It is for me, a Jewess, an honour to be invited to share your thoughts tonight. I feel it as a duty to you and as a sign of hope to discuss with you of both the bonds that bind us together and the mortal danger that in a not too far future might destroy us together by suppressing the spiritual foundations which we share: the Judeo-Christian civilization.

Written by Bat Ye’or. Lecture held at the 3th International Church-Congress (Kirche in Not), April 11 2008 in Augsburg, Germany

It is not the first time that I speak to a Christian audience. As a daughter of Israel who studied step by step the anguish, agony and death of the greatest Christian empire destroyed by the Arab-Muslim invasion, I realized very soon the nature of the modern, yet ancient threat. My book, The Decline of Eastern Christianity, published in a German edition also, was a long painful voyage that I undertook in the company of ghosts, taking me to destroyed cities, emptied villages and towns in the path of a millenary jihad. And I was wondering: What kept the faith, the resistance of the Christians?

I read very carefully the old testimonies of Christians. Along the roads of deportations, while walking on the edge of an abyss of evil, they recited Job, they internalized the words of the prophet Isaiah. They advanced in the steps of the Children of Israel. The description of the 8th century cleric, Pseudo-Denys of Tell-Marhe, a village in Iraq, of the utter destruction, enslavement and pillage of the native Christian and Jewish population by Arab-Muslim invaders, is interwoven with biblical lamentations, connecting Christian ordeals with Israel sufferings more than a millennium before. The tribulations of Christians in Islamic lands went with Jewish tribulations throughout the centuries. In the 17th century an Armenian cleric, Arakel of Tabriz describes the martyrdom endured by Jews under Shah Abbas II. This report follows his narration of the terrible mass deportation of the Armenians under Shah Abbas 1st where he evoked the march of the Israelites guided by Moses. The Bible was the rock and the solace in time of despair. Hebrew prophets were the companions of Christians persecuted by Islam.

I have tried to explain to Europeans the theological and legal context of the persecutions of Christians today in Muslim lands. I called this context – which is the same for Jews – dhimmitude. I did this at the request of Eastern Christians who told me: Because you are Jewish, the Christians will listen to you. From them I learned how deep and profound are our bonds. The Bible is as precious in their heart as their life. When I was fed up with the animosity against me, I would remember their trust in me.

I know that many in the Church have chosen another path. But the Church is saved through the Jewish Jesus, not through Isa, the Muslim Jesus who is the channel to Islamize the Church. Many saw the Palestinian Muslim Jesus as an opening toward the Muslim world, a wonderful occasion for a definitive separation from Israel. But it has only chained the Church to dhimmitude.

We are now living in a time of global jihad and of dhimmitude. Jihad is the religious effort to expand the domination of Islam all over the world. Military jihad covers several fields: wars, terrorism, abduction, ransom, enslavement, and armistice conditions. The soft-jihad encompasses the spiritual jihad waged peacefully: propaganda and proselytism (da’wa); subversion of Western culture and societies by multiculturalism, and the insertion of shari’a values and laws in Europe; the corruption of influential infidels in high position to facilitates Islam’s expansion and conquest. Jihad is as old as Islam – it is an ideology, a doctrine, a legislation based on religious texts; it has a global strategy, a world vision, and today it expands through a worldwide network. It has been waged for thirteen centuries against non-Muslims, mainly Christians. Jihad is a religious obligation for the Muslim community which has a divine mandate to impose Islam all over the world.

According to the jihad doctrine, the non-Muslim population is given a choice: conversion to Islam or submission to the Muslim authority and payment of a security ransom, the jizya. If they refuse both they are confronted with a war which entails massacres, destruction and enslavement.

When a non-Muslim population accepts to submit to Islam, it is obliged to pay a tribute for its own security. It becomes a dhimmi or a protected people. You may ask: Protected from what? They are protected from the jihad onslaught. Because Muslims recognize only two types of relationship with non-Muslims: either war or submission – what I call dhimmitude. Native Jews and Christians in their Islamized countries, are protected as long as they pay the poll-tax, several other tributes, and submit to very oppressive and discriminatory shari’a regulations. Jihad and dhimmitude are the two forces that have decimated the indigenous non-Muslim populations in their Islamized homelands. Today, jihad is displayed in all its traditional manifestations: military and economic warfare, terror, abductions, corruption of Western politicians and media in order to control the media, the universities and public opinion.

