Funding from Qatar and other oil-producing states has transplanted the traditional belligerence against Judeo-Christianity from national frontiers into the very heart of these countries. Added to this innovation is that of indiscriminate terrorism, pioneered by the Palestine Liberation Organization as early as the 1960s.
The concept of dar al-harb (the “abode of war”) — countries still to be conquered for Islam and regarded as the realm of absolute evil in which the injustice of infidel laws prevails — remains current and effective in Islamic theology. It is this concept that today mobilizes some Muslim immigrants in the West to reject integration into societies that do not practice sharia. In other words, the clash of civilizations persists, but now within Western civilizations themselves, which have lost their homogeneity through the demographic changes and host large numbers of Muslim immigrants imposing their own laws.
The present situation recalls the traditional waves of jihadist conquest of territories inhabited by Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. Greek, Serbian, and Slavic historians bitterly chronicled, over the course of centuries, the internal traitors — military figures, displaced aristocrats, princes of the Church — who made pacts with Muslim conquerors and handed citadels and cities over to them.
The radical activism today of the Muslim diaspora within Western societies and its refusal to integrate… stem from directives issued by the OIC [a sort of global caliphate representing 56 Muslim countries].
In the West, jihad operates on several levels: indiscriminate terrorism, censorship of “blasphemy,” changes in customs and laws, the ballot box, the adoption of Western concepts in order to turn them against Europeans, such as cancel culture (to shut out Western evil), and calls for “resistance” (against Christian laws, by holding to jihadist principles of conquest and domination) and “liberation” (meaning the replacement of infidel law by sharia).
We also see the systematic use of the reversal of accusations, in which offenders become victims; the destruction of the infidels’ knowledge such as the rejection of Western culture, history and modern history, and their replacement by linguistic fabrications, such as white racism, Western colonialism and “Islamophobia.”
Unfortunately, there is a lot to be “phobic” about: paedophilia, death for alleged blasphemy, death for apostasy, permitted rape of infidels, brutality to women and homosexuals, stoning to death for adultery (which includes having been raped), and so on. The principles of Islamic law, as derived from the Quran and sharia, are fundamentally opposed to Western secular laws: they do not recognize individual rights (rather than group rights), gender equality or equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. They do not accept the testimony of non-Muslims and their rights to sovereignty, property or territorial independence. The concept of justice is defined only according to Islamic parameters of justice. Hence, the same words — rights, liberation, resistance, justice, God — can be used without Westerners realizing that their meanings and implications are often quite contradictory to those assumed in the West.
This disparity, which becomes a confrontation, is particularly evident in United Nations forums, where 56 Islamic countries vote as a bloc against Israel according to a jihadist view of justice based on the concepts of harbi (non-Muslims in a state of war with Islam) and jahiliya (the “age of ignorance,” referring to miscreant non-Muslim societies, including Jews and Christians). The concept is based on the supposed chaos of evil and barbarity covering the world before the advent of Islam in 622 CE).
The social and peaceful improvements against radicalism highlighted by Riboua, such as the Abraham Accords, in the foreign policies of Muslim states are encouraging, provided that they are not limited to acquiring the levers of Western power, as they increasingly seem to be.
The name “Palestine,” in fact, belongs to Jewish history. It is unpronounceable in Arabic and absent from the canonical texts of Islam. Muslims received it as a gift, an act of humble allegiance from Christians who fashioned it into a weapon against Israel. Their Muslim allies then adapted it to their Islamic version of the Bible and the Gospel — a version in which, in the Quran, all Jewish figures are Islamized, including Jesus, who becomes Isa, a Muslim prophet whose mission is to abolish all infidel religions, above all Christianity.
This supposed Quranic Palestine, whose name, temporal and geographical location appear nowhere in the Quran, was claimed as Muslim ―without Jews or Christians ―because in the Quran, Islam preceded Judaism and Christianity, both of which, according to doctrine, appeared only after Islam. In Islam, it is this Palestine that must be restored. It is in this sense that Jews and Christians, are colonists, because the entirety of Biblical history, including the Gospels, is erased. It is this meaning that Christians embrace when they pride themselves on wearing the keffiyeh, the emblem of a Palestine that is a totally political artefact created to eliminate the Christian and Jewish faiths.
