Simon Kuper: The strange world of 'Eurabia'
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within
by Bruce Bawer
Doubleday $23.95, 256 pages
The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent
by Walter Laqueur
Thomas Dunne £12.99, 256 pages
Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within
by Melanie Phillips
Gibson Square £8.99, 384 pages
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
by Bat Ye'or
Farleigh Dickinson University Press £15.50, 384 pages
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.
Bat Ye'or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye'or is Hebrew for ''daughter of the Nile'', the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.
Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye'or's genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.
The four books here provide a fair summary of the ''Eurabia'' genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.
A fixed trope of ''Eurabia'' books is the writer behaving as though only he or she and a few other resistance heroes see Europe's impending doom. Bruce Bawer, a US journalist living in Oslo, credits his aunt for coming up with his title, While Europe Slept, but Melanie Phillips sees Britain as forever asleep too. ''Only if we take up this civilisational gauntlet that has been thus thrown down at us will we stop sleepwalking to defeat,'' she concludes her book. (Phillips writes for the Daily Mail, and reading Londonistan feels like being imprisoned with a never-ending Mail editorial.)
All these authors start with disclaimers that not all Muslims support terrorist jihad. This is then swiftly forgotten as the plans for jihad in Europe are outlined. Ye'or, for whom Muslims are always the same, describes jihad as a 1,400-year-old strategy. Like Bawer, she explains that ''they'' never got over losing Andalusia in 1492.
Mixed with the hysteria are kernels of truth. Phillips' Londonistan rightly recalls that in the 1990s the British authorities let many radical jihadists settle in London. Some later plotted terrorism against the UK. Phillips leaps from this to claiming that Britons cannot see the terrorist threat. However, this is rather negated by the fact that almost all her information about British terrorism comes from British newspapers....
Read entire article at Financial Times
by Bruce Bawer
Doubleday $23.95, 256 pages
The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent
by Walter Laqueur
Thomas Dunne £12.99, 256 pages
Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within
by Melanie Phillips
Gibson Square £8.99, 384 pages
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
by Bat Ye'or
Farleigh Dickinson University Press £15.50, 384 pages
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.
Bat Ye'or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye'or is Hebrew for ''daughter of the Nile'', the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.
Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye'or's genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.
The four books here provide a fair summary of the ''Eurabia'' genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.
A fixed trope of ''Eurabia'' books is the writer behaving as though only he or she and a few other resistance heroes see Europe's impending doom. Bruce Bawer, a US journalist living in Oslo, credits his aunt for coming up with his title, While Europe Slept, but Melanie Phillips sees Britain as forever asleep too. ''Only if we take up this civilisational gauntlet that has been thus thrown down at us will we stop sleepwalking to defeat,'' she concludes her book. (Phillips writes for the Daily Mail, and reading Londonistan feels like being imprisoned with a never-ending Mail editorial.)
All these authors start with disclaimers that not all Muslims support terrorist jihad. This is then swiftly forgotten as the plans for jihad in Europe are outlined. Ye'or, for whom Muslims are always the same, describes jihad as a 1,400-year-old strategy. Like Bawer, she explains that ''they'' never got over losing Andalusia in 1492.
Mixed with the hysteria are kernels of truth. Phillips' Londonistan rightly recalls that in the 1990s the British authorities let many radical jihadists settle in London. Some later plotted terrorism against the UK. Phillips leaps from this to claiming that Britons cannot see the terrorist threat. However, this is rather negated by the fact that almost all her information about British terrorism comes from British newspapers....