Last week, attending in Toronto a Fraser Institute conference on immigration, terrorism and border control I met Bat Ye’or, a remarkably gentle woman in her 70s, though her work as a historian has generated in equal measure ire and admiration in both Europe and North America.
As I departed the conference, events elsewhere—Arab-Muslim terrorists plying their evil trade—filled the news cycle.
It is with these and more in mind I recall sitting with Bat Ye’or as memorable and a meeting to be treasured.
Bat Ye’or, meaning “daughter of the Nile” in Hebrew, is the pen name Gisele Orebi took for herself.
Bat Ye’or was born in Cairo and with her family became a stateless refugee in 1957 when the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser revoked the citizenship of Jews settled in the land of the Pharoahs for nearly three millenniums.
I have been reading Bat Ye’or for some time and have acquired insight into that aspect of history—the place of religious minorities in the Arab-Muslim world—that Muslims more than anyone else need to learn and reflect upon, but sadly will likely not.
In Islam and Dhimmitude (2001) Bat Ye’or explored what happened to followers of other faiths in the lands where Islam spread.
For Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and others the choice left under Muslim rule was conversion, paying a special poll-tax to be “tolerated” as people of diminished (dhimmi) status in Muslim society, or flight.
In pre-modern times such an arrangement in places under Muslim rule could be viewed as comparatively somewhat more agreeable than elsewhere as in Europe of the Inquisition.
But that such arrangement should persist or get revived in modern times, and Muslims defend it on the basis of sharia (Islamic laws) is instructive of what Muslim rule implies for non-Muslims.
Across the Arab-Muslim world where once large non-Muslim communities thrived, or where they were once the majority as in Iran with Zoroastrians, conversions or migrations have seen the demise of these communities.
Bat Ye’or’s own experience is a testimony of how poorly minorities have fared under Muslim rule.
In Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005) Bat Ye’or—she is most responsible in popularizing the term “Eurabia”—explores the diplomatic-political linkage forged between the European community and the Arab states since the early 1970s.
This linkage got institutionalized as Europe increasingly tilted in meeting Arab-Muslim demands, in accepting the Arab view of the Middle East to isolate Israel, and in seeking Arab support to counter the position of the United States as the dominant global power.
Bat Ye’or has unsettled the mainstream consensus in history writing and in contemporary journalism. In Eurabia, for instance, Bat Ye’or discloses the connections, influences and interests at work that nevertheless raise the question of how much Europe’s pro-Arab leaning is a disguise for 2,000 years of anti-Semitism that never entirely perished in the death chambers of the Holocaust.
In sitting with Bat Ye’or I saw the evidence in person of what I knew in abstraction, that it is Jews in Israel and outside who continue to be victims of the grisly apartheid policy of Arabs and Muslims, and not the other way around that Palestinians and their apologists in disregard of history keep mouthing.
Cassandra’s gift in Greek mythology is to prophecy, but she is unheeded. Bat Ye’or is the Cassandra of our time, and we could do well in paying heed to her brave yet kindly voice.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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