The crowds of Westerners who, encouraged by some Christian clergy, jeer at Israel and worship “Palestine,” are unaware that they are rejecting the foundations of their own civilization. These crowds are campaigning for the Islamization of their countries and their own deaths, or else conversion or submission to Islam as inferior beings called dhimmis.
America’s main challenge will not come from external jihad but from diaspora Muslims in the United States and Europe, “driven by postcolonial resentment and a politics of permanent resistance…”
This, too, is jihad: resentment at having been humiliated by the despised infidel, at having to obey him, while Islam is supposed to command and not be commanded, and while Islam rejects the testimony of the dhimmi.
Indeed, the strict prohibition against Muslims adopting the customs and practices of Jews and Christians or forming friendships with them is as old as the Quran. It lays down these principles and, since its emergence in the eighth century, is the source of endless prohibitions in Islamic jurisprudence.
Ultimately, Muslim states can sleep soundly: the conquest of the West is well under way…. Thanks to its many clueless helpers in the West, Jihad is doing just fine.
Zineb Riboua, a Moroccan-American researcher, developed an original analysis in her recent essay for City Journal, “The West Faces Two Islams.” She distinguishes between an Islam in the West, infused with Third Worldism and centered on Israeli-Palestinian issues, as opposed to an Islam in the Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. Many in those regions have, by and large, modernized, are enthusiastic about technology, and seek a new relationship with their former colonizers from the West.
The fault line, therefore, is said to have shifted onto Western soil, where the West now faces a new homegrown Islam that is steeped in colonial resentment and forged in the Palestinian cause.
Riboua’s analysis seems correct regarding the choice made by a large number of Muslim states, such as the United Arab Emirates, in favor of modernity and international cooperation. Anti-Western Islamic hostility, as she observes, is no longer expressed in the foreign policy of Muslim countries, but rather through divisions within Western societies themselves: in demonstrations against colonialism, racism and Israel.
Riboua’s observations are accurate, but they do not disprove Samuel Huntington’s theory of a “clash of civilizations”; they merely reflect a change in tactics adapted to the modern shifts in population brought about by the mass immigration of Muslims to the West. Funding from Qatar and other oil-producing states has transplanted the traditional belligerence against Judeo-Christianity from national frontiers into the very heart of these countries. Added to this innovation is that of indiscriminate terrorism, pioneered by the Palestine Liberation Organization as early as the 1960s.
Denunciations of imperialism, colonialism and racism, moreover, target only the West — never Muslim countries, all of which were Islamized through jihadist conquest, then through the racism of “dhimmitude” directed against the non-Muslim indigenous populations, who were treated as inferior, second-class citizens.
Dhimmitude, it should be recalled, is the name given to the comprehensive religious Islamic system governing the non-Muslim populations that were defeated by the jihad wars. It therefore has its roots in the jihad ideology and military legal rules and is mainly responsible for the subjugation and Islamization of the native populations through mass deportation, slavery, abduction of women and children, the fiscal oppression of the jizya (obligatory protection tax from non-Muslims), and conversion to Islam.
From the 8th to the 12th century, the Muslim jurisdiction spread with the military expansion of Islam over Christian lands such as Spain, part of South Italy, Sicily, the Levant, Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia, mainly inhabited by Jews and Christians), Asia Minor and other parts of the Byzantine Empire. From there, it used a combination of Muslim sacred Scriptures, shariah law and Christian anti-Jewish laws from the fifth and six centuries, for repressing the original non-Muslim inhabitants: dhimmitude.
An anti-Jewish common ground sometimes led to a Christian-Muslim alliance for persecuting Jews in Muslim countries, especially in the Islamized Jewish homeland before the modern restoration of Israel. That relentless hatred, often stimulated by the clergy, the Catholic Church as well as the Eastern churches, intensified against the pro-Jewish evangelical Protestant churches in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Islamic-Christian alliance against the Jews, a recurring feature in the context of dhimmitude, took on a global dimension in opposition to Zionism.
As Europe in recent decades became the new continent of dhimmitude, it imported into its midst this uninhibited, triumphalist and exultant anti-Jewish hatred from the traditional world of dhimmitude. In the 20th century, that trend achieved its peak in the Holocaust in Europe.
