously headquartered in Vienna, was moved to Berlin at the time of the Anschluss. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the agency responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution, became Interpol’s president. After his assassination in 1942, he was succeeded by Arthur Nebe, a senior SS officer who played a major role in the extermination of both Jews and Gypsies. Nebe was succeeded as President in 1943 by Ernst Kaltenbruner, condemned to death at the Nuremberg trials. According to Bat Ye’or, under Dickopf, “Interpol did nothing to stop [Arab] terrorism, nor the wave of hijacked planes and the 1972 Munich massacre of the Israeli athletes.”¹⁵ There were, according to Bat Ye’or, strong ties between pro-Nazi and other Fascist elements in European politics and society and their erstwhile Arab allies and this helps to explain the willingness of the Europeans to weaken their own culture in order to come to accommodate the Muslims at Israel’s expense.

Bat Ye’or also characterizes the EU’s appeasement policy as “Palestinization.” Unelected EU officials sought to create a common domestic and foreign policy for the states on both sides of the Mediterranean. It was, of course, an impossible enterprise. There was no way that the policies of the relatively secular EU nations that extend full equality of status to Muslims could be harmonized with those of the Muslim nations in which only Islam has full legitimacy and whose ultimate objective is to create a world in which Islam is universally dominant.

The obvious contradiction between the Enlightenment culture of Europe and its Muslim partners does not appear to trouble the European leadership. The endemic, religiously legitimated violence present in Muslim societies has been habitually explained as due to “root causes,” such as the alleged humiliation, deprivation, and “injustice” caused by the Israeli occupation of what is claimed to be Arab land. Unlike post-war Germany that finally came to accept defeat and which makes no right-of-return claims, vis-à-vis formerly German lands and settlements, the Palestinians, and for that matter, a goodly portion of the Muslim world has been unable to regard the military strength of the Israelis, gained in the face of constantly repeated threats of annihilation, as anything but injustice and undeserved humiliation. There are, of course, good reasons, both political and religious, for the refusal. For the Palestinians to accept defeat, they would have had to experience a breakdown as complete as was the German defeat in 1945, but that came after two horrendous world wars, the bloodiest in human history. And, the principal contenders in the European war shared a common religious inheritance that even National Socialism could not obliterate.

The Israelis and Palestinians share no common religious inheritance and  the Palestinians have a theological motive for a permanent state of war. It is succinctly stated in Article 11 of the Charter of Hamas: “…the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” The Charter further states: “This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain.”¹⁶ There is no place for secularized wiggle room here. Moreover, as Bat Ye’or points out, the “root causes” strategy has a further utility. It allows the perpetrators and their accomplices to shift blame to their victims. A similar strategy is effective in the widespread attempt to criminalize “Islamophobia” so that the accusation can serve as a strategic weapon with which Muslims seek to control what can and cannot be said about Islam. This is evident in the efforts of the OIC and its western allies to get the UN to declare Islamophobia a punishable crime. And, as we have seen, the alleged “root causes”    are said to be the poverty, humiliation, frustration, and “injustice” that the Israelis have alleged to have inflicted upon the Palestinians.

According to Bat Ye’or, a major consequence of the EU’s attempt to utilize unelected networks of parliamentarians, bureaucrats and assorted other participants in the Euro-Arab Dialogue to harmonize important aspects of EU domestic and foreign policy with those of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has been the subordination of European policy and even sovereignty to the OIC. While the EU has worked earnestly to accommodate the religious, cultural and political demands of the OIC, there has been absolutely no reciprocity. For example, Muslim are free to practice and proselytize their religion in Europe, but no such freedom exists for Christians in Muslim lands. Bat Ye’or argues that the EU has had “zero influence” in the Muslim world, whereas the EU has made every attempt to accommodate Muslim religious and political sensibilities. Put simply, since the 1970s the Europeans have been acting like dhimmis in their own countries. And, central to this Christian-Muslim rapprochement has been the claim, continually asserted by the OIC and parroted by the EU, that Israel is the principal instigator of “war, terror, and injustice” throughout the world.¹⁷ In spite of a history of fourteen hundred years of Christian-Muslim conflict and combat, the newly reconciled EU holds that “Israel is the only obstacle to peace between Islam and Christianity.” The result has been that de facto, if not de jure, the OIC seems to be “restoring in the 21^st Century the Caliphate, the Supreme Controlling body of all Muslims.”

