I decided to write this essay after a comment from a journalist, not a Leftist by my country's standards, who dismissed Eurabia as merely a conspiracy theory, one on a par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I do not disagree with the fact that conspiracy theories exist, nor that they can be dangerous. After all, the Protocols and the Dolchstosslegende, or "stab in the back myth" - the idea that Germany didn't lose WW1 but was betrayed by Socialists, intellectuals and Jews - helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis before WW2.
However, what puzzles me is that it is a widely-held belief of many (not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and even in the United States) that the terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11th 2001 were really a controlled demolition staged by the American government and then blamed on Muslims. I have seen this thesis talked about many times in Western media. While it is frequently (though not always) dismissed and mocked, it is least mentioned.
In contrast, Eurabia - which asserts that the Islamicization of Europe didn't happen merely by accident but with the active participation of European political leaders - is hardly ever referred to at all, despite the fact that it is easier to document. Does the notion of Eurabia hit too close to home? Perhaps it doesn't fit with the anti-American disposition of many journalists? Curiously enough, even those left-leaning journalists who are otherwise critical of the European Union because of its free market elements never write about Eurabia.
Because of this, I am going to test whether the Eurabia thesis is correct, or at least plausible. I have called this project The Eurabia Code, alluding to author Dan Brown's massive bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Brown's fictional account "documents" a conspiracy by the Church to cover up the truth about Jesus. I'm not sure my work will become equally popular, but I'm pretty sure it's closer to reality. The next time Mr. Brown wants to write about massive conspiracies in Europe, he would be well-advised to set his eyes at Brussels rather than Rome. It would be a whole lot more interesting.
What follows is a brief outline of the thesis put forward by writer Bat Ye'or in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. My information is based on her book (which should be read in full). In addition I have drawn from some of her articles and interviews. I republish the information with her blessing, but this summary is completely my own.
In an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bat Ye'or explained how French President Charles de Gaulle, disappointed by the loss of the French colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as with France's waning influence in the international arena, decided in the 1960's to create a strategic alliance with the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union.
"This is a matter of a total transformation of Europe, which is the result of an intentional policy," said Bat Ye'or. "We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicized and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world. The European leaders have decided on an alliance with the Arab world, through which they have committed to accept the Arab and Muslim approach toward the United States and Israel. This is not only with respect to foreign policy, but also on issues engaging European society from within, such as immigration, the integration of the immigrants and the idea that Islam is part of Europe."
"Europe is under a constant threat of terror. Terror is a way of applying pressure on the European countries to surrender constantly to the Arab representatives' demands. They demand, for example, that Europe always speak out for the Palestinians and against Israel."
Thus, the Eurabian project became an enlarged vision of the anti-American Gaullist policy dependent upon the formation of a Euro-Arab entity hostile to American influence. It facilitated European ambitions to maintain important spheres of influence in the former European colonies, while opening huge markets for European products in the Arab world, especially in oil-producing countries, in order to secure supplies of petroleum and natural gas to Europe. In addition, it would make the Mediterranean a Euro-Arab inland sea by favoring Muslim immigration and promoting Multiculturalism with a strong Islamic presence in Europe.
The use of the term "Eurabia" was first introduced in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity, Lucien Bitterlein, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d'Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East International (London). Their articles called for common Euro-Arab positions at every level. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated theorists; instead they put forth concrete policy decisions conceived in conjunction with, and actualized by, European state leaders and European Parliamentarians.
During a November 27, 1967 press conference, Charles de Gaulle stated openly that French cooperation with the Arab world had become "the fundamental basis of our foreign policy." By January 1969, the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, held in Cairo, in its resolution 15, decided "...to form special parliamentary groups, where they did not exist, and to use the parliamentary platform support of the Arab people and the Palestinian resistance." Five years later in Paris, July 1974, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation was created, under the Euro-Arab Dialogue rubric.
Bat Ye'or has highlighted this shared Euro-Arab political agenda. The first step was the construction of a common foreign policy. France was the driving force in this unification, which had already been envisaged by General de Gaulle's inner circle and Arab politicians.
The Arab states demanded from Europe access to Western science and technology, European political independence from the United States, European pressure on the United States to align with their Arab policy and demonization of Israel as a threat to world peace, as well as measures favorable to Arab immigration and dissemination of Islamic culture in Europe. This cooperation would also included recognition of the Palestinians as a distinct people and the PLO and its leader Arafat as their representative. Up to 1973 they had been known only as Arab refugees, even by other Arabs. The concept of a Palestinian "nation" simply did not exist.
During the 1973 oil crisis, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced that, due to the ongoing Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors Egypt and Syria, OPEC would no longer ship petroleum to Western nations that supported Israel. The sudden increase in oil prices was had lasting effects. Not only did it create a strong influx of petrodollars to countries such as Saudi Arabia, which permitted the Saudis to fund a worldwide Islamic resurgence, but it also had an impact in the West, especially in Europe.
However, Arab leaders had to sell their oil. Their people are very dependent on European economic and technological aid. The Americans made this point during the oil embargo in 1973. According to Ye'or, although the oil factor certainly helped cement the Euro-Arab Dialogue, it was primarily a pretext to cover up a policy that emerged in France before that crisis occurred. The policy, conceived in the 1960s, had strong antecedents in the French 19th-century dream of governing an Arab empire.
This political agenda has been reinforced by the deliberate cultural transformation of Europe. Euro-Arab Dialogue Symposia conducted in Venice (1977) and Hamburg (1983) included recommendations that have been successfully implemented. These recommendations were accompanied by a deliberate, privileged influx of Arab and other Muslim immigrants into Europe in enormous numbers.
The recommendations included:
1. Coordination of the efforts made by the Arab countries to spread the Arabic language and culture in Europe,
2. Creation of joint Euro-Arab Cultural Centers in European capitals,
3. The necessity of supplying European institutions and universities with Arab teachers specialized in teaching Arabic to Europeans, and
4. The necessity of cooperation between European and Arab specialists in order to present a positive picture of Arab-Islamic civilization and contemporary Arab issues to the educated public in Europe.
These agreements could not be set forth in written documents and treaties due to their politically sensitive and fundamentally undemocratic nature. The European leaders thus carefully chose to call their ideas "dialogue." All meetings, committees and working groups included representatives from European Community nations and the European Council along with members from Arab countries and the Arab League. Proceedings and decisions took place in closed sessions. No official minutes were recorded.
The Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) is a political, economic and cultural institution designed to ensure perfect cohesion between Europeans and Arabs. Its structure was set up at conferences in Copenhagen (15 December 1973), and Paris (31 July 1974). The principal agent of this policy is the European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, founded in 1974. The other principal organs of The Dialogue are the MEDEA Institute and the European Institute of Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation, created in 1995 with the backing of the European Commission.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of Frontpage Magazine, Ye'or explained how "in domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centers, school textbooks, student and youth associations, tourism. Church interfaith 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."
Eurabia's driving force, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, was created in Paris in 1974. It now has over six hundred members - from all major European political parties - active in their own national parliaments, as well as in the European parliament. France continues to be the key protagonist of this association.
A wide-ranging policy was sketched out. It entailed a symbiosis of Europe with the Muslim Arab countries that would endow Europe - and especially France, the project's prime mover - with a weight and a prestige to rival that of the United States. This policy was undertaken quite discreetly, and well outside of official treaties, using the innocent-sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The organization functioned under the auspices of European government ministers, working in close association with their Arab counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission and the Arab League. The goal was the creation of a pan-Mediterranean entity, permitting the free circulation both of men and of goods
On the cultural front there began a complete re-writing of history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to "The Contribution of the Islamic Civilisation to European culture." It was reaffirmed by French President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8, 1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the powerful European Commission, the EU's "government," and later Italian Prime Minister, through the creation of a Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations. This foundation was to control everything said, written and taught about Islam in Europe.