The current antisemitic wave was programmed and planned by a campaign organized by the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO), one of the main institutions of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, a sort of global caliphate representing 56 Muslim countries). The plan was laid out in a series of lectures given in Morocco (1993) and Jordan (2004) in the Framework of the Islamic-Christian Dialogue. In this context, the Jordanian Abdallah Kanaan presented an elaborate strategy for ways of infiltrating Islamic policy into all Western cultural and media sectors by invoking the Palestinian cause, and that matches perfectly the plan of activities decided upon by the “Alliance of Civilizations.”[1]
Today, the anti-Israel wave sweeping across Europe, with the full support of governments, is spreading the customs of dhimmitude throughout the continent. The sooner Europeans become familiar with this civilization, which has existed for thirteen centuries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the better they will understand present-day pitfalls and threats.
European colonialism, furthermore, may in certain instances have represented the reconquest of formerly Christian lands that were previously colonized by Islam, such as in North Africa and the Levant. The concept of dar al-harb (the “abode of war”) — countries still to be conquered for Islam and regarded as the realm of absolute evil in which the injustice of infidel laws prevails — remains current and effective in Islamic theology. It is this concept that today mobilizes some Muslim immigrants in the West to reject integration into societies that do not practice sharia. In other words, the clash of civilizations persists, but now within Western civilizations themselves, which have lost their homogeneity through the demographic changes and host large numbers of Muslim immigrants imposing their own laws.
The present situation recalls the traditional waves of jihadist conquest of territories inhabited by Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. Greek, Serbian, and Slavic historians bitterly chronicled, over the course of centuries, the internal traitors — military figures, displaced aristocrats, princes of the Church — who made pacts with Muslim conquerors and handed citadels and cities over to them.
The radical activism today of the Muslim diaspora within Western societies and its refusal to integrate, mentioned by Riboua, stem from directives issued by the OIC. This radical activism is not a new phenomenon in history. Islamic domination has always started with a small nucleus of a Muslim army occupying a conquered land that was populated by a vast majority of Christians as well as a Jewish minority. Dhimmitude is the evidence of what happens when Christian states are transformed into Islamic lands.[2]
Today, jihad is being waged mainly on Israel’s borders, where Islamist terrorist organizations have built vast tunnels that are like an underground version of Islamic ribats, the military fortresses that for 13 centuries terrorized Christian countries.
In the West, jihad operates on several levels: indiscriminate terrorism, censorship of “blasphemy,” changes in customs and laws, the ballot box, the adoption of Western concepts in order to turn them against Europeans, such as cancel culture (to shut out Western evil), and calls for “resistance” (against Christian laws, by holding to jihadist principles of conquest and domination) and “liberation” (meaning the replacement of infidel law by sharia).
We also see the systematic use of the reversal of accusations, in which offenders become victims; the destruction of the infidels’ knowledge such as the rejection of Western culture, history and modern history, and their replacement by linguistic fabrications, such as white racism, Western colonialism and “Islamophobia.”
Unfortunately, there is a lot to be “phobic” about: paedophilia, death for alleged blasphemy, death for apostasy, permitted rape of infidels, brutality to women and homosexuals, stoning to death for adultery (which includes having been raped), and so on. The principles of Islamic law, as derived from the Quran and sharia, are fundamentally opposed to Western secular laws: they do not recognize individual rights (rather than group rights), gender equality or equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. They do not accept the testimony of non-Muslims and their rights to sovereignty, property or territorial independence. The concept of justice is defined only according to Islamic parameters of justice. Hence, the same words — rights, liberation, resistance, justice, God — can be used without Westerners realizing that their meanings and implications are often quite contradictory to those assumed in the West.
This disparity, which becomes a confrontation, is particularly evident in United Nations forums, where 56 Islamic countries vote as a bloc against Israel according to a jihadist view of justice based on the concepts of harbi (non-Muslims in a state of war with Islam) and jahiliyya (the “age of ignorance,” referring to miscreant non-Muslim societies, including Jews and Christians). The concept is based on the supposed chaos of evil and barbarity covering the world before the advent of Islam in 622 CE).
The social and peaceful improvements against radicalism highlighted by Riboua, such as the Abraham Accords, in the foreign policies of Muslim states are encouraging, provided that they are not limited to acquiring the levers of Western power, as they increasingly seem to be.
