Saturday 10 November 2007

Eurabia

Via crookedtimber: Simon Kuper in the FT reviews four books in the 'Eurabia' genre (including 'Londinistan' by our very own Mad Mel). Started by Bat Ye’or, these ideas seem particulalrly popular in the US (presumably because they're further away from Europe and know less about it).

The essential thesis is that Europe is facing a demographic and ideological takeover by those sneaky Muslims who will reduce the rest of us into a state of dhimmitude (a sort of ideological subjugation). Read the whole thing, these views may be bonkers but you will come across them again:
"In the imagined “Eurabia’’, the Muslims are taking over. Europeans aren’t resisting. In fact, it is 1938 again, or in Bawer’s phrase, “Europe’s Weimar moment’’. A keyword of the “Eurabia’’ genre is therefore “appeasement’’ - once of Hitler, now of Muslims. Phillips urges a British-American alliance, as “when they stood shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany’’, with the US providing “muscle’’ and Britain “backbone’’. But unfortunately, Britain has gone wobbly. She expects this will prove fatal, because it is correct “at least in part’’ to see “Islam as a successor to Nazism and communism’’. It follows, for all four authors, that another exodus or Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is likely, though Laqueur grants that “by taking a low profile they might be able to survive in the new conditions’’.

Why is Europe supine? (Sorry - the “Eurabia’’ habit of grand rhetorical questions is infectious.) Ye’or has the fullest theory. She explains that something called the “Euro-Arab Dialogue’’ - with a permanent secretariat of 350 members, and a seat in Paris - runs a plot to hand over Europe to the Arabs, and to destroy Israel. “In just thirty years (1973-2003), the Euro-Arab Dialogue has successfully brought about the mutation of European civilization, giving birth to a hybrid culture: Eurabia - as foreseen in 1969 in Cairo by the European Committee for Coordination of Friendship Associations with the Arab World.’’ In her book if nowhere else, the EU has a united foreign policy.
...
Phillips has a different theory about Britain’s demise. Wonderfully, it unites all the enemies of her journalistic career. Jihad is conquering Britain because intellectuals, transsexuals, judges, Antonio Gramsci, the human-rights brigade, gays who adopt children, etcetera, have destroyed the country’s confidence in its own values. So Phillips’ former employer, The Guardian, is “a virtual mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood’’, while Islamic jihad is “the armed wing of the British left’’.
...
Its target market seems to be the US. Of the four books only Londonistan seems to have had much circulation in Britain, probably because hardly anybody who actually lives in Europe could take these dystopias seriously. The only way to interest many US readers in Europe’s tame politics is to predict catastrophe. Bawer, for instance, warns of “the end of the West as we know it - and perhaps the beginning of the end of freedom, too’’."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i agree, no dhimmitude. after all, "Islam Is Peace (tm)." thats the government line, isn't it?

pj said...

It may be the government line - but that's really irrelevant since the Eurabia genre is based on the tiny EU Muslim population (some 3% in the UK) of whom an even tinier proportion hold extremist views:

"about 15 per cent of European Muslims who profess sympathy for violence, and a tiny group willing to commit it. Islamic terrorists have committed about as much carnage in Europe in the last dozen years as far-left terrorists did in the 1970s."

The likelihood of any major demographic shift as imagined here is pretty much non-existent:

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

Feel free to believe in sub-Illuminati conspiracy theories, but it does make you a nutter:

"the Euro-Arab Dialogue has successfully brought about the mutation of European civilization, giving birth to a hybrid culture: Eurabia - as foreseen in 1969 in Cairo by the European Committee for Coordination of Friendship Associations with the Arab World.’’"