Over the past three decades, the EEC and the EU's political and cultural organizations have invented a fantasy Islamic civilization and history. The historical record of violations of basic human rights for all non- Muslims and women under sharia (Islamic Law) is either ignored or dismissed. In this worldview the only dangers come from the United States and Israel. The creators of Eurabia have conducted a successful propaganda campaign against these two countries in the European media. This fabrication was made easier by pre-existing currents of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in parts of Europe, although both sentiments have been greatly inflated by Eurabians and their collaborators.
On January 31, 2001, with the recrudescence of Palestinian terrorist jihad, European Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten declared to the European Parliament that Europe's foreign policy should give special attention to its southern flank (the Arab countries, in EU jargon), adding that he was delighted by the general agreement to give greater visibility to the Mediterranean Partnership.
Bat Ye'or thinks that "Our politicians are perfectly informed of Islamic history and current policies by their embassies, agents and specialists. There is no innocence there, but tremendous inflexibility in corruption, cynicism and the perversion of values."
In the preface to her book, she states that "This book describes Europe's evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post- Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers."
The new European civilization in the making can correctly be termed a ''civilization of dhimmitude.'' The word dhimmitude comes from the Koranic word ''dhimmi.'' It refers to the subjugated, non-Muslim individuals who accept restrictive and humiliating subordination to Islamic power in order to avoid enslavement or death. The entire Muslim world as we know it today is a product of this 1,300 year-old jihad dynamic, whereby once thriving non-Muslim majority civilizations have been reduced to a state of dysfunction and dhimmitude. The dhimmis are inferior beings who endure humiliation and aggression in silence. This arrangement allows Muslims to enjoy an impunity that increases both their hatred and their feeling of superiority, under the protection of the law.
Eurabia is a novel new entity. It possesses political, economic, religious, cultural, and media components, which are imposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies. While Europeans live within Eurabia's constraints, outside of a somewhat confused awareness, few are really conscious of them on a daily basis.
This Eurabian policy, expressed in obscure wording, is conducted at the highest political levels and coordinated over the whole of the European Union. It spreads an anti-American and anti-Semitic Euro-Arab sub-culture into the fiber of every social, media and cultural sector. Dissidents are silenced or boycotted. Sometimes they are fired from their jobs, victims of a totalitarian "correctness" imposed mainly by the academic, media and political sectors.
According to Ye'or, France and the rest of Western Europe can no longer change their policy: "It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently through 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."
Are Bat Ye'or's claims correct, or even possible?
Bernard Lewis has pointed out that, by common consent among historians, "the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte-who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease."
In an unsuccessful effort to gain the support of the Egyptian populace, Napoleon issued proclamations praising Islam. "People of Egypt," he proclaimed upon his entry to Alexandria in 1798, "You will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that more than the Mamluks, I respect God, his Prophet, and the Qur'an."
According to an eyewitness, Napoleon ended his proclamation with the phrase, "God is great and Muhammad is his prophet." To Muslim ears, this sounded like the shahada - the declaration of belief in the oneness of Allah and in Prophet Muhammad as his last messenger. Recitation of the shahadah, the first of the five pillars of Islam, is considered to mark one's conversion to Islam. Muslims could thus conclude that Napoleon had converted to Islam. In fact, one of his generals, Jacques Ménou, did convert to Islam.
The French were later defeated and forced to leave Egypt by the English admiral Lord Nelson. Although the French expedition to Egypt lasted only three years, it demonstrated that the West was now so superior to the Islamic world that Westerners could enter the Arab heartland, then still a part of the Ottoman Empire, at will. Only another Western power could force them to leave. The shock of this realization triggered the first attempts to reform Islam in the 19th century.
A positive result of Western conquest was the influx of French scientists into Egypt and the foundation of modern Egyptology. Most importantly, it led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was later used by French philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, the encounter also left a lasting impact in Europe, and above all in France.
The French invasion of Algeria in 1830 marked another chapter in this tale. Later, the French ruled Tunisia and Morocco. Finally, after the First World War, the French gained mandates over the former Turkish territories of the Ottoman Empire that make up what is now Syria and Lebanon. After the Second World War, French troops gradually left Arab lands, culminating with war and Algerian independence in 1962. However, their long relationship with Arabs resulted in France's belief that she had a special relationship with and an understanding of Arabs and Muslims. Along with French leadership in continental Europe, this would now provide the basis of a new foreign policy.
President de Gaulle pushed for a France and a Europe independent of the two superpowers. In a speech, he stated that "Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world." In 1966, he withdrew France from the common NATO military command, but remained within the organization.
Following the Six Days War in 1967, de Gaulle's condemnation of the Israelis for their occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip marked a significant change in French foreign policy. Previously, France - as well as the rest of Western Europe - had been strongly pro-Israel, even going to war together with Israel as late as 1956 against Nasser's Egypt. From 1967 on, however, France embarked on a decidedly pro-Arab course.
It has been said that English foreign policy has remained the same since the 16th century. Its goal was to prevent any country, whether Spain, France, or later Germany, from dominating continental Europe to the extent that it represents a threat to England. On the other hand, one could argue that French foreign policy has also remained the same for several centuries; its goal is to champion French leadership over Europe and the Mediterranean region in order to contain Anglo-Saxon (and later Anglo-American) dominance. This picture was complicated by the unification of Germany in the late 19th century, but its outlines remain to this day.
Napoleon is the great hero of French PM de Villepin. Several prominent French leaders stated quite openly in 2005 that the proposed EU Constitution was basically an enlarged France. Justice Minister Dominique Perben said: "We have finally obtained this 'Europe à la française' that we have awaited for so long. This constitutional treaty is an enlarged France. It is a Europe written in French."
From its inception, European integration has been a French-led enterprise. The fact that the French political elite have never renounced the maintenance of their leadership over Europe was amply demonstrated during the Iraq war. President Chirac famously said in 2003 after Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic backed the US position "They missed a good opportunity to shut up," adding "These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position."
Jean Monnet, French economist never elected to public office, is regarded by many as the architect of European integration. Monnet was a well-connected pragmatist who worked behind the scenes towards the gradual creation of European unity.
Richard North, publisher of the blog EU Referendum and co-author (with Christopher Booker) of The Great Deception: Can The European Union Survive, relates that for years - at least from the 1920s - Jean Monnet had dreamed of building a "United States of Europe." Although what Monnet really had in mind was the creation of a European entity with all the attributes of a state, an "anodyne phrasing was deliberately chosen with a view to making it difficult to dilute by converting it into just another intergovernmental body. It was also couched in this fashion so that it would not scare off national governments by emphasising that its purpose was to override their sovereignty."
In their analysis of the EU's history, the authors claim that the EU was not born out of WW2, as many people seem to think. It had been planned at least a generation before that.
The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in "Europe Day," contains phrases which state that it is "a first step in the federation of Europe", and that "this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation." However, as critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people are unaware of their existence.
A federation is, of course, a State and "yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. The EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws."
The EU founders "were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it."
Booker and North call the European Union "a slow-motion coup d'état: the most spectacular coup d'état in history," designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so publicly.
The irony is that France is now held hostage by the very forces she herself set in motion. The Jihad riots by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 demonstrated that Eurabia is no longer a matter of French foreign policy, it is now French domestic policy. France will burn unless she continues to appease Arabs and agree to their agenda.
The growth of the Islamic population is explosive. According to some, one out of three babies born in France is a Muslim. Hundreds of Muslim ghettos already de facto follow sharia, not French law. Some believe France will quietly become a Muslim country, while others are predicting a civil war in the near future.
Maybe there is some poetic justice in the fact that the country that initiated and has led the formation of Eurabia will now be destroyed by its own Frankenstein monster. However, gloating over France's dilemma won't help. The impending downfall of France is bad news for the rest of the West. What will happen to French financial resources? Above all, who will inherit hundreds of nuclear warheads? Will these weapons fall into the hands of Jihadist Muslims, too?