Islamic law covers the rights and obligations of the dhimmis in great details. This has been the subject of my research over the years. I call dhimmitude the Islamic system of governing the non-Muslim peoples. This system is linked to jihad and like jihad it is a theological, political and legal institution. Dhimmitude is, in fact, the peaceful continuation of jihad because it is dhimmitude that has destroyed the massive non-Muslim majorities, mainly Christians, that were conquered and subdued.

Wars are fought on several levels but the spiritual one is probably the most important. The theological divergences that we, Jews and Christians, have with Islam have been obfuscated, yet we must know them in order to solve them. We must know that the Koran mentions biblical names like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, Solomon, others and Jesus: all of them are considered to have been Muslim prophets who preached Islam. But in fact these Koranic figures are very different from those in the Bible. For Muslims, Jesus is a Muslim prophet called Isa, endowed in the Koran with a different life. He is believed to have brought, like Mohammed, a revealed book, the Gospel in which he preached Islam.

So, then, we have a Jesus named Isa who is a Muslim prophet, competing with the Jewish Jesus, “born in Bethlehem of Judea” (Matthew 2:1). According to several hadiths – Muslim sacred texts – Isa has a mission: at the end of time he will return to destroy Christianity and to impose Islam as the sole religion over the whole world. These hadiths, often quoted in sermons, speak of him killing the pig, breaking the cross – which means in Islamic language: destroying Christianity – and the hadiths continue: he will suppress the jizya or poll-tax imposed on all non-Muslims and the booty will be boundless. (Sahih Muslim, vl.1, p.287; Sunan Abu Dawud, Book of Battles 37:4310.) The suppression of the jizya refers to the suppressions of all religions except Islam. So it means that when Jesus/Isa will come back he will suppress Christianity and all other religions and Islam will be the sole religion for humanity.

So in the Islamic optic, what is Christianity? Christianity is a falsification of Islam and of the true message of Isa, which is the same as that revealed to Muhammad. It follows that a good Christian is a Muslim. A good Christian must go back to his former religion, which is Islam. True Christianity is therefore Islam.

In short: Jews and Christians are left with what? The true Bible is the Koran, the Holy Scriptures of Jews and Christians are just falsifications, and all the biblical figures are Muslim prophets who preached Islam. In practice, what are the consequences?

1) Biblical narrative in the Holy Land is Muslim history, and Jews and Christians had no history there since they came after Islam. Their sacred scriptures are in the Koran, not in the Bible. This motivates Muslim opposition to the legitimacy of the State of Israel, because the Bible is considered a travesty of Muslim history.

2) Because Judaism and Christianity originate from one unique trunk, which is Islam, Muslims say that these two religions are unrelated. They deny that Christianity unfolded from Judaism. This is why the Islamized Churches in the Muslim world have developed a kind of Marcionism, abandoning the Jewish Jesus in order to link Christianity to the Muslim Isa who is not even mentioned as a Palestinian Arab in the Koran, since no towns or place from the Holy Land, not even Jerusalem, are ever mentioned in the Koran. The Koran does not mention where Isa was born, nor where he lived. But Muslims say that he is the real Jesus. Some Palestinian and Arab Churches (particularly in the Sabeel Centre in Jerusalem) tried to come closer to Islam by destroying the Jewish roots of Christianity. This current is growing in Europe, supported by the antisemitic/anti-Zionist movement created by Palestinianism.

Palestinianism is the best tool to destroy Christianity. In the Islamic context, Palestinians incarnate the jihadist ideology against infidels and also the Muslim replacement theology. The Palestinian war against Israel is based on the Koranic teaching that all the biblical prophets and kings and Jesus are Muslim prophets and that the biblical story is in fact a Muslim story whose truth is in the Koran, not the Bible.

Under the pressure of Palestinian terrorism in the late 1960s and the oil boycott (October 1973), Europe supported the Palestinian jihad against Israel. Since 1973, the Palestinian jihad has become a joint Euro-Arab policy and culture: this is Eurabia. By justifying the Palestinian jihad against Israel, Europe went into a suicidal dynamic that legitimize its own destruction and that of Christianity. The whole policy of Eurabia focuses on uniting Europe with the Muslim-Arab world, while suppressing its links with Israel, its spiritual roots.

