The sagacious brilliant Islamic scholar is in our part of the world and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to interview her this weekend.
The prescient scholar who warned us over a decade ago of the coming caliphate in the seminal, groundbreaking work EURABIA (plagiarized by the most revered.). When I first became aware of the Islamic threat (the first month I started blogging) I went to see Yeor speak at Columbia University- I asked her, "what can we do, what can I do?" She said "learn everything."
EURABIA'S AUTHOR COMES TO CANADA Michael Coren, National Post
And the internationally renowned author Bat Ye'or. If the other speakers provoke certain people, this diminutive, gentle and brilliant 74-year-old lady seems to positively terrify them. They urge immigration authorities "immediately to bar Bat Ye'or from entering Canada."
Being deported because of Arab anger would, however, be nothing new to the author of a host of internationally acclaimed works on the history of Islam and its treatment of Jews and Christians. She and her family were forced to leave their native Egypt in 1957, part of the more than one million Jews who were exiled from Muslim states after the Second World War and the foundation of Israel. Bat Ye'or's name roars the horror of it all. It is a pseudonym, meaning "Daughter of the Nile" in Hebrew.
The persecuted Jews of the Middle East. The silenced catastrophe. A wave of innocents whose existence in Arab lands pre-dated the birth of Islam. Their numbers were greater than those of the Palestinian refugees and they were frequently treated far more harshly. Yet the world said very little, and today the Islamic bloc and their allies in the United Nations and elsewhere pretend this post-Biblical exodus did not happen.
"It is, I suppose, deeply ironic that I was told that I was not allowed to live in Egypt when I was a girl and now as a grown woman I'm told, in part by people from Egypt, that I shouldn't come to Canada either. As for Israel, they'd like that to disappear," she says, more bemused than bitter. "Where ought I to go? No matter. The story has to be told, the true story of how Islam has treated and still does treat its minorities."
"As late as the early 20th century, in some Muslim countries Jews had to remove their shoes when they left their own quarter, were not allowed to ride a horse, were treated as second-class citizens. This idea of equality is nonsense. Their numbers were restricted, especially in the Holy Land, and the same was true of Christians. There were periodic pogroms, right up till the 1940s."
A pause, searching for the right words. "What occurred back then is history, but history has to be understood and accepted. What we have now is revision, denial. Muslim immigrants are taking this false idea of the past to Europe and North America, along with a culture that does not share the Western notion of tolerance, equality, criticism of religion and freedom."
This thesis of the spread of such ideas is discussed at length in what may be her most famous and controversial book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. In it she argues that Islamic fundamentalism has found its way to Europe because most Muslim moderates are frightened of speaking out and European intellectuals and activists have been seduced by its anti-American dynamic.
It is her collection of work on the Islamic conquest of the Christian heartlands of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and North Africa that have caused so much frustration among Muslim opponents. She writes in detail of Dhimmitude, the method in which Jews and Christians were subjugated and humiliated.
"There are courageous Muslims who do resist but it is difficult and dangerous. There is an underground of Sharia law across Europe, with terrible treatment of women. This is combined with the threat of violence aimed at anybody who speaks out against what is going on. Censorship through fear. We even see this to a mild degree in Canada, an example being the attempt to stop me entering the country."
The cause of Palestine, she emphasizes, is at its heart about the triumph of Islam. "Most of Palestine is in Jordan but we do not hear cries for Jordan to return land. This isn't about the rights of the Palestinians but about the refusal to accept a non-Muslim state in the region. Palestine has become the fashion of the West, without them understanding the deeper issues of the conflict."