MEDEA (the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation), supported by the European Commission, is one of the key components of the Euro-Arab dialogue. On its own webpage, it states that:
"The Euro-Arab Dialogue as a forum shared by the European Community and the League of Arab States arose out of a French initiative and was launched at the European Council in Copenhagen in December 1973, shortly after the "October War" and the oil embargo. As the Europeans saw it, it was to be a forum to discuss economic affairs, whereas the Arab side saw it rather as one to discuss political affairs.
MEDEA Institute wishes to be a resource and a reference point for people wanting to engage in the Euro-Mediterranean dialogue. Via its meetings and talks the Institute seeks to create exchanges between political, economic, and diplomatic players, experts, journalists, academics and others."
As Bat Ye'or points out, while most of the workings of Eurabia are hidden from the public view, sometimes we can catch glimpses of it if we know what to look for. If you search the archives of the MEDEA website and other sources and read the documents carefully, the information is there. Even more material exists on paper, both in French and in English. I argue, as does Bat Ye'or, that there are sufficient amounts of information available to validate the thesis of Eurabia.
One of the documents Bat Ye'or was kind enough to send me (which she mentions in the French version of her book about Eurabia but not in the English version) is the Common Strategy of the European Council - Vision of the EU for the Mediterranean Region, from June 19th 2000.
It includes many recommendations, such as:
"to elaborate partnership-building measures, notably by promoting regular consultations and exchanges of information with its Mediterranean partners, support the interconnection of infrastructure between Mediterranean partners, and between them and the EU, take all necessary measures to facilitate and encourage the involvement of civil society as well as the further development of human exchanges between the EU and the Mediterranean partners. NGOs will be encouraged to participate in cooperation at bilateral and regional levels. Particular attention will be paid to the media and universities [my emphasis]."
It also includes the goal of assisting the Arab partners with "the process of achieving free trade with the EU." This may be less innocent than it sounds, as I will come back to later.
The Strategy also wants to "pursue, in order to fight intolerance, racism and xenophobia, the dialogue between cultures and civilisations." Notice that this statement preceded both the start of the second Palestinian intifada as well as the terror attacks of September 11th 2001. It was thus part of an ongoing process, rather than a response to any particular international incident.
One point in the document is particularly interesting. The EU wanted to "promote the identification of correspondences between legal systems of different inspirations in order to resolve civil law problems relating to individuals: laws of succession and family law, including divorce."
In plain English, it is difficult to see this bureaucratic obfuscation as anything other than an indicator that the EU countries will be lenient, adjusting their secular legislation to the sharia requirements of Muslim immigrants in family matters.
In another document from December 2003, which is available online, Javier Solana, the Secretary General of the Council of the European Union, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission and Chris Patten, member of the European Commission, have signed a plan for "Strengthening the EU's Partnership with the Arab World."
This includes the creation of a free trade area, but also plans to "invigorate cultural/religious/civilisation and media dialogue using existing or planned instruments, including the planned Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilisations.
Arab immigrants make a substantial contribution to the development of Europe. The EU is firmly committed to fight all manifestations of racism and discrimination in all its forms. [What constitutes discrimination? Secular laws?] Full respect for the rights of immigrants in Europe is a consistent policy throughout Europe. Its implementation should be improved further and co-operation in the framework of existing agreements should be enhanced to take into account the concerns of Arab partners."
Super-Eurocrat Romano Prodi wants more cooperation with Arab countries. He talks about a free trade zone with the Arab world, but this implies that Arab countries would enjoy access to the four freedoms of the EU's inner market, which includes the free movement of people across national borders. This fact, the potentially massive implications of establishing an "inner market" with an Arab world with a booming population growth, is virtually NEVER debated or even mentioned in European media. Yet it could mean the end of Europe as we once knew it.
Another statement from the "Sixth Euro-Med Ministerial Conference: reinforcing and bringing the Partnership forward" in Brussels, 28 November 2003, makes the intention of this internal Euro-Mediterranean market:
"This initiative offers the EU's neighbouring partners, in exchange for tangible political and economic reforms, gradual integration into the expanded European internal market and the possibility of ultimately reaching the EU's four fundamental freedoms: free movement of goods, services, capital and people [my emphasis]. Ministers are also expected to back the Commission's proposal1 to set up a Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, a Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly."
In June 2006, then newly elected Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi stated that:
"It's time to look south and relaunch a new policy of cooperation for the Mediterranean." Prodi was outlining a joint Italian-Spanish initiative which sought to provide countries facing the Mediterranean with "different" political solutions from those offered in the Euro-Mediterranean partnership. The prime minister then explained that the Barcelona Process - whose best known aspect is the creation of a free trade zone by 2010 - was no longer sufficient and a new different approach was needed. "The countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean expect that from us" he added.
Notice how Prodi, whom Bat Ye'or has identified as a particularly passionate Eurabian, referred to what the Arabs expected from European leaders. He failed to say whether or not there was great excitement among Europeans over the prospect of an even freer flow of migrants from Arab countries and Turkey, which is what will result from this "Euro-Mediterranean free trade zone."
During the Euro-Mediterranean mid-term Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs in Dublin in May 2004, the participants declared that:
"Work is now in progress to develop an agreed view on relations with the area which extends from Mauritania to Iran - the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The [European] Union has proposed to include Mediterranean partners in the European Neighbourhood Policy."
The EU can offer a more intensive political dialogue and greater access to EU programmes and policies, including their gradual participation in the four freedoms particularly the Single Market, as well as reinforced co-operation on justice and home affairs."
Again, exactly what does "co-operation on justice and home affairs" with Egypt, Syria and Algeria mean? I don't know, but I'm not sure whether I will like the answer.
The Barcelona declaration from 1995 encouraged "contacts between parliamentarians" and invited the European Parliament, with other Parliaments, to launch "the Euro-Mediterranean parliamentary dialogue." In March 2004, this was converted into a specific institution called The Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, EMPA (pdf). During the Euro-Mediterranean Ministerial Conference in Crete in May 2003, the Ministers included a provision which envisaged the consultative role the Parliamentary Assembly will play within the framework of the Barcelona process.
EU Commissioner Chris Patten has reiterated the European Commission's readiness to co-operate fully with the Assembly, giving the Assembly the right to comment on any subject of interest to the Euro-Arab Dialogue.
The Assembly consists of 120 members from EU countries, both members of national parliaments and of the European Parliament, and an equal number of representatives from the Parliaments of the Mediterranean partner countries.
Like most Europeans, I hadn't even heard about this institution before coming across it during an Internet search. However, it is apparently going to influence the future of my entire continent. This set-up leaves me with some questions. When we know that these "Mediterranean partner countries" include non-democratic Arab countries such as Syria, isn't it disturbing that representatives from these countries should participate in a permanent institution with consultative powers over the internal affairs of the European Union? Especially when we know that our own, democratically elected national parliaments have already been reduced to the status of "consultation" with unelected federal EU lawmakers in Brussels?
The Algiers Declaration for a Shared Vision of the Future was made after a Congress held in Algeria in February 2006. The document states that: "It is essential to create a Euro-Mediterranean entity founded on Universal Values" and that "It is crucial to positively emphasise all common cultural heritage, even if marginalised or forgotten." A Common Action Plan draws up a large number of recommendations on how to achieve this new Euro-Mediterranean entity. Among these recommendations are:
These agreements, completely rewriting European history books to make them more Islam-friendly, and gradually silencing "Islamophobia" as racism, are being implemented even now.
Walter Schwimmer, the Austrian diplomat and Secretary General of the Council of Europe from 1999 to 2004, told foreign ministers at the Islamic conference in Istanbul (June15th 2004) that the Islamic component is an integral part of Europe's diversity. He reaffirmed the commitment of the Council of Europe to work against Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance.
The Council was also actively involved in the co-organisation of a Conference on the Image of Arab-Islamic culture in European history textbooks, which took place in Cairo in December 2004. The event was held within the framework of the Euro-Arab Dialogue ''Learning to Live together.'' The aim of the conference was to examine negative stereotyping in the image of Arab-Islamic culture presented in existing history textbooks, and to discuss ways to overcome this stereotyping.