The cultural and media war in Europe to delegitimize Israel accredits the Muslim belief that Jews and, therefore, Christians have no historical roots in the Holy Land. If Jews have no legitimacy in the Holy Land, it is the same for Christians, because Jesus is the Muslim Jesus – Isa. Another consequence of Muslim replacement theology is that when we speak of Judeo-Christian values we are, in fact, referring to Muslim values, because there are no Judeo-Christian values, since both Christianity and Judaism developed from a false interpretation of Islam. And when we refer to biblical narratives and figures, or to their iconography, we offend Muslims because they do not fit into the koranic model.

It is my opinion that we are now living in a period of reactivated jihad and dhimmitude. Those of you who have worked in South Sudan and Darfur and who have seen the atrocities there will recognize these legal tactics of jihad described in my books or in any Muslim texts on jihad from the 8-9 century onward. What happens in Sudan, Darfur, Iraq and other places evoke events described in Mesopotamia by Christian clerics, by Armenian chronicles, by Jews in the Holy Land, by Copts describing Muslim internal feuds and atrocities in Egypt – and with the passing centuries we see this same pattern of endless wars and persecution of Jews and Christians in the chronicle of the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, that covers a period till the end of the 12 century. We have numerous accounts on the devastation by the Arabs and Turks in Anatolia, in the Balkanic regions and all along the European Mediterranean coasts and on the European islands. Throughout the centuries we see this same war, the same tactics of jihad repeated against Jews and Christians in different places of the world. Abduction of Christians and Jews to obtain a ransom – like what happened recently in Iraq to Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of Mossul – was a common practice in all the lands of Islam. Historical testimonies on such cases were endless. In the Vatican there is a huge amount of letters from Christian families asking for money to pay the ransom of millions of European Christians, men, women and children that were abducted and reduced to slavery, and this went on for centuries. Jewish and Christian communities in the Muslim lands were ruined by such demands. Now in Egypt, young Coptic women are abducted to force them to convert.

The reactivation of the jihad spirit inherent to Islam has reinforced dhimmitude against non Muslims – mainly Christians – in most Muslim countries. Shari’a laws – or laws inspired by shari’a – discriminate against Christians, since almost all Jews fled or were expelled. So now it is the Christians – in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere – who are leaving because in Islam, anti-Jewish hate is always connected to anti-Christian hate and vice-versa as it grows from the same religious source.

For decades, Europeans have been conditioned by the denial of the history of jihad and dhimmitude. Such policy led Europe into a suicidal dynamic. The repudiation of Israel’s historical legitimacy in its own land, supports its replacement by a jihadist world-order with its Islamic conception of justice that seeks to debase or suppress all non-Muslim religions. This same doctrine denies Europe’s own sovereignty and legitimacy and justifies the jihad against Europe – against Christianity. This Western adhesion to the jihad waged against Israel has perverted its own values and precludes Europe to understand now the dangers that challenge its own survival.

For Christians, Israel is central in this context, because jihad is waged in the name of Islamic replacement theology against Jews and Christians, so that Isa replaces Jesus, and the Koran replaces the Gospel. Christians are linked to the Jews by the Bible. If Christians want to break from this bond, they will have to forego the First Testament, including the Ten Commandments, the Prophets, and the Psalms and somehow find a way to link the Gospel to the Palestinian Muslim Isa of the Koran. This is the aim of the Palestinian Liberation Theology. The challenge that Christians are facing now is not only a military jihad, but also a spiritual/cultural jihad, which is the Islamization of the roots of Christian theology. And this is the spiritual meaning of Israel for Christians now: either Christians will resist or they will convert and Europe will become one more Islamized Christian territory. The jihad against Israel is also a war against the Christian world

Having devoted more than 30 years of my life studying the system of dhimmitude applied to Christians, I am now of the opinion that Europe has become the new land of dhimmitude and I will explain why. I have described in Eurabia, my last book, the causes that have triggered the dhimmitude of Europe. I will explain why politically and intellectually we have been conditioned to become dhimmis, without even knowing it because we do not recognize its signs, as this history has been denied.

1) Muslims consider that there is no Judeo-Christian civilisation so our European leaders have decided to agree that Europe has no Judeo-Christian roots, in order to integrate the Muslim immigrant population.

2) Muslim law forbids non-Muslims, under pain of death, to criticize Islam and shari’a. Hence the European Union, fearing to irritate Muslims, has complied to this rule and has obfuscated the regime of terror and discrimination against Christians in most Muslim lands.