Bat Ye’or is not optimistic about the future of Europe and, to some extent, an Obama-led United States. She shares her concerns with her readers In her conclusion:

While writing this study I was reminded of a question that greatly troubled me twenty-five years ago when researching Les Chrétientés d’Orient entre jihad et dhimmitude (1991). How did Christian peoples and states, some with powerful armies and the richest cultures of their times, collapse when faced with the onslaught of jihad and dhimmitude from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries? Now I no longer ask myself this question. The breakdown process that I used to study and documented in old chronicles I have seen taking place in today’s Europe. When I examined the past I saw it repeated in the present, under my very eyes. Indeed, the present situation is reminiscent of the one that followed the Muslim conquests. Keeping Christian officials in their positions maintained a semblance of continuity. Behind their foggy screen, Islamization could penetrate within every stratum of the vanquished societies. However, with time, the collapse of this edifice revealed the true role of these ministers, whose job was to enforce upon their people the caliphate’s orders, under pain of death. I was missing one essential link in the chain of events: the motivations of human beings that lead them in an unswerving direction within the chaos of events, the undeviating route toward an ultimate objective. Now this link is revealed in the mix of fears, cowardice, corruption, hatred and short-term ambitions that within the space of forty years have led Europe along the road to Eurabia, an interim stage in an even more profound change.

Bat Ye’or has once again written an important book that both requires and rewards diligent study. She has uncovered a process, largely hidden from public view, by which the national identity of the nations of Europe is in the process of being progressively and surreptitiously wiped out while the religio-political identity of the Muslim ummah is being unified and strengthened through the OIC and the UN with its fifty-six Muslim member nations. The goals of the OIC, which Bat Ye’or characterizes as “the modern associative Caliphate,” are clear, global Muslim religio-political supremacy and the destruction of Israel. She has warned us that it has happened before and that conditions are ripe for a contemporary repetition.

NOTES

[1] Niall Ferguson, “The End of Europe?”, The American Enterprise Institute Bradley Lecture, Washington,  March 1, 2004.

[2]. Littman, op. cit.

[3] Bat Ye’or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, University Press, 2011), p. 3; see Bassam Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam” in Sohail H. Hashimi, ed., Islamic Political Ethics, Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 175-93.

[4] Scott Swett, “Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Fort Hood Massacre,” The American Thinker, February 27, 2012, .

[5] Robert O. Keohane,. “Multilateralism: An Agenda for Research.” International Journal, 45 (Autumn 1990), p. 731.

[6] Richard L. Rubenstein, Jihad and Genocide  (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) pp. 155-188..

[7] Bat Ye’or, “Le dialogue Euro-Arabe et la naissance d’Eurabia,” Observatoire du monde juif, Bulletin no. 4/5, December 2002, 44–55. Translated into English as “The Euro-Arab Dialogue and The Birth of Eurabia,” at www.dhimmitude.org/d_today_eurabia.html .

[8] Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, University Press, 2005), French (2006), Italian (2007), Dutch (2007), and Hebrew (2008).

[9] Ye'or, Bat (2011-09-16). Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (p. 56). Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Kindle Edition.

[10] Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Kindle Edition, 2010), p 6.

[11].See Richard L. Rubenstein, ). Jihad and Genocide (Studies in Genocide: Religion, History, and Human Rights) (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010,  Kindle Edition). P.80.

[12] See Caroline Glick, “Our World: The Convenient War Against the Jews,” Jerusalem Post, October 8, 2008, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=116647

[13] See also, Bat Ye’or:  “New Evidence on Eurabia,” New English Review, September 4, 2012.

[14] Caroline Glick, op. cit.

[15] Spiegel Online International, “Officials Ignored Warnings of Terrorist Attack,” July 23, 2012.

[16] Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate, p. 27.

[17] The Avalon Project, “The Charter of Hamas.”

[18] Bat Ye'or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate, p. 143, Kindle edition

Richard L. Rubenstein is President Emeritus of the University of Bridgeport. His latest book is Jihad and Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield: 2011).

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