In the European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering stated that school textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam by experts overseen by the European Union and Islamic leaders. He said textbooks should be checked to ensure they promoted European values without propagating religious stereotypes or prejudice. He also suggested that the EU could co-operate with the 56-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee.
In June 2005 in Rabat, Morocco, a conference was held on "Fostering Dialogue among Cultures and Civilizations." The Conference was jointly organized by UNESCO, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), the Danish Centre for Culture and Development (DCCD) and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures (Alexandria, Egypt).
Notice that this was months before the Danish Muhammad cartoons created havoc. It was not a reaction to this issue; rather it was a part of a sustained, ongoing process to promote the Arabic-Islamic culture in Europe.
Among the recommendations that were raised by Mr. Olaf Gerlach Hansen, Director General of the DCCD: "We are interested in new actions in the media, in culture and in education. These proposals include:
- Concrete initiatives to develop "intercultural competencies" in the training of new generations of journalists - Concrete initiatives for links and exchanges between journalists, editors, media-institutions, which encourage intercultural co-operation" - Concrete initiatives for curriculum development through new educational materials and revision of existing textbooks.
Although not stated directly, one may reasonably assume that among the "negative stereotypes" to be removed from the textbooks used to teach history to European schoolchildren are any and all references to the 1300 years of continuous Jihad warfare against Europe. These recommendations were accepted and incorporated into The Rabat Commitment.
According to Serge Trifkovic, "The present technological, cultural and financial strength of Europe is a façade that conceals a deep underlying moral and demographic weakness. The symptoms of the malaise are apparent in the unprecedented demographic collapse and in the loss of a sense of place and history that go hand-in-hand with the expansion of the European Union. The emerging transnational hyper-state is actively indoctrinating its subject-population into believing and accepting that the demographic shift in favor of Muslim aliens is actually a blessing."
He points out specifically the EU Parliamentary Assembly Recommendation N° 1162 (19 September 1991) on "the contribution of the Islamic civilization to European culture." A decade later, in its General policy recommendation n° 5: "Combating intolerance and discrimination against Muslims," the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance emphasized "Islam's positive contribution to the continuing development of European societies, of which it is an integral part." It expressed strong regret "that Islam is sometimes portrayed inaccurately [as] a threat."
The ECRI called on the EU member states to adopt measures that would effectively outlaw any serious debate about Islam and introduce pro-Muslim "affirmative action." European countries should:
Trifkovic says "Cynically defeatist, self-absorbed and unaccountable to anyone but their own corrupt class, the Eurocrats are just as bad as jihad's fellow-travelers; they are its active abettors and facilitators."
Eurabians want to create a unity of the Mediterranean region. This desire is strikingly similar to the goals of some Islamic organizations.
The Muslim Brotherhood, regarded as the most important Islamic movement of the past century, was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, inspired by contemporary European Fascists in addition to Islamic texts.
German historian Egon Flaig quotes Banna as saying:
"We want the flag of Islam to fly over those lands again who were lucky enough to be ruled by Islam for a time, and hear the call of the muezzin praise God. Then the light of Islam died out and they returned to disbelief. Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Italy and the Greek islands are all Islamic colonies which have to return to Islam's embrace. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea have to become internal seas of Islam, as they used to be."
Patrick Poole describes how discussion of a document called "The Project" so far has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson, has information regarding The Project finally been made public. It was found in a raid of a luxurious villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, who has had active association with the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years.
Included in the documents seized was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlined a 12-point strategy to "establish an Islamic government on earth" - identified as The Project. According to testimony given to Swiss authorities by Nada, the unsigned document was prepared by "Islamic researchers" associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. It represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the "cultural invasion" of the West.
The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood "master plan." Some of it recommendations include:
Included among this group of Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals is Youssef al-Qaradhawi, an Egyptian-born, Qatar-based Islamist cleric. Both Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess provide extensive comparisons between Qaradhawi's publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, published in 1990, and The Project. They note the striking similarities in the language used and the plans and methods both documents advocate.
As Patrick Poole says, "What is startling is how effectively the Islamist plan for conquest outlined in The Project has been implemented by Muslims in the West for more than two decades."
Youssef al-Qaradhawi, one of the most influential clerics in Sunni Islam, has predicted that "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor," was an important figure during the Muhammad cartoons riots, whipping up anger against Denmark and the West.
According to Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen, "Clearly, the riots in Denmark and throughout the world were not spontaneous, but planned and organized well in advance by Islamist organizations that support the MB, and with funding mostly from Saudi Arabia."
The current leader of the international Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, recently issued a new strategy calling on all its member organizations to serve its global agenda of defeating the West. Akef has called the U.S. "a Satan." "I expect America to collapse soon," declaring, "I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America."
Ehrenfeld and Lappen state that the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring organizations employ the Flexibility strategy:
"This strategy calls for a minority group of Muslims to use all "legal" means to infiltrate majority-dominated, non-Muslim secular and religious institutions, starting with its universities. As a result, "Islamized" Muslim and non-Muslim university graduates enter the nation's workforce, including its government and civil service sectors, where they are poised to subvert law enforcement agencies, intelligence communities, military branches, foreign services, and financial institutions."
In the Middle East Quarterly, Lorenzo Vidino writes about "The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe."
According to him, "Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations."
One of the Muslim Brotherhood's first pioneers in Germany was Sa'id Ramadan, the personal secretary of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. The oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia has granted an influx of money to the powerful Islamic Center of Geneva, Switzerland, run by Sa'id's son Hani Ramadan, brother of Tariq Ramadan. Hani Ramadan was made infamous by - among other things - a 2002 article in the French daily Le Monde defending the stoning of adulterers to death. Tariq Ramadan, a career "moderate Muslim," later called for a "moratorium" on stoning.
According to Vidino, "The ultimate irony is that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would have never dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe."
Former Muslim Dr Patrick Sookhdeo warns that the Islamicization going on in European cities is not happening by chance. It "is the result of a careful and deliberate strategy by certain Muslim leaders which was planned in 1980 when the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States."
The instructions given in the book told Muslims to get together and organize themselves into viable Muslim communities. They should set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. At all costs they must avoid being assimilated by the majority, and to resist assimilation must group themselves geographically, forming areas of high Muslim concentration.
Douglas Farah writes about the largely successful efforts by Islamic groups in the West to buy large amounts of real estate, territory that effectively becomes "Muslim" land once it is in the hands of Islamist groups. Some groups are signing agreements to guarantee that they will only sell the land to other Muslims.
The Brotherhood, particularly, is active in investments in properties and businesses across Europe, laying the groundwork for the future network that will be able to react rapidly and with great flexibility in case of another attempted crackdown on the group's financial structure. Most of the money comes from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
According to Farah, the governments of Europe and the United States continue to allow these groups to flourish and seek for the "moderate" elements that can be embraced as a counter-balance to the "radical" elements.
"We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning."
In March 2006, the two-day plenary session of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, held in Brussels approved a resolution which "condemned the offence" caused by the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as well "as the violence which their publication provoked." These MEPs and national MPs from the EU and Arab countries also urged governments to "ensure respect for religious beliefs and to encourage the values of tolerance, freedom and multiculturalism."
During the parliamentary assembly, Egyptian parliament speaker Ahmed Sorour insisted that the cartoons published in Denmark and other recent events showed the existence of a "cultural deficit." Jordanian MP Hashem al-Qaisi also condemned the cartoons, claiming that it is not sufficient to deplore the cartoons as these things might occur again in another country.
And European Parliament president Josep Borrell referred to the Mediterranean as "a concentrate of all the problems facing humanity." He said that after one year presiding over the assembly he "still did not fully understand the complexities of the Mediterranean."
Following the cartoons affair, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana had travelled to the Middle East and made joint statements with Islamic leaders that "freedom of the press entails responsibility and discretion and should respect the beliefs and tenets of all religions." Solana said that he had discussed means to ensure that "religious symbols can be protected." He held talks with Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of Al Azhar University, the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam, and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa.