3) The EU leaders are suppressing any critics of jihad for the same reason. We are supposed to respect the Muslim view that jihad is always just because it implements the law of Allah and humiliates unbelief. From our perspective jihad has been and still is a genocidal war. Yet we are supposed to praise it. When the Pope, in his Regensburg lecture, quoted a 15th century Byzantine emperor stating that Islam developed by the sword, Muslims protested, accusing him of Islamophobia, and saying that Islam developed peacefully. We are supposed to admire and avoid criticizing jihad, although it was jihad that destroyed and Islamized the Christian world. We see that the spiritual war directed against the Judeo-Christian values wants to condition our mind so that we will praise what will destroy us.

4) For Muslims, unbelief is always the source of evil on the planet, and therefore it is the West, America, Israel that are always blamed for the terrorism and crimes done by Muslims. It is written in a hadith: “There would come people amongst Muslims on the Day of Resurrection with as heavy sins as a mountain and Allah would forgive them and He would place in their stead the Jews and the Christians” (Muslim, vol. 4, chap. 1149, 6668). There are many such hadiths stating that guilt will be taken from Muslims’ shoulders and transferred upon Christians and Jews. The strange thing is that Christians accept this reasoning and instead of seeing the supremacist doctrine of jihad as the real source of war and terror, they accuse the existence of Israel and its self-defence policy. Christians have even unconsciously internalized upon themselves the Muslim transfer of guilt. They have adopted the jihadist view that the resistance of the victim of jihad is an aggression and Islamophobic.

We consider that dhimmitude is a dehumanizing system, but for Muslims it is a generous tolerance offered to non-Muslims. So now, in order to accommodate the Muslims and their integration in Europe, our leaders have promoted in Europe the Islamic view of history. For this reason, Europeans ignore totally what is jihad and what is dhimmitude. So what are we going to teach in schools and universities in Europe – the Islamic version of Islamic superiority and Western guilt or the Western one based on historical facts and documents?

We are currently living a period of global jihad, which tomorrow can develop into a nuclear jihad and we don’t know it, nor do we know how to defend ourselves. We are living a period of dhimmitude, we are conditioned by dhimmitude to accept the Muslim version of our history and we do not realize it because the historical framework of the past, of jihad and dhimmitude, has been obfuscated.

Let me conclude: There has been several interfaith dialogues for decades but with poor results. Europe has paid tens of billions to Muslim countries worldwide, buying its security, but the culture of jihad is blossoming in Europe and in the Arab countries in spite of Europe’s appeasement policy. Palestinianism which is a replacement theology was the tool that led to Europe’s Islamization and dhimmitude. By joining the Muslim jihad against Israel, Europe has obfuscated its own history and, now faced with a global jihad, it is unable to assess correctly the situation and defend itself. But a continent that bases its survival on appeasement, tributes, and self-denial is already a dead continent.

Israel represents the liberation of man from the slavery of dhimmitude, whereas Palestinianism represents the jihad and dhimmitude ideology based on replacement theology. Europe, enslaved by Palestinianism, has chosen servitude instead of freedom.

If we want peace to prevail, the Muslim world must abandon the jihadist ideology and must recognise Jews and Christians as different and not see them as apostate Muslims, who have to return to Islam. And this must start with Muslim recognition of the legitimacy of Israel, because jihad started against the Jews and it can only end with the rehabilitation of the Jews and Israel, and this will bring the rehabilitation of Christians and of all non-Muslims. We can achieve it if we speak the truth, if we teach about jihad and dhimmitude. Then, masses of peaceful Muslims, liberated from the jihadist ideology of hate, which many oppose or ignore, will join us willingly, to build together peace. But we cannot help the peaceful Muslims if we cannot even help ourselves – if we are swamped in dhimmitude. Now if you have patience for one more minute, I will say that the future of Europe is your responsibility – it is for you to act and to save what Christianity has built and the values that are yours, but if you are passive, you will not succeed, because the time is already very late. It is not your fault, if you don’t know, but it is your duty to know, to instruct others and also to learn – it is your duty to learn and instruct others who cannot learn – it is your responsibility.

Guest, 18. Apr 2008 |  Print This Post | post a comment    
Kategorie: Dhimmitude, EU, Eurabia, Human Rights, Islam, Israel, Judaism;

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