Simon Kuper, to my mind one of the sharpest journalists around, has “a nice review”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4cf288ba-8c13-11dc-af4d-0000779fd2ac.html of four books in the “Eurabia” genre. The general thesis originates with Bat Ye’or and has Europe sleepwalking into “dhimmi” status as the (mysteriously unified) Muslims press home their demographic advantage against natives befuddled by multiculturalism and moral relativism. Mark Steyn is the great popularizer of all this, and the “decent left” are a minor sect in the Eurabian church (as can be seen by how readily their blogs recycle this tripe). You should “read the whole thing”, as a credulous Islamophobe likes to say.
{ 27 comments }
Branedy 11.10.07 at 1:02 pm
The Islamophobe doctrine is being propagated throughout the U.S. currently as reason to vote GOP next year, references are being passed in bulk email in the guise of ‘Europe is not to be trusted as it’s becoming Muslin’
Barry 11.10.07 at 1:07 pm
This article is not accessible without subscribing/registering. Perhaps a very, very vrey generous ‘fair use’ excerpt?
Matt Weiner 11.10.07 at 1:19 pm
according to bugmenot, username “screwyoudotcom” and password “screwyou” works for the free registration.
dslak 11.10.07 at 1:29 pm
In the dark days ahead, we can only count on garments made of wool.
Barry 11.10.07 at 1:47 pm
Thanks, Matt.
Andrew Brown 11.10.07 at 1:52 pm
Is Bruce Bawer the one who got into this after emigrating from the states to Amsterndam because he is gay and thought he was being persecuted in America? I once spent an instructive, unhappy afternoon on Amazon.com reading the readre reviewsd, and following the network of poeple who had bought similar things. But if the only thing that most Americans know about European history is that “European anti-semitism caused the holocaust” how can they tell this stuff for the tripe it is?
JP Stormcrow 11.10.07 at 2:42 pm
Paul Belien explains in this article (I found it on Brussels Journal, but apparently it was also published in The Washington Times this past week) how this is merely the ultimate triumph of Hitler:
….
JP Stormcrow 11.10.07 at 3:53 pm
Oops, forgot link. Here it is.
Pamela over at Atlas Shrugged is not fooled, however.
But she is having Belien on her radio show at 3:00 on Monday.
P O'Neill 11.10.07 at 4:16 pm
If you’re having trouble with the FT link, copy and paste the link to a browser and remove the junk after .html.
Among his excellent points is that it’s a strange market segment for these books, written in Europe but for a target audience predominantly in the US. Not least because some of them (e.g. Rudy!) believe this stuff.
abb1 11.10.07 at 4:38 pm
I dunno, judging by Le Pen’s success in 2002, Christoph Blocher in Switzerland recently, troubles in East Germany, etc. – there should be quite a large audience in Europe as well.
nu 11.10.07 at 4:52 pm
Le Pen didnt do that good in 2002 and in 2007 the candidate who try to out-islamophobize him (instead of complaining about immigration), De Villiers, did far worse than him.
bobbie 11.10.07 at 4:58 pm
beware this veiled threat…
I find it more alarming Melanie Phillips writes for one of the largest circulation papers in the UK.
Bruce Webb 11.10.07 at 5:21 pm
@7 Wow. If it hadn’t been for Charles the Hammer it would have been “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Kaliph”? Who knew?
abb1 11.10.07 at 5:36 pm
Le Pen got 18% in 2002, not too shabby. Well, come to think of it, Melanie-Phillips-specific strain of Eurabia-phobia probably doesn’t appeal much to the Le Pen crowd. For the obvious reason: as far as they are concerned, Melanie herself is just as undesirable as any other lazy, unscrupulous and cunning Semite out there.
bi 11.10.07 at 6:19 pm
JP Stormcrow:
We are not at war with Nazis. Isn’t it obvious? We are -not at war with- Nazis.
roger 11.10.07 at 6:38 pm
Ah, I went through the fever swamp blogs this morning, looking for lunacy about the Eurabian menace, and discovered that the new menace is Belgium. Who knew? The immanent break up of Belgium will create a small, mostly arabic state in Europe, which will, of course, immediately make shari’a law and have to be bombed back into the stone age.
These guys are so funny! To bad their kind is pretty much the dominate strain in the White House. Cheney should be asked about Eurabia – I’m sure he’d throw some kind words out to the dittoheads who believe it.
In the meantime, remember – the sharia state of post-breakup Belgium will possess nukular weapons!
Mrs Tilton 11.10.07 at 7:44 pm
jp@ 7,
yes, well, to give Hitler his due, he did disapprove of pork and alcohol.
gr 11.10.07 at 8:20 pm
The true attraction of the Eurabia thesis is that it caters both to anti-Muslim and to Anti-European prejudice. So it’s not too surprising that the view has more adherents in the US than in Europe.
Mrs Tilton 11.10.07 at 8:40 pm
gr,
don’t forget, though, that “Eurabia” is also gratifyingly scary to Europeans who hate/fear pluralism and liberal democracy.
nu 11.10.07 at 10:51 pm
The 2002 success was a percentage one, in terms of votes, LePen gain was minimal.
But yeah, the LePen crowd’s antisemitism makes their islamophobia different from the US one.
And also as I’ve hinted by mentionning De Villiers, pro-catholic islamophobia wouldn’t work either.
It’s really some sort of secular, nationalist, proto-fascist and more obviously racist eurabia-phobia there.
gr 11.11.07 at 8:12 am
mrs tilton, true enough, there’s certainly a lot of anti-Islamic xenophobia in Europe, and you’re right that it’s related to an underlying anti-pluralist attitude. However, I have yet to meet a European (xenophobe or not) who believes that cowardly and defeatist Europe has taken a decision to accept the status of ‘dhimmitude’. Neither have I come across any European who believes that there’s a secret alliance between the EU and The Caliphate to destroy the US and Israel. At least in some of its more conspiratorial versions, the Eurabia thesis seems to appeal to a peculiarly American form of paranoia, which is in turn rooted in stereotypes of European decadence and perfidy.
Mrs Tilton 11.11.07 at 1:02 pm
gr,
oh yeah, I forgot that we are all wearing special hats and paying a tax to our Muslim masters now. And my 7 year old was just taken away to become a janissary! I tell you, helping the Caliph subjugate the American dogs is the only solace left to us over here.
des von bladet 11.11.07 at 3:33 pm
I merely wish to remark that I for one am decadent and perfidious enough to satisfy even the most demanding American taste. Can I gets me some wingnut welfare now, puh-lease?
I speak two and a half dialects of Belgian, if that helps.
Barry 11.11.07 at 4:37 pm
des, remember that speaking more than one language (guess which one) is considered suspicious by wingnuts.
abb1 11.11.07 at 5:41 pm
If English was good enough for Jesus, why would you need any other language?
Keven 11.11.07 at 10:24 pm
And there was me thinking that Simon Kuper only wrote about football. I should read more.
“reading Londonistan feels like being imprisoned with a never-ending Mail editorial.”
Oh my God, that sounds like hell on Earth
Jacob Christensen 11.11.07 at 11:53 pm
It is always dangerous to comment a book I wouldn’t read voluntary but I think that Karen Jespersen and Ralf Pittelkow’s latest opus “Islamister og naivister” would count as a Danish case of the Eurabia/Islamofascism literature.
(Oh, and by the way Karen Jespersen is the minister for social affairs.)
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