The Barbarians Are At The Gate, Part 5786

In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper reviews four recent books that purport to show that Europe is under attack from Islam and/or Muslims: Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept, Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe, Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia. Here is Kuper’s intro:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

Bat Ye’or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye’or is Hebrew for ”daughter of the Nile”, the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.

Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye’or’s genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.

The four books here provide a fair summary of the ”Eurabia” genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.

And then he proceeds to deconstruct all these books’ claims. You can read the full article here.