Solana also met with the leader of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Following their discussion, Solana "expressed our sincere regret that religious feelings have been hurt", and vowed "to reach out... to make sure that people's hearts and minds are not hurt again."
Only a few years earlier, Mr. Solana, then Secretary General of NATO, in a speech stated that "the root cause of conflicts in Europe and beyond can be traced directly to the absence of democracy and openness. The absence of the pressure valve of democratic discourse can lead these societies to explode into violence." The irony that he himself is now trying to curtail the democratic discourse in Europe through the promotion of Islamic censorship apparently did not occur to him.
Meanwhile, the tentacles of the vast, inflated EU bureaucracy insinuate themselves into regulations on every conceivable subject. Some of the examples of the bureaucracy are ridiculous; some are funny. But there is a sinister side to the European bureaucracy:
A report from the EU's racism watchdog said that more must be done to combat racism and "Islamophobia." One method of accomplishing this is the promotion of a lexicon which shuns purportedly offensive and culturally insensitive terms. This lexicon would set down guidelines for EU officials and politicians prohibiting what they may say. "Certainly 'Islamic terrorism' is something we will not use ... we talk about 'terrorists who abusively invoke Islam'," an EU official said.
Early in 2006, the EU's human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles's criticized a plan to revamp Christianity as a school subject in elementary schools in Denmark. Gil-Robles said doing so went against European values. "Religion as a school subject should be a general course that attempts to give students insight into the three monotheistic religions [my emphasis]," he said. The "three monotheistic religions" means Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
As I see it, there are several possible ways of dealing with the issue of education about religion.
1. Teach the traditional religions within a particular country, which in Europe means Christianity and Judaism.
2. Teach all the major world religions.
3. Leave religion out of the curriculum.
What the European Union does, however, is to treat Islam as a traditional, European religion on par with Christianity and Judaism. This is a crucial component of Eurabian thinking and practice. Notice how EU authorities in this case directly interfered to force a once-independent nation state to include more teachings of Islam in its school curriculum in order to instill their children with a proper dose of Eurabian indoctrination. Notice also that they didn't ask for more teaching of Buddhism or Hinduism. Only Islam is being pushed.
In another case, the European Commission rebuffed a call by the Polish president for an EU-wide debate on reinstating the death penalty. "The death penalty is not compatible with European values," a Commission spokesman said. Again, the issue here is not your opinion regarding the death penalty. The real issue is that the metasticizing EU has already defined for you what constitutes "European values." Thus, major issues are simply beyond public debate. This innocent-sounding phrase "European values" cloaks a federal, Eurabian ideology enforced across the entire European Union without regard to the popular will.
Perhaps the most shameful and embarrassing aspect of the history of Eurabia is how the supposedly critical and independent European media has allowed itself to be corrupted or deceived by the Eurabians. Most of the documents about the Euro-Arab Dialogue place particular emphasis on working with the media, and the Eurabians have played the European media like a Stradivarius. Aided by a pre-existing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, European media have been willing to demonize the United States and Israel while remaining largely silent on the topic Eurabia.
In May 2006, a big conference was held in Vienna involving media figures (journalists) from all over Europe, who met with partners from the Arab world as a part of the Euro-Arab Dialogue.
European officials responded publicly with "regret" to Israel's ambassador to Austria Dan Ashbel's decision to boycott the conference on racism in the media because of concern in Jerusalem that anti-Semitism was getting short shrift at the meeting. Speaking for the conference - entitled "Racism, Xenophobia and the Media: Towards Respect and Understanding of all Religions and Cultures" - an official claimed that anti-Semitism was not taken off the agenda. This official countered that the meeting was "primarily a dialogue between the media representatives of all the Euro-Med partners on the problems that beset their profession. These include xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia [my emphasis]."
Writer Bruce Bawer thinks that many Europeans recognize that Multiculturalism is leading their societies to disaster. But they've heard all their lives from officially approved authorities that any concern about Multiculturalism and its consequences is tantamount to racism:
"There's a widespread resignation to the fact that multiculturalists control the media, academy, state agencies, and so on. They know very well that if you want to get ahead in European society, you don't take on multicultural orthodoxy. The political establishment seems solidly planted, unmovable, unchangeable. There may be a widespread rage, in short, but it's largely an impotent rage. Europeans today have been bred to be passive, to leave things to their leaders, whose wisdom they've been taught all their lives to take for granted. To shake off a lifetime of this kind of indoctrination is not easy."
According to Bat Ye'or, fear of awakening opposition to EU policy toward the Arab Mediterranean countries led to the repression of all discussion of the economic problems and difficulties of integration caused by massive immigration. Any criticism of Muslim immigration is basically brushed off as being "just like the Jews were talked about in Nazi Germany," a ridiculous but effective statement.
Bat Ye'or agrees with Bawer's analysis "concerning the totalitarian web cohesion of 'teachers, professors, the media, politicians, government agency workers, talking heads on TV, the representatives of state-funded "independent" organizations like SOS Racism' to indoctrinate the politically correct. This perfectly expresses the political directives given by the European Commission to coordinate and control in all EU member-states the political, intellectual, religious, media, teaching and publishing apparatus since the 1970s so as to harmonize with its Mediterranean strategy based on multiculturalism."
Professional harassment, boycott and defamation punish those who dare to openly challenge the Politically Correct discourse. According to Bat Ye'or, this has led to the development of a type of "resistance press" as if Europe were under the "occupation" of its own elected governments. This free press on the Internet and in blogs has brought some changes, including the rejection of the European Constitution in 2005. Despite overwhelming support for the Constitution by the governments in France and the Netherlands and a massive media campaign by political leaders in both countries, voters rejected it. Blogs played a significant part in achieving this.
Only a few months later, EU authorities lined up together with authoritarian regimes such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and the Chinese Communist Party in favor of "more international control with" (read: censorship of) the Internet.
According to Richard North of the EU Referendum blog, "The most dangerous form of propaganda is that which does not appear to be propaganda. And it is that form at which the BBC [the British Broadcasting Corporation] excels. Perhaps the biggest sin of all is that of omission. By simply not informing us of key issues, they go by default, unchallenged until it is too late to do anything about them."
Vladimir Bukovsky is a former Soviet dissident, author and human rights activist who spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons. Now living in England, he warns against some of the same anti-democratic impulses in the West, especially in the EU, which he views as an heir to the Soviet Union. In 2002, he joined in on protests against the BBC's compulsory TV licence. "The British people are being forced to pay money to a corporation which suppresses free speech - publicising views they don't necessarily agree with." He has blasted the BBC for their "bias and propaganda," especially in stories related to the EU or the Middle East.
Conservative MP, Michael Gove and political commentator Mark Dooley also complain about lopsided coverage: "Take, for example, the BBC's coverage of the late Yasser Arafat. In one profile broadcast in 2002, he was lauded as an "icon" and a "hero," but no mention was made of his terror squads, corruption, or his brutal suppression of dissident Palestinians. Similarly, when Israel assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in 2004, one BBC reporter described him as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man." This despite the fact that under Yassin's guidance, Hamas murdered hundreds."
Polish writer Nina Witoszek, now living in Norway, warns that people who have lived under Communist regimes are struck by a strange feeling of dejá vu in Western Europe:
"Before formulating a sentence, you put on a censorship autopilot which asks: Who am I insulting now? Am I too pro-Israeli, or maybe anti-Feminist, or - God forbid - anti-Islamic? Am I "progressive" enough? Soon we shall all write in a decaffeinated language: We shall obediently repeat all the benign mantras such as "dialogue," "pluralism," "reconciliation" and "equality." Norway has never been a totalitarian country, but many people now feel the taste of oppression and of being muzzled. I know many wise Norwegians - and even more wise foreigners - who no longer have the energy to waste time on contributing to a castrated, paranoid democracy. We prefer safety above freedom. This is the first step towards a voluntary bondage."
