Europe and eurabia

Interesting article from Australia's biweekly magazine Newsweekly

Since the early 1970s, EU officials and bureaucrats have been seeking to merge Europe with the Islamic world through massive Muslim immigration, writes Bernard Moran.

The central mystery of resurgent Islam in Europe is: how did so many Muslims actually get there in the first place? This question excludes the Turkish guest workers in Germany from the 1950s and the Algerians in France; it is about the many hundreds of thousands of more recent arrivals forming enclaves throughout Europe and Scandinavia.

All has been revealed in the 2005 publication of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by a previously obscure Egyptian-born Jewish researcher, Bat Ye'or. Married to English historian David Littman, Bat Ye'or (Hebrew for "daughter of the Nile") now lives in a village in Switzerland.

Her research and documentation are considered unimpeachable. She describes the progress of the secretive 32-year Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), a joint initiative of the European Union (EU) and Arab governments. The meetings involving the EU political and bureaucratic elite and their Arab counterparts were closed, unpublished and, in Ye'or's words, "shielded from scrutiny and democratic control".

Both sides of the "Dialogue" agreed that the future of Europe and the Middle East lay in the fusion of a new geopolitical entity they termed "Eurabia". Mass Muslim emigration was therefore officially encouraged and funded by the EU through the ideology of "multiculturalism".

On the European side, there was the promise of security of oil supplies and privileged access to the vast Arab market for technology, products and professional expertise.

The European participants were mainly secularists and had little understanding of Islam, particularly the doctrines of Jihad, Sharia law and "dhimmitude" - the status of submission required of non-Muslims living in Islamic territory.

Their Arab counterparts viewed the EAD as providing myriad economic and technological benefits to their respective regions. As Muslims, it also provided the diplomatic weight of the EU political establishment in support of the Arab League agenda on Israel and Palestine, unprecedented opportunities for mass immigration, future demographic and political supremacy, thus achieving the long-term goal of bringing Europe into the House of Islam.

Before covering the details of the European-Arab Dialogue, it would be helpful for readers to comprehend what are, until recently, little-known concepts of Islam. Bat Ye'or (now 70) is a pioneer researcher on dhimmitude. Her three major books translated from French are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: 7th–20th Century (1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002).

In a presentation at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris (June 11, 2001), Bat Ye'or outlined the theory of jihad which regulates the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims on a global scale, codified and institutionalised by the eighth century. "This (jihadist) ideology impregnates current thinking and conduct," she said.

She quotes the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi, speaking in 1997 on Islamic law, as dividing mainly the People of the Book - Jews and Christians - into three categories:

• non-Muslims in the lands of war.

• non-Muslims in the lands of temporary truce.

• non-Muslims protected by Islamic law, that is to say, the dhimmis.

The inhabitants of the lands of war are to be fought because they oppose the introduction of Islamic (Allah's) law to their country. These infidels have no rights and their possessions and lives belong to any Muslim. Their very existence is considered illegal.

The infidels from a land of temporary truce are in a state of respite between two wars.

The dhimmis are those infidels who have ceded their land in exchange for protection. They have no rights beyond those specified and protected by Islamic law. This law is the source of all non-Muslim rights.

In the theological domain, Islamists believe (on the basis of numerous verses in the Koran), that Islam appeared at the beginning of Creation and therefore preceded Judaism and Christianity. Adam, Eve and Noah, were Muslims and professed Islam. Therefore mankind is Islamic and all children are born Muslim.

All the leading figures in the Bible - Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and the apostles - are prophets who were Muslims. The Jews and the Christians re-wrote a falsified Bible. They believe lies and teach their children lies.

It follows that, when offered the chance to accept the Truth - Islam - and they refuse, preferring to believe falsehoods, then as infidels they deserve death or slavery.

Another legitimate means of waging jihad is taqiyya (pronounced "tark-e-ya"), which is essentially "spin", employed to confuse and split the enemy. Taqiyya is the deployment of subterfuge to dissemble and camouflage one's real thinking and purpose, in the service of advancing Islam.

