The breadth and strength of European anti Semitism and anti Americanism surprises me sometimes. I can understand the Germans – America’s actions were twice critical in their defeat. It wasn’t until I read this talk by Bat Ye’Or that I realized I had failed to grasp the breadth and strength of the European vision for its future. She has described in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis the European vision of a Mediterranean partnership having its roots in agreements between the then EC, later the EU, and Arab Mediterranean countries going back to the early 70s.

What I specifically underestimated was the degree to which Europe fancied itself as the senior partner in this process set to absorb the Mediterranean lands of Africa and Asia into it orbit. Immigration to Europe coupled with the cultural tolerance that Europe had learned through the experience of two world wars was to incorporate the immigrants into greater Europe. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism – the core of the hard won experience of Europe – was the key to this progressive and plausibly mature vision of the future. I now can see more clearly how apparently naive and old fashioned us Americans seemed to the ‘grown ups’ in Europe with our cowboy presidents who still believed in the nation state and like children thought they perceived good and evil in the world and that it was necessary to speak out about it, or worse, act against it. And I must confess that before 9/11, had I fully appreciated it, I would have accepted this European vision as realistic or at least seen it as a possible model for the future.

Conversely, I would have seen Bat Ye’Or as the product of her background. She was part of the Egyptian Jewish community driven out of Egypt in 1954 that had lived there since the time of the prophet Jeremiah. Her family fled to Britain where she was educated and began to write about the experience of her people who had lived as dhimmis – that peculiar state of second class citizenship allowed by Islam to Christians and Jews – for over a thousand years. I would probably have regarded her warnings that there was an Islamic counter vision that saw Europe as coming under the sway of Islam and sharia – including dhimmi status for Christian and Jews – as an overheated projection of her people’s unfortunate history.

Today her words don’t seem either naive or limited in their application. (They are taken from a rough transcript done from an amateur video of her 29 June talk in Toronto. I supplied the word ‘academics’ because I know there is such a boycott, but can’t explain the words ‘very count’ which seem to carry the sense of ‘basis’.)

In this view, the Europe-Mediterranean partnership establishes linkages and networks between the civil societies and the NGO’s of the two shores of the Mediterranean. It created common functional synergies and solidarities between Europe and Arab worlds and develops common deceptions [perceptions?] and cultural partnerships at all levels and this is the reason of the British boycott of the British [ academics ] against Israel because of these linkages, and it also encompasses Muslim immigration in Europe. This policy is detailed in several EU documents. I mention that in my book.

This structure that links several areas: politics, economics, culture, security; all that together with immigration, was implemented at the highest level of the EU and it engendered a proliferation of networks that are the [very count?] for anti-Israel and anti-American policies and also for Judeophobia in Europe and anti-western activism, and as well as propaganda, the denial of terrorism and of Jihadism and for support for immigration.

Since 9/11 I have viewed the apparent blindness to, or outright denial of, the intent of jihadism as a form of Stockholm syndrome. The victims of terror identifying with the aims and political goals of the terrorists in an attempt to save their own skins by allying themselves with the terrorists. But I underestimated the conceit of the Europeans – they were confident that their culture would absorb the Muslims. So now the outraged sense of superiority that people of this persuasion – and there are plenty of them in the US and Australia too – feel toward the US and Israel becomes more understandable. The simple reaction of President Bush to defend the US and the West is seen as the primary outrage because the real threat of jihadism is too foreign – too anachronistic – to the postmodern sensibility to recognize as real. The invasion of Iraq is particularly offensive because of its unilateral interference with the European plans to gradually incorporate the Middle East into its way of life. The president becomes Bushhitler, America the scourge of the world – at once all powerful and pitiful. Such people evidently prefer the comfort of their delusions to facing the actual threat to their way of life because it is their vision of the world that is based on a terrible denial – the failure to face the cultural reality of jihad. Even Tony Blair, one of the few European Social Democrats who understand there is a real threat from jihadism can’t quite come to terms with the idea that its proponents really see it as the future order of the world. He still experiences their attitude as ‘absurd’ – even as he recognizes it as as serious threat. From the Guardian:

Tony Blair has launched a powerful attack on ‘absurd’ British Islamists who have nurtured a false ‘sense of grievance’ that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States.

In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.

Bat Ye’Or, on the other hand, says the jihadi view is not absurd but the logical outcome of one interpretation of Islamic theology. An old attitude empowered by a postmodern internationalist culture that has disarmed itself and can no longer distinguish between real and imagined threats – between mandatory burkas and optional burgers. Her personal experience of expulsion from Egypt becomes the basis for an unflinching understanding of the larger jihadi project in Europe. She goes back to the relevant Koranic verses and also significantly to 8th century texts on jihadism that are post Mohammed. Jihadism is an old part of Islam but as a student of comparative religion who has experienced Islam directly it is not for me the whole of the religion. At the same time it is a serious anachronism, a survival of early medieval attitudes into the modern era. Such attitudes were workable in the middle ages, but are toxic – not absurd – in a globalized world.