All she can do is to write and warn.

It’s up to us to take heed and implement solid policies that reverse the trend.

Bat Ye’or and the Coming Universal Caliphate

by Richard L. Rubenstein (January 2013)

A review essay of Bat Ye’or, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). This essay was first published as “Coming Attractions: Caliphates?” in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, December issue Vol 4 #2.

 In the past few years,  it has become all too apparent that the nations of the European Union (EU) have made a catastrophic mistake when they created a common, one-size-fits all currency, the euro, ignoring the vast differences in productive capacity, financial resources, work habits, and culture of the member nations. The full consequences of this mistake have yet to unfold, but the instability in the world’s financial markets may be a foretaste of darker troubles ahead.

While the financial crisis has been recognized, a far worse error of judgment has yet to be recognized, at least by Europe’s leaders, the surrender of Europe’s cultural identity as a consequence of the introduction of a largely unassimilable Muslim population into the EU. According to the U.S. Department of State’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, 2005, the EU’s Muslim population numbered 23.2 million and has continued to increase since then. In France alone, the Report estimated that there were between five and six million Muslims, about ten percent of the population. Moreover, as Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out, the fundamental problem facing Europe’s indigenous population is “senescence.”¹

This is not true of Europe’s Muslim population. With or without further immigration, it is expected to increase considerably. Moreover, as Bat Ye’or points out in her new book, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011) the rising number of Muslims constitute only a part of the problem. Far more problematic have been the political, economic, and cultural motives that led to Europe’s fateful decision to permit this unprecedented mass immigration.

To explain that decision, Bat Ye’or begins with a discussion of the concept of dhimmitude, a term she characterizes as “concealed knowledge.” Although “few terms are as significant for the understanding of current events,” she reports that the term is “unknown by the general public and taboo in academia.”  Dhimmitude, she argues, designates the civilizations “conquered by jihad and subject to sharia law.” It is her conviction that the nations of the European Union (EU) are in the process of submitting to that subordination at the present time. Alternatively, as she demonstrates, dhimmitude can be understood as arguably the most effective and enduring system of religiously legitimated domination human beings have ever created.

A dhimmi is a non-Muslim belonging to the civilization of dhimmitude. Either he or his ancestors surrendered to the armies of jihad and consequently lost their sovereignty and their territorial rights in exchange for “protection” in the form of a contract of surrender (dhimma) against jihad. Such protection renders dhimmis essentially powerless and subject to the humiliating conditions imposed upon them by their masters. It should be further noted that dhimmitude is a condition that can only be altered by a highly unlikely reversal of military fortune or, far more likely, conversion to Islam.

According to Bat Ye’or, the concept of dhimmitude is relevant today because, with the exception of Israel, Islam’s jihad ideology of world conquest is once again flourishing in every corner of the world while the governments of most target nations are in denial concerning jihad’s existence and its global aspirations. Global jihad is driven by the 56 nation Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Since its creation in 1969, the OIC has been dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel and to the eventual implementation of sharia over the Western world. The OIC’s oft-stated objectives have not prevented either the European Union or the United States from seeking close ties with the organization. At least theoretically, dhimmitude represents an interim status in which Islam conditionally accepts defeated subject peoples into its midst, provided they abide by the controls and limitations imposed upon them by their Muslim overlords. This willingness on the part of Islam to create a religiously legitimated civilization of domination and submission is often misleadingly characterized as tolerance.

In 1990, the OIC issued the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It represented the culmination of Muslim dissatisfaction with the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a strictly secular document. The Preamble to the UN Declaration states: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

More here.