She quotes follow writer from Poland Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 for books such as The Captive Mind, where he explained the seductiveness of totalitarian ideology.
One essay by Milosz is titled "Ketman." "Ketman" or "kitman" is an Islamic term brought to Milosz's attention by Arthur Gobineau's book Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia. He had noticed that the dissidents in Persia, long accustomed to tyranny, had evolved a style of their own. The need for survival often involved more than just keeping your mouth shut, but of actively lying in every way necessary. This strategy of dissimulation and deceit, which is especially pronounced by Shia Muslims but also used by Sunnis, is primarily used to deceive non-Muslims, but can also be used against other Muslims under duress.
According to Milosz, a very similar strategy was used in Communist countries. Similar to Islam, those practicing dissimulation felt a sense of superiority towards those who were stupid enough to state their real opinions openly. In Communist societies, dissimulation was just as much a technique of adaptation to an authoritarian regime as a conscious, theatrical form of art that became increasingly refined.
It is frightening to hear people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that they see this same totalitarian impulse at work in Western Europe now. According to them, we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism. It is frightening because I believe they are right. Have we witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe only to see an Iron Veil descend on Western Europe? An Iron Veil of EU bureaucracy and Eurabian treachery, of Political Correctness, Multicultural media censorship and the ever-present threat of Muslim violence and terrorism that is gradually extinguishing free speech. The momentum of bureaucratic treachery is accelerating.
Native Europeans and indeed some non-Muslim immigrants are quietly leaving in growing numbers, gradually turning the continent into a net exporter of refugees rather than an importer of them. When large parts of Europe are being overrun by barbarians - actively aided and abetted by our own trusted leaders - and when people are banned from opposing this onslaught, is Western Europe still a meaningful part of the Free World? Have the countries of Eastern Europe gone from one "Evil Empire" to another? Are they - and we - back in the EUSSR?
Vaclav Klaus, the conservative President of the Czech Republic, has complained that: "Every time I try to remove some piece of Soviet-era regulation, I am told that whatever it is I am trying to scrap is a requirement of the European Commission." In an interview with Paul Belien of the Brussels Journal in February 2006, Vladimir Bukovksy warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. Mr Bukovsky called the EU a "monster" that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fully-fledged totalitarian state.
"The ultimate purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a new historic entity, the Soviet people, all around the globe. The same is true in the EU today. They are trying to create a new people. They call this people "Europeans", whatever that means. According to Communist doctrine as well as to many forms of Socialist thinking, the state, the national state, is supposed to wither away. In Russia, however, the opposite happened. Instead of withering away the Soviet state became a very powerful state, but the nationalities were obliterated. But when the time of the Soviet collapse came these suppressed feelings of national identity came bouncing back and they nearly destroyed the country. It was so frightening."
Timothy Garton Ash is considered a leading expert on Europe's future. Bruce Bawer views Garton Ash as typical of Europe's political élite. Ash mistrusts national patriotism but adores the EU. He writes about the need for a factitious European patriotism ("flags, symbols, a European anthem we can sing") to encourage "emotional identification with European institutions." And just why does Europe need the EU? Garton Ash's answer: "To prevent our falling back into the bad old ways of war and European barbarism." Among his suggestions is that Europe encourage "the formation of an Arab Union." He makes no mention of Arab democracy. Imagining "Europe in 2025 at its possible best," he pictures it as a "partnership" with Arab countries and Russia that would extend "from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok."
The European Commission proposed the controversial idea of a singing event in all member states to celebrate the European Union's 50th "birthday," the 50th anniversary of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Commissioner Margot Wallstrom was lobbying for big-style birthday celebrations to "highlight the benefits that European integration has brought to its citizens." Diplomats said the idea had sparked feelings of disgust among new, formerly Communist member states such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which were reminded of "Stalinist times" when people were forced by the state to sing. Brussels decided on a more modest celebration, also intended to spend around €300,000 on the appointment of 50 citizen "ambassadors," dubbed the "Faces of Europe," who are supposed to "tell their story" throughout the year on what the EU means to them in their daily life, as well as a series of activities for school children and youngsters. Germany will go ahead with its own idea to let thousands of its bakeries bake 54 sorts of cakes with recipes from all 27 member states.
Commissioner Wallstrom in 2005 argued that politicians who resisted pooling national sovereignty risked a return to Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Her fellow commissioners also issued a joint declaration, stating that EU citizens should pay tribute to the dead of the Second World War by voting Yes to the EU Constitution. The commissioners gave the EU sole credit for ending the Cold War, making no mention of the role of NATO or the United States.
Is the EU an instrument to end wars? In October 2006, Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the French Action Police trade union, warned of a civil war in France created by Muslim immigrants: "We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their 'comrades' free when they are arrested."
These Muslim immigrants were allowed in by the very same European elites who now want European citizens to celebrate their work through cakes and songs. While civil society is disintegrating in Western Europe due to Islamic pressures, EU authorities are working to increase Muslim immigration, while congratulating themselves for bringing peace to the continent. What peace? Where?
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years' War, the last major religious war in Europe, and helped lay the foundations for modern nation states. Before nation states, we thus had a pattern of borderless religious wars and civil wars. This is what we have returned to, full circle, only this time a borderless Jihad is triggering civil wars in Europe. While the EU may help prevent wars between nation states with old grudges, such as Germany and France, it may also actively cause other kinds of wars. It accomplishes this by increasing Multicultural tensions and a dangerous sense of estrangement between citizens and those who are supposed to be their leaders.
Wars have existed for thousands of years before the advent of the modern nation state. It is far more likely that weakening nation states will end our democratic system, a system which is closely tied to the existence of sovereign nation states, than that it will end wars.
When asked whether the member countries of the EU joined the union voluntarily, and whether the resulting integration reflects the democratic will of Europeans, Vladimir Bukovksy replied, "No, they did not. Look at Denmark which voted against the Maastricht treaty twice. Look at Ireland [which voted against the Nice treaty]. Look at many other countries, they are under enormous pressure. It is almost blackmail. It is a trick for idiots. The people have to vote in referendums until the people vote the way that is wanted. Then they have to stop voting. Why stop? Let us continue voting. The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage."
In 1992, Bukovksy had unprecedented access to Politburo and other Soviet secret documents, as described in his book, Judgement in Moscow. In January 1989, during a meeting between Soviet leader Gorbachev, former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, American banker Rockefeller and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Giscard d'Estaing supposedly stated: "Europe is going to be a federal state and you have to prepare yourself for that. You have to work out with us, and the European leaders, how you would react to that."
This was in the 1980s, when most of the media still dismissed as scaremongering any talk of a political union that would subdue the nation states. Fifteen years later, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became the chief drafter of the truly awful EU Constitution, an impenetrable brick of a book, hundreds of pages long, and lacking any of the checks and balances so crucial to the American Constitution. Giscard has argued that the rejection of the Constitution in the French and Dutch referenda in 2005 "was a mistake which will have to be corrected" and insisted that "In the end, the text will be adopted."
Giscard has also said that "it was a mistake to use the referendum process" because "it is not possible for anyone to understand the full text." Does it instill confidence among the citizens of Europe that we are supposed to be under the authority of a "Constitution" that is too complex for most non-bureaucrats to understand? According to Spain's justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar "you don't need to read the European constitution to know that it is good."
Jean-Luc Dehaene, former Belgian Prime Minister, said that "We know that nine out of ten people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes."
Journalist Nidra Poller, however, is more skeptical. Commenting on the debate prior to the EU Constitution referendum in France, she noted a submissive attitude among EU leaders towards Muslim demands: "The Euro-Mediterranean 'Dialogue' is a masterpiece of abject surrender." The European Union functions as an intermediate stage of an ominous project that calls for a meltdown of traditional European culture, to be replaced by a new, Eurabian cocktail. And she asks: "When subversive appeasement hides behind the veil of 'Dialogue,' what unspeakable ambitions might be dissembled by the noble word 'Constitution'?"