Bat Ye'or provides a detailed chronicle of the process beginning in May 1945 when Charles de Gaulle, embittered about France's exclusion from the Yalta negotiations, rescued the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin, from appearing at the Nuremberg Trials as a war criminal. The Mufti had spent most of the war in Berlin, but now he offered his influence in the Arab world, and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, to advance a new alliance with France.

Growing public knowledge of his Nazi past and war crimes forced the French to facilitate his escape from Paris to Egypt, where he maintained contact with the French Embassy, through to his settling in Lebanon in 1962.

Haj Amin's advocacy of a French-Arab alliance attracted powerful support in Gaullist and intellectual circles. They saw such an alliance with a Muslim federation extending through North Africa and the Middle East as restoring French prestige, impressing the Soviet Union and establishing a rival power bloc to the United States.

Bet Ye'or writes: "Two elements thus cemented the Franco-Arab alliance in the 1960s: French anti-Americanism fed by frustrated power ambitions, and a convergence of French Vichy anti-Semitism with the Arab desire to destroy Israel. From then on, America and Israel were inextricably linked in this policy."

The Euro-Arab Dialogue actually dates from a meeting between the French President Georges Pompidou and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt on November 26–27, 1973, which coincided with the summit of the Arab Conference in Algiers on November 28.

The conference issued a statement specifying their conditions for cooperating with the then European Economic Community (EEC): that Europe would defend Arab claims to Jerusalem and the "occupied territories" and recognise the autonomous Palestinian people.

The Arab Declaration of Algiers was followed by President Pompidou calling for an EEC summit in Copenhagen in December 1973. European heads of state and their civil servants examined the Middle East crisis and planned for cooperation between the Arab League and EEC countries.

In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMagazine.com (September 21, 2004), Bat Ye'or described how Eurabia as a geopolitical reality was synchronised as an association called the Europe-Arab Dialogue (EAD) in July 1974 in Paris. She said:

"A working body composed of committees, and always jointly presided by a European and an Arab delegate, planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the applications of the decisions.

"The field of Euro-Arab collaboration covered every domain: from economy and policy to immigration. In foreign policy, it backed anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and Israel's delegitimization; the promotion of the PLO and [Yasser] Arafat; a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy in international forums; and NGO collaboration.

"In domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media: television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centres, school textbooks, student and youth associations and tourism.

"Church inter-faith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations - a comprehensive symbiosis, with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture."

Bat Ye'or believes that France and the rest of Western Europe cannot change their policy anymore - their future is Eurabia.

"I don't see how they can reverse the movement they set in motion thirty years ago. Nor do Eurabians want to modify this policy. It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently though immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration.

"Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it."

"This is the source of the strong anti-American feeling in Europe and of the paranoiac obsession with Israel, two elements that form the cornerstone of Eurabia."

A 2003 poll conducted for the European Commission in the 15 EU countries, found that Europeans considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace - greater than Islamic terrorism or North Korea.

Mass Muslim immigration was planned at the University of Venice, in March 1977.

Under the auspices of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, there were four sessions under joint Euro-Arab chairmanship. Representatives from 14 universities in Arab countries joined 19 Arabists from European universities. The recommendations from the seminar on Arab inculturation served to end any critical public discourse about Islam and the Islamic world.

Also the recommendations on meeting the educational needs of Muslim immigrants were then approved by the foreign ministers of the European Community, the president, and their Arab counterparts on the EAD General Commission.

As Bat Ye'or notes, the EAD General Commission held closed sessions, with no public record of the proceedings. The decisions to encourage mass Muslim immigration were apparently agreed upon behind closed doors and could only be "deduced by the fact of their subsequent implementation".

At Alexandria in October, 2003, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (in 2006 elected Prime Minister of Italy) announced the Proximity Policy which would place the Euro-Mediterranean partnership on an equal footing. The practical instrument would be the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, enabling new policies and cultural and intellectual exchanges.

Prodi encouraged the advisory group to create a "friendly neighborhood policy" in which the EU would consider its "Mediterranean partners" on a par with the Eastern European countries that had entered the EU.

The ensuing report recommended that the new Eastern European member states could themselves become open lands for southern Muslim immigration. This influx would assist Arab states concerned about their rapid demographic growth.

