Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis is Bat Ye’or’s groundbreaking 2005 study of how, after the oil crisis of 1973, the European Community and the Arab League began the Euro-Arab Dialogue, resulting in a series of agreements with the Arab League for political, economic, and cultural cooperation. The word “Eurabia” was used in the Euro-Arab Dialogue documents. These agreements were markedly one-sided, and paved the way for massive Muslim migration into Europe, without assimilation.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a 1903 czarist forgery purporting to depict leading Jews plotting world domination. It became the basis and justification for the conspiratorial anti-Semitism of the National Socialists (Nazis) in Germany and others.
Now at Harvard’s Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program, funded by Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, Associate Professor in History at King’s College London, will give a lecture equating the two. The object, obviously, is to discredit Bat Ye’or’s work by portraying it as conspiracy paranoia that leads to genocide.
Just a few obvious problems with this endeavor: Zia-Ebrahimi’s lecture is entitled “When the Elders of Zion Relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialisation in Antisemitism and Islamophobia,” but neither Islam nor Islamophobia are races, as far as I know. Zia-Ebrahimi probably means, however, that Muslims are being “racialized,” i.e., treated as a racial category, by being discriminated against and harassed collectively in a racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic Europe, but this is sheer fantasy, as in reality European governments have been avid to appease and accommodate their restive and rapidly growing Muslim populations.
What’s more, Zia-Ebrahimi’s thesis ignores the fact that Muslim migrants in Europe have brought the Continent to a crisis that is a cause for genuine concern, and that concern can in no honest way be likened to the baseless stigmatizing of the Jews. All of the Islamic jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in a series of jihad attacks in November 2015 were refugees who had recently been welcomed into Europe. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency admitted in July 2017 that hundreds of jihadis had entered the country among the refugees, and that 24,000 jihadis were active in Germany. Muslim migrants in Europe have also been responsible for an appalling epidemic of rape, sexual assault, theft, petty crime, and looting. In the first half of 2016, migrants in Germany, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, committed 142,500 crimes, an average of 780 every day. This was a significant increase from 2015, during which migrants committed 200,000 crimes. On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2015, Muslim migrants committed as many as 2,000 mass rapes and sexual assaults in Cologne, Stockholm, and other major European cities. Muslim migrants have made Malmö, once a peaceful city, crime-ridden and hazardous. In Sweden, Muslim migrants from Afghanistan are 79 times more likely to commit rape and other sexual crimes than native Swedes. Migrants and refugees commit 92 percent of rapes in Sweden. Rapists in Sweden come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine, Chile, and Kosovo, in that order; rapists of Swedish background do not exist in sufficient numbers to make the top ten, and all the nations on that list except Chile and Eritrea are majority Muslim. Even before the migrant influx, while on a speaking tour in Germany in 2011, I was told by the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the event organizers that she was routinely harassed on the way to school: Muslims on the commuter trains would call her a “whore” and a “slut” because her hair and arms were not covered. This happened, she said, every day.
So is concern for all this just “Islamophobia” and “conspiratorial racialization”? So Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, Alwaleed bin Talal, and Harvard University would have you believe. But in reality, this lecture is just another example of the endeavor by the political and academic elites to stigmatize any concern for jihad terror and Sharia oppression as “Islamophobia” and “racism.” This is the phenomenon I discuss in my new book Confessions of an Islamophobe: preorder your copy here now. It also illustrates yet again how universities today are not centers of higher learning, but recruitment centers for Antifa and boot camps for hard-Left indoctrination.
From the Harvard Divinity School Public Events Calendar:
When the Elders of Zion Relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialisation in Antisemitism and Islamophobia
When Thursday, November 30, 2017, 5:15 – 7pm
Where Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave.
Sponsor The Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program and the Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact CSWR: 617.495.4495Details
Zia-Ebrahimi builds on recent comparative research on antisemitism and Islamophobia to argue that the two display similar dynamics in representing their target population as a hostile race (a process referred to as ‘racialization’). His research suggests that conspiracy theories of the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ type, and their Islamophobic equivalent, the ‘Islamisation of Europe’ type, are powerful enablers of racialization, something that the literature has so far neglected. To show the similar dynamics of what he calls ‘conspiratorial racialization’, Zia-Ebrahimi provides a textual comparison between The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005).
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi is an Associate Professor in History at King’s College London. His work is situated at the juncture between global intellectual history and ethnic studies. He has worked on the development of dislocative nationalism in Iran in the period 1860–1979, focusing on the hybridisation of European ideas of nation and race by Iranian intellectuals. Currently, his research centers on a parallel study of antisemitism and Islamophobia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The incidence of conspiracy thinking on strategies of racialisation is at the heart of this new research agenda.