By Andrew G. Bostom
America must reckon with the reality of a long term project to create a Euro-Arab alliance based on far-reaching cultural integration measures. Yet some dismiss the warnings of those who speak of the dangers for America as the ravings of conspiracy theorists. Phillip Jenkins, in his recently released book God's Continent makes the following statement:
... the forces driving Muslim immigration were so overwhelming that there is no reason to imagine the conspiracy theory devised by Bat Ye'or and since popularized by Oriana Fallaci and others, which suggests that European elites collaborated with Arab states to create a Eurabian federation spanning the Mediterranean. Given the economic forces demanding labor and the political factors conditioning supply, it would be difficult to imagine any outcome much different from what actually occurred.
Sadly, and not so "incidentally", this reductio ad absurdum argument -- focused inappropriately on the secondary issue of immigration as if that were the sine qua non of "Eurabia", and imbued with a non-sequitur, defamatory charge of conspiracism -- reveals little more than Mr. Jenkin's own thoroughly inept research.
Despite its widespread usage, there is almost universal ignorance about the origins of the term "Eurabia". We'll get to that shortly. Here is a bit of historical context, to which Mr. Jenkins is completely oblivious, dating back to the early to mid-1970s, as characterized in meticulous (if dry and forbidding) detail in Bat Ye'or's seminal, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.
Born of the Arab League's October, 1973 defeat in their Yom Kippur war against Israel and the related oil embargo, The Euro-Arab Dialogue has created an alphabet soup of European Community, and later European Union-funded organizations charged with planning joint political, cultural, social, industrial, commercial, and technical-scientific projects.
This entity first met officially at a ministerial level on July 31, 1974, in Paris, to discuss the Dialogue's organization. In attendance were the Secretary General of the Arab League, the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, the President of the European Community Commission, and the President of the European Community. As Bat Ye'or observes,
In the course of the meetings that followed, the European foreign ministers of the Nine [i.e., the original European Community member states] laid the foundations for their cooperation with the Arab countries, through an institutionalized structure linked to the highest authorities in each European Community country. This...made it possible to harmonize the European Community policy of trade and cooperation with the Arab League countries.
The Dialogue rapidly spawned a European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation whose members represented a broad spectrum of European Community political groups. Biannual Euro-Arab Parliamentary meetings convened alternately in Europe and the Arab nations. Roughly 100 European and Arab members of their respective Parliaments attended, along with observers from the European Community/European Union Commission, the Arab League, and other international organizations. During an initial meeting in Damascus, September 14-17, 1974, the Arab delegates established their political preconditions for economic agreements with Western Europe, specifically demanding:
1. Israel's unconditional withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines
2. Arab sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem
3. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) participation (lead by Yasser Arafat), in any negotiations
4. European Community pressure on the United States to detach it from Israel and bring its policies closer to those of the Arab states
...
Read it all...
Pertinent Links:
1) Eurabia: 'Conspiracy' or Policy?
2) Andrew G. Bostom, M.D.
4) AmericanThinker.com
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