The Muslim populations of Bulgaria, the Balkans, Turkey, and those of Turkish origin in Germany and Austria, could combine with Arab Muslims in bringing about the diversification of European Islam.

It was believed this new European Islamic culture would dispel the notion of a rampant Islamisation of Europe.

Proximity Policy

The Proximity Policy is intended to unfold, utilising existing EU-funded support structures for the increased teaching of Arabic and other measures to assist Muslims integrate into European society.

A crucial arm of the Proximity Policy is the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation which is intended to function as a cultural or social "change agent". The advisory group insists that no culture can claim any kind of superiority. The European and Mediterranean (PC term for Arabs) entities will together form "the cultural dimension of our unfolding history".

Bat Ye'or summarises the Foundation's design as "nothing less than complete Euro-Arab integration under its guidance, with control over European intellectual life and education".

She says: "This intercultural dialogue thus requires that the Europeans reinvent their identity and history in order to integrate the Southern Arab migrant populations."

The planners intend to effect social change at every educational and cultural level. "States will have to undertake a re-examination of schoolbooks dealing with the history of the region. Study centres and networks of scholars will assume the control of publications and the diffusion of knowledge of the history of the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Foundation will create an active network of artists and writers and the media: film, television and publishing will be a vital instrument of its policy."

Bat Ye'or reports that Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers met in Dublin on May 5-6, 2004, and agreed on the creation of the Foundation under the title: the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, whose headquarters will be in Alexandria, Egypt.

Anna Lindh was the Swedish foreign minister stabbed to death by a deranged man in September, 2002. She was a strong supporter of Yasser Arafat, personally boycotted Israeli products and condemned President Bush's Middle East policy.

• Bernard Moran is a New Zealand writer

What future civilisation?

An excellent article in an Australian biweekly magazine - Newsweekly:-

CULTURE WARS: Is it too late to save our civilisation?

by Bill Muehlenberg

Aniel (reviewer)

Civilisations, like humans, are born, mature, decay and eventually die. Warning signs are clearly evident that Western civilisation today is in an advanced state of decay.

Is this decay terminal or reversible? Bill Muehlenberg takes Christians to task for their complacency in the face of such danger, and asks whether it may not be too late to save civilisation.

A lot of thought has gone into human mortality, and how we can prolong life. Less thought has gone into the question of why nations die. But nations, like people, do have a beginning, and do have an end. Thus it is worth looking at the questions of how and why nations collapse.

This article is not a scholarly examination of the subject, but more of a rough outline, sustained by a string of thoughts and quotations taken from those who have pondered these important questions. Historians, philosophers, theologians and others here contribute to the discussion.

Decline of nations

One common theme of those who have thought carefully about the decline of nations is that, often, it is the case that they collapse from within, instead of perishing from without. Thus Arnold Toynbee could rightly say, "Civilisations die from suicide, not murder."

Toynbee, a British historian (1889-1975), is most famous for his magisterial A Study of History, 1934-1961. In this 12-volume work, he examined the rise and fall of nations.

One of his more significant remarks is worth recalling: "Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now." Given that this is now a dated comment, how much more true is it today?

Other historians have of course remarked on the suicidal tendencies of nations. Will Durant (1885-1981), an American historian, made this observation: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars."

Along with his wife Ariel, he penned the monumental 11-volume Story of Civilization (1935-1975). They also penned, among other works, the 1968 study, The Lessons of History. In both these works they noted the tendency of nations to wither from within.

Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), the English writer and historian, made a similar observation about the fate of democracies. He said that the average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.

(A letter from Lord Macaulay to an American friend, May 23, 1857).

The questions of course that arise are these: Where are we in this progression? How far along are we on the road to decay? Can we escape this fate?

It is not hard to pinpoint where we are on Macaulay's timeline. The examples of corruption, selfishness, apathy and decadence are all around. The easiest way to make this case is simply to open the daily newspaper. Recent newspaper headlines readily make the case. Consider just a few from the past several months:

• Paedophiles launch own political party (May 30, 2006)

Paedophiles in the Netherlands are registering a political party to press for lowering the legal age of sexual relations from 16 to 12 and to allow child pornography and bestiality. The party says it eventually wants to get rid of the age limit on sexual relations.