According to Riboua, Jihad will continue for as long as Edward Said’s demonizations, which inaccurately portrayed Israel as the paradigm of colonialism and have gradually been replacing the West’s study of humanity. Antiquity becomes displaced under the concept of jahiliyya, the world as it looked before Islam. It is because jahiliyya replaces the Bible that the Jewish people, stripped of their 3,000-year-old national and spiritual heritage, are accused of colonialism by jihadist usurpers whose history began in the seventh century. The Israeli-Arab conflict serves as an example of this replacement: both Jewish and Christian biblical history — and civilization– are denied (not pointed out by Riboua), erased by the jahiliyya and nothingness awaiting Islam.
That it should have been an Egyptian Christian, Edward Said, afflicted by a paranoid anti-Jewish hatred, who, to eliminate Judaism, forged Islamic weapons for the destruction of Christianity is hardly surprising. The name “Palestine,” in fact, belongs to Jewish history. It is unpronounceable in Arabic and absent from the canonical texts of Islam. Muslims received it as a gift, an act of humble allegiance from Christians who fashioned it into a weapon against Israel. Their Muslim allies then adapted it to their Islamic version of the Bible and the Gospel — a version in which, in the Quran, all Jewish figures are Islamized, including Jesus, who becomes Isa, a Muslim prophet whose mission is to abolish all infidel religions, above all Christianity[3].
This supposed Quranic Palestine, whose name, temporal and geographical location appear nowhere in the Quran, was claimed as Muslim ―without Jews or Christians ―because in the Quran, Islam preceded Judaism and Christianity, both of which, according to doctrine, appeared only after Islam. In Islam, it is this Palestine that must be restored. It is in this sense that Jews and Christians, are colonists, because the entirety of Biblical history, including the Gospels, is erased. It is this meaning that Christians embrace when they pride themselves on wearing the keffiyeh, the emblem of a Palestine that is a totally political artefact created to eliminate the Christian and Jewish faiths.
The crowds of Westerners who, encouraged by some Christian clergy, jeer at Israel and worship “Palestine,” are unaware that they are rejecting the foundations of their own civilization. These crowds are campaigning for the Islamization of their countries and their own deaths, or else conversion or submission to Islam as inferior beings called dhimmis. Such is Said’s legacy, revered by American academics.
Riboua is correct when she writes that America’s main challenge will not come from external jihad but from diaspora Muslims in the United States and Europe, “driven by postcolonial resentment and a politics of permanent resistance” ― resentment and resistance against the colonial Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospel.
This, too, is jihad: resentment at having been humiliated by the despised infidel, at having to obey him, while Islam is supposed to command and not be commanded, and while Islam rejects the testimony of the dhimmi. In traditional Islamic society, Jews and Christians were segregated in their own separate quarters, forbidden to possess land, to bear arms, to dress like Muslims, and to ride on horses or camels. Their clothes, homes and houses of worship had to be shabby.
They had to be humiliated in every way. In the Ottoman Empire, each year a certain number of Christian children of both sexes would be abducted, enslaved, Islamized, and dispatched to various functions — soldiers, eunuchs in harem, sex slaves, or in the Ottoman administration where they could reach the higher levels.
Indeed, the strict prohibition against Muslims adopting the customs and practices of Jews and Christians or forming friendships with them is as old as the Quran. It lays down these principles and, since its emergence in the eighth century, is the source of endless prohibitions in Islamic jurisprudence. Such prohibitions prevented Muslim countries from adopting Western scientific and technical innovations and delayed the printing of books.
In 2000, ICESCO published an important pamphlet entitled “Strategy of Islamic Cultural Action in the West.” The authors, recognizing the incompatibility of Western values and laws with Islamic precepts, recommended a series of steps to prevent the integration and assimilation of Muslims into European culture. Those principles are based on Quranic precepts such as:
“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you—then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.” — Quran 5:51, Sahih International translation.
Ultimately, Muslim states can sleep soundly: the conquest of the West is well under way. Muslim troops are active on the ground. Their greatest ally is a visceral Christian hatred of Jews, which leads some Christians, like Nazis, to seek tearing Judaism out of Christianity — an impossible task — and thereby to rid the West of Judeo-Christianity, just as the Nazis wanted, by Islamizing Europe[4].
Thanks to its many clueless helpers in the West, Jihad is doing just fine.
Bat Ye’or, born in Cairo, has written five major books and countless articles on the subject of non-Muslims under Islam. These include The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (English/1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam; From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002), and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005).
 egretnewseditor@gmail.comÂ
