Special Report on Islamophobia
Europe has Fallen to "The Muslims" Due to Immigration
According to many purveyors of the "clash of civilizations" paranoia, Europe, or at least parts of western Europe, have already fallen to "the Muslims" and are now lost to "the West." One pioneer of this frankly silly set of ideas is the Israeli who writes under the pseudonym Bat Ye'or, and whose main book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005) encapsulates the concept that for various reasons, European states have been sold out to predatory Middle Easterners by corrupt leaders (again, note the echo of traditional Western anti-Semitism in the notion of corrupt politicians "selling their countries out" to the Jews or in this case, the Arabs.) The prejudicial nature of these claims can be gleaned merely from the title itself, Eurabia, which immediately communicates the idea that Europe has been swallowed by predatory Arabs. Imagine the perfectly justified outrage is someone were to publish an anti-Semitic book called "The Jew-nited States of America" or some such title, which is the functional equivalent of Eurabia. Ye'or and her ilk argue that Arabs seek to impose Islamic law in Europe and force the Christian Europeans to live as "dhimmis" or protected minorities under Islamic rule in a classical and completely anachronistic sense, as if in medieval Islamic state of some kind. The late and frankly unlamented Italian racist Oriana Fallaci was a major proponent of these ideas.
The "Europe has fallen" arguments have cited unrest in France from urban immigrant youths (which had nothing to do with Arab nationalism or Islam but were a common phenomenon in urban areas subject to extreme poverty and discrimination), the murder of right-wing Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh (a horrible but in fact isolated incident) and simply the fact that there are large and growing permanent Muslim populations in many European states (though none with significant political or cultural influence). France, often cited as a state that has been surrendered to "the Muslims" in fact has never had a Muslim deputy in its Parliament, and its Muslim community has virtually no influence at all in French life. The conservative columnist Ralph Peters – who has increasingly emerged as a major foe of the Islamophobes - recently pointed out in his New York Post column that this rhetoric about Europe being overrun by Muslim hordes is absurd and that, in fact, far from being poised to take over European states, many Muslim communities in that continent are in a highly vulnerable and exposed position and lack political power with which to defend themselves.