The European Union gave the Palestinians $342.8 million in aid in 2005 - or, more accurately, $612.15 million when assistance from the 25 EU governments is included. Even the United States has repeatedly donated millions of American tax dollars to the Palestinian Authority, though not at EU levels. In July 2005, as a response to the Islamic terrorist attacks on London a few days earlier, leaders of the G8, the group of influential industrialized nations, offered the PA some $9 billion, dubbed an "alternative to the hatred."
The West's largesse continued despite a demographic study in 2005 which revealed that the number showing the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza had been inflated by 50% by the government.
Almost all of the new infrastructure in the Palestinian territories from the beginning of the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s - schools, hospitals, airports - were arranged and paid for by Brussels. As Jihad was once again unleashed with the second Intifada in 2000, Israel stopped its transfer of payments to the Palestinians. So the EU stepped in with another 10 million Euros a month in direct budgetary assistance to the Palestinian Authority. EU Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten stated in 2002 that "there is no case for stating that EU money has financed terrorism, has financed the purchase of weapons, or any similar activities."
However, a report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies later found that: "There is indisputable evidence that PA money has been used to fund terrorist activities." This was confirmed by Fuad Shubaki, who used to serve as the finance chief in the Palestinian security forces. According to him, former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat ordered millions of dollars, taken from international aid funds, tax money transferred by Israel and from Arab countries, to be used to purchase weapons and ammunition, including the 50 tons of armaments on board the ship Karine A. The transaction was coordinated between the PA, Hizballah in Lebanon and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
In May 2006, Mahmoud Abbas - President of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat's death in November 2004 and a leading politician in Fatah - talked to the European Parliament about the peace process. At the same time, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, threatened to strike at US and European economic and civilian interests in response to international sanctions on the PA. Financial support evokes no gratitude in the Palestinians. However, they will threaten you with violence if aid is not forthcoming. This is plainly extortion.
This shakedown corresponds to the Muslims' view of the Jizya, the tributary tax paid by non-Muslims in exchange for not being killed. Documents from the Euro-Arab Dialogue frequently mention about "financial assistance" from the EU to Arab countries. Bat Ye'or points out that some of this Jizya tax is extracted from Europeans without their awareness.
In November 2005, the EU's official financial watchdog refused to approve the EU's accounts for the 11th year in a row because they were so full of fraud and errors. The European Court of Auditors refused to give a statement of assurance on the EU's $160.3 billion budget for 2004. "The vast majority of the payment budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity," it said. It specifically refused to approve the budgets for the EU's foreign policy and aid programs, many of which are geared towards Arab countries. Half the project budgets approved by the European Commission were inadequately monitored.
The European Commission is considered the EU's "government," and thus the government of nearly half a billion people. But it can release accounts with massive flaws for over a decade straight because it is largely unaccountable to anybody and was intended to be that way.
Muslims use deception to advance Jihad until it is almost too late for the infidels to stop them. The EU federalists and Eurabians have taken a page out of the Islamic playbook, and have been approaching their goals by stealth for decades, buried beneath a mass of detail and technocratic newspeak all but incomprehensible to non-bureaucrats.
In a frank moment, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister, once described the EU's "system" in this way: "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens," he explained. "If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."
In The Economist, columnist Charlemagne writes: "What Mr Juncker and those who think like him are trying to do is, in essence, to drown opposition to European federation in a mass of technical detail, to bore people into submission. As a strategy, it has gone a long way. [My emphasis] The greatest single transfer of sovereignty from Europe's nations to the European Union took place, in 1985, as part of the project to create a single European market. Even [British Conservative PM] Margaret Thatcher, not usually slow to spot a trick, later claimed that she had not fully appreciated the ramifications of what she was then signing up to."
Writer Christopher Booker has called this the EU's "culture of deceit":
"What in fact has been taking place has been a transfer of power (...) to Brussels on a scale amounting to the greatest constitutional revolution in our history. But much of this has remained buried from view because our politicians like to preserve the illusion that they are still in charge. The result is that remarkably few people now have any proper understanding of how the political system which rules our lives actually works."
I have used the term "neo-Feudalism" to describe the EU. There are definitely certain elite groups in Europe who think that everything that's wrong with Europe is because of "populism" - what others call democracy. The motive force behind the EU aims to cede national sovereignty to a new ruling class of bureaucrats, a new aristocracy. This is a throwback to the pre-democratic age. Karl Zinsmeister notes that: "The EU apparatus is exceedingly closed and secretive. Relatively few of the confederation's important decisions are currently made by democratically accountable officials. On front after front, bureaucratic mandarins are deciding how everyday Europeans will live. ... Many Europeans, in a way Americans find impossible to understand, are willing to let their elites lead them by the nose. There is a kind of peasant mentality under which their "betters" are allowed to make the important national judgments for them."
MP Gisela Stuart was a member of the Praesidium which drafted the proposed EU Constitution. She sums up her experiences thus:
"The Convention brought together a self-selected group of the European political elite, many of whom have their eyes on a career at a European level, which is dependent on more and more integration, and who see national parliaments and governments as an obstacle ... Not once in the sixteen months I spent on the Convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want, whether it serves their best interests or whether it provides the best basis for a sustainable structure for an expanding Union."
In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all the British political groups in Brussels called for an end the "medieval" practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU's supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain's laws, "is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret."
According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. "Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion. Indeed, the EU's structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic."
The European Union has been compared to the Roman Empire, but such comparisons are not very apt. Rome was the military superpower of its time, while the EU is but a military midget. However, there is one intriguing commonality: Julius Caesar was murdered because he wanted to crown himself king. This was not a popular move among the powerful elite in the Senate, who reminded Caesar that Rome had become a Republic precisely because they had rebelled against the "tyrant" kings of old.
Caesar's successor Octavian, better known today as Caesar Augustus, is considered both the first and one of the most important Roman Emperors. He downplayed his own position by preferring the title princeps, usually translated as "first citizen". He also preserved the outward form of the Roman Republic, paid lip service to the old elite, and veiled the changes to make them seem less upsetting to the public. He may have been a monarch, but he never called himself one.
Some might see a parallel in the present-day EU. When up to three-quarters of our national laws originate in Brussels, what is then the point of holding national elections? Just as in Octavian's Rome, the real power has been moved elsewhere, but the old order is draped over reality as a democratic fig leaf in order not to upset the common people. The EU operates largely by stealth; its edicts are implemented through traditional parliaments, which are increasingly reduced to decorative appendages.
The funny aspect of this is that those who are against the EU are labelled xenophobes, nationalists or simply anti-democratic forces. The EU is an organization where unelected bureaucrats dismantle democracy, yet denounce their critics as anti-democratic forces.
In order to create this new entity, the old nation states must be deliberately crushed. Massive numbers of non-European immigrants are introduced, and the resulting situation is termed a "Multicultural society". This demolition is followed by the demand that our entire society be changed accordingly.
Since Europeans feel less "European" than they experience themselves as French, Italian, Dutch, etc., national allegiances have to be broken down. At the same time, an external rival must be created. The closest model is Bismarck's unification of Germany. The numerous German states rallied to Prussia's side against the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, thus paving the way for a new, powerful German federation.
The EU federalists strive to build a united European state through a shared animosity against the USA, while constructing a Eurabian entity of Europe and the Arab world via their common hostility towards Israel. One tactic is the deliberate use of the media to whip up anger against these countries and to demonize them.
However, Bismarck's German states were united by a common language. Even if a "new us" could be constructed from dozens of nations - which is highly questionable - melding various ethnic groups into a cohesive nation takes centuries. Without a shared identity, without a European demos, how can the EU be anything but authoritarian? Perhaps the EU elites believe that a large mass of people lacking a distinct cultural identity would be easier to control?
The problem is that the nation state itself has been declared evil or obsolete, not collectivism, anti-individualism or totalitarianism. But there is a crucial distinction between nationalism and patriotism, which George Orwell saw clearly:
"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power."
