10.05
Current use of the term has gained supporters, and sometimes differs from that of Bat Ye’or, with more attention to Muslim immigration and demographic, and to the difficulties of assimilating Europe’s Islamic populations. Niall Ferguson wrote in The New York Times that the idea of Eurabia has
gained credibility since 9/11. The 3/11 bombings in Madrid confirm that terrorists sympathetic to Osama bin Laden continue to operate with comparative freedom in European cities. Some American commentators suspect Europeans of wanting to appease radical Islam. Others detect in sporadic manifestations of anti-Semitism a sinister conjunction of old fascism and new fundamentalism.
The skeptical Matt Carr, writing in the academic journal Race & Class, describes this imagined scenario as follows:
According to the worst-case Eurabian predictions, by the end of the twenty-first century, most of Europe’s cities will be overrun with Arabic-speaking foreign immigrants, much of the continent will be living under Islamic Sharia law and Christianity will have ceased to exist or be reduced to a state of ‘dhimmitude’ [...] In the nightmare world of Eurabia, the future will become the past once again and Christians and Jews will become oppressed minorities in a sea of Islam; churches and cathedrals will be replaced by mosques and minarets, the call to prayer will echo from Paris to Rotterdam and London and the remnants of ‘Judeo-Christian’ Europe will have been reduced to small enclaves in a world of bearded Arabic-speakers and burka-clad women.
The term Eurabia has been popularized by writers such Bat Ye’or, Oriana Fallaci, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Melanie Phillips, Mark Steyn (and several web sites). Others, such as Bernard Lewis and Bruce Bawer have presented comparable scenarios.
The term has become more common partly because it reflects a more general political tendency, which sees Islam as a major threat to Europe and its values. Justin Vaisse, who is sceptical of the claimed transformation into Eurabia, spoke of this mood at the Brookings Institution:
I toured the bookshops and I was looking for books on Islam in Europe. And the only titles I could find, the only books I could find, bore titles like While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bawer; The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, by Tony Blankley; Eurabia, The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or; or Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too, by Claire Berlinski [...] And more generally, even more serious authors like Bernard Lewis or Niall Ferguson write things or give interviews speaking of the Islamization of Europe, the reverse colonization, the demographic time bomb that is threatening Europe, et cetera, with the suggestion that the sky is falling.
Waleed Aly, a devout Muslim, in an article published in the Melbourne Age, responding to Raphael Israeli’s call for controls limiting Muslim immigration to Australia (lest a “critical mass” develop); observed that Raphael Israeli’s comments are a cause for concern “because they are not as marginal as they are mad.” Aly continues that Israeli’s latest book “is an unoriginal appropriation of the ‘Eurabia’ conspiracy thesis of Jewish writer Bat Ye’or: that Europe is evolving into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation increasingly subjugated to the jihadi ideology of Muslim migrants” and that the theory has received “enthusiastic support” from intellectuals in Europe and activists in the USA.
Some partisans of the Eurabia theory have stated that 2005 civil unrest in France did not stop in November 2005, but french medias “stopped reporting about it” “at the request of the French authorities”, so there are “unreported race riots in France” since then, but “do not expect Western media to write about such topics”. In November 2006, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer wrote that the 751 French “Zone urbaine sensible” (fr) urban areas were Muslim no-go areas. In January 2008, Michael Nazir-Ali stated that Islamic extremism had turned “already separate communities into ‘no-go’ areas” in the U.K. In July 2009 Le Figaro reported that the wearing of the burka and other Muslim clothing is growing rapidly in France. According to Thomas Landen, by 2009 there were arranged car trips through Sharia Muslim areas of various European cities, such as Sint-Jans-Molenbeek of Belgium and RosengÃ¥rd in Sweden, that he called “Eurabia Safaris”.