• Bibles banned (May 12, 2006)

Bibles are being banned in Australian hospitals and schools in order not to offend non-Christians.

• Gay school guide: Teachers' manual rejects "mum" and "dad" (June 4, 2006)

Victorian schools are being advised to dump the words "mother" and "father" by a new teachers' manual that promotes the cause of same-sex parents.

• PC penguins (April 16, 2006)

Sea World on the Queensland Gold Coast changed the names of "fairy penguins" to "little penguins" for fear of offending homosexuals (although the decision was later reversed).

Many more examples could be provided. But I think you get the point. These are all examples of a culture in deep decline. Or, as one American sociologist and Democratic Senator once put it, these are illustrations of "Defining Deviancy Down".

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) wrote an important essay by this title in 1993. In it he decried the moral collapse in the West, and the way we try to cope with it. He wrote: "The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can 'afford to recognise' and that, accordingly, we have been redefining deviancy so as to accept much conduct previously stigmatised, and also quietly raising the 'normal' level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard."

He rightly noted that the saturation of evil is becoming so complete that the only way we can cope is to redefine it. Of course such attempts are not new. Twenty-five hundred years ago the prophet Isaiah could warn of similar calumny: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." (Isaiah 5:20).

There is a long answer which we cannot go into here. We could look at the Enlightenment and its impact. Or more recently, the counter-culture of the 1960s. But we can provide a short answer: The past century has been one grand social experiment to see what life is like when we reject God. (And the results are in!)

We have tried to live as if there is no God, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.

One modern prophet who shares this view is the former Russian gulag prisoner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He has written much on this theme. His assessment is simple yet profound: "It is because we have forgotten God. That is why all this is happening to us."

Our moral decline is directly connected to our rejection of God. Will Durant offered this insight: "There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."

Another important voice in this regard is T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The American-British poet and critic wrote an important volume in 1948 entitled, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. His thoughts are well worth recalling:

"If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it."

Exactly. Throw out God, and the work of civilisation becomes very difficult indeed. Again, Will Durant concurs: "From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day."

What is needed more than ever is a rebuilding of the foundations. As the Psalmist said so long ago, "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Psalm 11:3).

The job will not be easy, but it must be done. We need to preserve what is good, and resist those anarchic voices who would take it away from us.

A big part of this is to learn from history, and to avoid the problems we encounter there. As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana reminds us, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes."

But it is not enough just to recall the lessons of history. We must be willing to act, to take a stand, to make a difference. We cannot sit on the sidelines in a time of danger and threat. It was Dante in his Inferno who remarked: "The hottest level in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in a moral crisis."

We must get involved. It is not enough just to talk about the problem, or to theorise about our current malaise. Karl Marx knew the importance of action: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

But I am just one person, you might protest. What difference can I make? The problems are just too big. But the anthropologist Margaret Mead would have us believe otherwise: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. ... Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Or as Edmund Burke has written: "Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."

A radical Black Panther activist of the '60s, Eldridge Cleaver, perceptively said: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." And a prophet of 2000 years ago put it this way: "You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world." (Jesus Christ, Matt. 5: 13).

So what can Christians do? Often people debate as to whether believers should seek personal revival or social reformation. The argument is often presented as if it is either/or. But may I suggest that it is both/and. The need of the hour is for Christians to both get their own act together, and to seek to be a light in a dark world, to be a preserving salt in a corrupt nation.

Indeed, the bottom line is this: Society is in a mess because the church is in a mess. And the church is in a mess because you and I are in a mess. We need to get back to our first love. We need to stop our trivial pursuits. We need to realise that we are here for a purpose, and the purpose of our existence does not revolve around ourselves, but around someone who gave his very life for all of us. We can do no less for him.

Reminder

Thus we need to get back to basics. And we need to seek forgiveness for losing the plot. As we were reminded so long ago: "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14).

In the end, we must agree with Toynbee: "Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God."

The question is, how will we respond?

• Bill Muehlenberg is a lecturer in ethics and philosophy at several Melbourne theological colleges.