Totalitarian regimes can be national, such as Nazi Germany, but they can also be supranational, such as the Soviet Union, which sought to suppress all pre-existing national loyalties.
How was a project as big as the creation of Eurabia pulled off? I have thought a lot about this question, and come to the conclusion that it succeeded precisely because of its size. St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. "How dare you molest the sea?" asked Alexander. "How dare you molest the whole world?" the pirate replied. "Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor."
It's a matter of scale. If a small group of people sideline the democratic process in one country and start imposing their own laws on the public, it's called a coup d'état. If they do so on an entire continent, it's called the European Union.
Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf described a propaganda technique known as "the Big Lie". The EU has adopted this strategy, which consists of telling a lie so "colossal" that it would be impossible to believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." This has been combined with the technique, perfected by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany, of repeating a point until it is taken to be the truth.
Here are some Big Lies:
The creation of Eurabia ranks as one of the greatest betrayals in the history of Western civilization. Does that mean that all EU federalists or those who participate in the various instruments of the Euro-Arab Dialogue are evil? No, reality isn't that simple. As Hugh Fitzgerald points out, "A whole class of people has gotten rich from Arab money and bribes; lawyers, public relations men, and diplomats, journalists, university teachers and assorted officials."
However, while ignorance, corruption and the self-serving search for personal power explains some of the behavior of the Eurabian elites, it cannot explain the behavior of ALL those thousands of people who have been involved in these networks. Some of them must have convinced themselves that what they were doing was for a just cause, if for no other reason than because human vanity demands that we justify our actions by covering them with a veneer of goodness.
In the science fiction movie Serenity, the two great superpowers, the United States and China, have merged into the Alliance, which has moved humanity to a new star system. On the little-known planet Miranda, a gas called Pax was added to the air processors. It was intended to calm the population, weed out aggression. It worked. The people stopped fighting. They also stopped doing everything else, including breeding and physical self-preservation. A small minority of the population had the opposite reaction to this pacification. Their aggression increased beyond madness, and they killed most of the others. Tens of millions of people quietly let themselves be wiped out.
Movie director Joss Whedon is careful to point out that the Alliance isn't some evil empire, but rather a force that is largely benevolent. They meant it for the best, to create a better world, a world without sin. However, according to Whedon, "Whenever you create Utopia, you find something ugly working underneath it."
Former Europeans who fought against Jihad fought for a number of things: Their religion, their culture and their nation. EU federalists and Eurabians are deliberately suppressing all of these instincts in their quest to create a New Man and weed out aggression. However, because they have wrongly identified the nation state as the root cause of all evil, they are suppressing not just aggressive nationalism, but defensive patriotism. And since some of the Muslims have actually become even more aggressive in response to what they perceive as our nihilism, the Eurabians have suicidally disarmed their own people, literally and metaphorically, and put them up for slaughter.
Many Communists, at least in the beginning, really believed in their ideology. The result was mass slaughter; tens of millions of people were killed in the quest for a world without oppression or exploitation. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Regardless of how good your intentions may be, you cannot use millions of people as guinea pigs in massive social experiments without also causing massive harm.
Perhaps one of the reasons why this has been allowed to happen in Western Europe and the European Union is because we never fully understood or attempted to confront the reasons for the abysmal failure of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following the Cold War. The concept of massive social experiments to create a New Man was allowed to survive. It mutated and then migrated West. Jean Monnet, who set in motion the process of European integration, reflected on how the European civil service constituted a 'laboratory' in which a new kind of 'European Man' would be born. But the New European Man, just like the New Soviet Man before him, is all but certain to fail.
Can the European Union be reformed? I doubt it. The EU is bound together by a self-serving class of bureaucrats who want to expand their budgets and their power, despite the harm they do. These functionaries will use traditional methods of deception to counteract any calls for reforms so they can retain control.
It is instructive to watch the reactions of the EU elites to the popular rejections in France and Holland of the EU Constitution in 2005. They put together a "wise" group of European politicians, led by Giuliano Amato, Italian Interior Minister in "super-Eurabian" Romano Prodi's government, to come up with possible solutions to this impasse. Suggestions discussed included dropping the name "constitution" in favor of "treaty."
The same Amato, who is a former Italian Prime Minister and also the Vice-President of the EU Convention which drafted the Constitution, has earlier stated that:
"In Europe one needs to act 'as if' - as if what was wanted was little, in order to obtain much, as if states were to remain sovereign to convince them to concede sovereignty ... The Commission in Brussels, for example, should act as if it were a technical instrument, in order to be able to be treated as a government. And so on by disguise and subterfuge [my emphasis]."
That a man who has openly bragged about how EU federalist goals are advanced by "disguise and subterfuge" leads the attempts to "renew" the EU Constitution tells ordinary Europeans everything we need to know about the EU. If the EU elites have deliberately deceived us for decades to achieve their goals, why should we suddenly trust them now? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. These people have fooled us enough.
"I think that the European Union, like the Soviet Union, cannot be democratized," says Vladimir Bukovksy. "There will be a collapse of the European Union pretty much like the Soviet Union collapsed. But do not forget that when these things collapse they leave such devastation that it takes a generation to recover.(...) Look to the huge number of immigrants from Third World countries now living in Europe. This was promoted by the European Union. What will happen with them if there is an economic collapse? We will probably have, like in the Soviet Union at the end, so much ethnic strife that the mind boggles."
In their book about the EU, Richard North and Christopher Booker conclude: "The project Monnet had set on its way was a vast, ramshackle, self-deluding monster: partly suffocating in its own bureaucracy; partly a corrupt racket (...) The one thing above all the project could never be, because by definition it had never been intended to be, was in the remotest sense democratic." They believe the EU is doomed and will "leave a terrible devastation behind it, a wasteland from which it would take many years for the peoples of Europe to emerge."
I understand concerns that the destruction of the EU could cause "instability" in Europe. It will. But we will probably end up with "instability" anyway, given the number of Muslims the EUrabians have let in. The choice is between a period of painful years in which most of Europe prevails, and death, where Europe simply ceases to exist as a Western cultural entity.
Some would hope that we could keep the "positive" aspects of the EU and not "throw out the baby with the bath water." I beg to differ.
The EU is all bath water, no baby. There never was a baby, just a truckload of overpaid babysitters.
Multiculturalism separates people into "tribes" below the nation state level. This is precisely the situation we had in Europe in the Middle Ages. Likewise, the idea that we should "respect" other cultures by not criticizing them means turning the clock back several centuries to the pre-Enlightenment era. Multiculturalism is merely a medieval ideology, and will generate medieval results.
Although the EU will fail in creating a pan-European identity, it has already partly succeeded in weakening the traditional nation states. Across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating into the countryside. This destruction of the coherence of society is triggering a return to tribalism, as people no longer trust the nation state to protect them.
The process has been explained by Ernest Baert: "Over many centuries, Western Europe has replaced the tribe or clan by the nation state." The result was that "European citizens tend to have equal trust in all other citizens of the same nation state outside their immediate family and circle of friends." This "high-trust society" was a necessary precondition not only for the success of a capitalist economy in Europe, but also for the rise of democracy.
A different worldview prevails in the Muslim world or in Africa. There, individuals have no choice but to fall back on their clan for protection. So what effect will the introduction of massive numbers of individuals from "low-trust societies" have on our own culture? Baert is pessimistic:
"There is little doubt that we live in the dying days of the multicultural fantasy. It will end in misery and may lead to the loss of Europe as a part of Western civilisation. Our children and grandchildren will look back to our days and wonder why so many so easily accepted what patently contradicted history and common sense."
While ordinary Europeans live in fear of Muslim violence in their own cities and trust in their own leaders is plummeting, EU elites meet in cocktail parties and congratulate each other for bringing peace to Europe.
The European Union promised a Brave New World where wars and ethnic rivalries were a thing of the past. Will it deliver the Middle Ages? Maybe that's what Utopias tend to do.
The blog version of this essay may be found at Gates of Vienna.