EU main Arab lobby is PAEAC (the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation). It relied on Christian Arab advisers, representatives of dhimmitude who enjoyed the trust of Muslim Arab dictators, their masters, and promoted their anti-Zionist policies and expansionist aims in Europe.Christians in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, including many Christian PLO members, strove for Europe’s rapprochement with the Arab world, hoping in this way to avert any threat to Christianity’s existence in its Eastern lands of origin, by destroying the State of Israel. Eulogists, and yet victims of Muslim “greatness and tolerance,” these Arab Christians switched from Nazism to communism and became the main instrument of the Euro-Arab alliance, thereby contributing to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia.This activism reconnected, reinforced, and modernized the web of collaboration, synergies, and sympathies that existed between the European fascists and Nazis and their Arab Christian and Muslim supporters in the period 1920–1945. As early as the 1970s its members had revived this platform within the new structure, PAEAC, with responsibility for standardizing the policies of the EC and the Arab League across various fields and in foreign policies, particularly against Israel.[21]No one has done more to destroy the fundamental basis of Western understanding of Islam than Edward Said, a Christian of Egyptian origin operating under a false Palestinian identity and an active member of the PLO. Said disseminated a racist theory restricting the right to write about Islamic history and culture to Muslims alone.[22] This Christian dhimmi engagement, enhanced by a scathing antisemitism that was well received in Europe, introduced the cultural and psychological facets of dhimmitude. It played a predominant role in modifying Europe’s demography and religions and in the Islamization of its political leanings.
Some churches and their media networks became the most active agents of the legitimization of Palestinian terrorism. Political pressure and the promotion and funding of anti-Israeli clergy involved in the EAD (Euro Arab Dialogue) swept away internal Christian opposition.
The cult of Palestinianism often exploits the theme of the Crucifixion. Although the Qur’an actually denies the Crucifixion altogether (4:157), Muslims and the Islamized and Eurabian Churches identify the Crucifixion with Palestine or the Arabs of Palestine. In a lecture in Paris on June 2, 1970, Mgr. Georges Khodr, Metropolitan of Byblos and Mt. Lebanon, stressed, “It is not for me to tell the Muslims what force the evangelical ferment would contribute to the Arab cause.” In his conclusion, he declared to have chosen Arabness because, on the June 5, 1967, “I saw that Jesus of Nazareth had become a Palestinian refugee.”4 The Arab Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, much praised in Europe, identified in his verse Arab Palestine with Christ crucified by Israel. Such abuse of Christian symbols to incite hatred of Jews has been strongly condemned by many Christians as blasphemy.
According to the Geneva bulletin of the League of Arab States, the WCCP (World Conference of Christians for Palestine) had a considerable impact on the Christian populations of the West. One of the WCCP’s aims was to inform Christians around the world about the plight of the Palestinians. The Arab League’s Bulletin stated that Middle Eastern Christians were “anxious to bring to their brothers in the West and in Eastern Europe, a testimony not only of their solidarity, but also of their identity with the Arab peoples of the region where they form an integral part.” For the League, it was also a major victory for unity between Muslim and Christian Arabs, and for Arab solidarity in general.
The Third World and the international networks of Arab Churches advocated this policy. As early as 1974, at the Lahore Summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Secretary-General al-Tohami commended the efforts undertaken by the Churches in the Arab countries and worldwide on behalf of the Palestinians, and praised their backing for Arab sovereignty over Jerusalem.
Despite all this talk of unity, cracks were already appearing in the fraternal edifice. Many Eastern Christians opposed antisemitism and anti-Zionism on principle, and thus never accepted the basic premises of the WCCP. Moreover, clashes occurred as early as April 1969 between the Lebanese army and the PLO in southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley. Within a few years, the PLO would become instrumental in the destruction of Lebanon. After the PLO had contributed to Lebanon’s devastation in the mid-1970s, Bashir Gemayel—Lebanon’s president-elect when he was assassinated in 1982—denounced the tragic fraud imposed upon his country in the name of Arab solidarity. Amid the blood and ruin, he appealed for help to European politicians and the Western Churches. But his appeal was in vain: many were backing Lebanon’s enemies in their common war against Israel.
Thus, the politico-religious axis of Euro-Arab Judeophobia that had reemerged after World War II now drew Middle Eastern Christianity into its web. This was the beginning of the great pro-Arab, pro-Islamist offensive in the West. Dhimmi Churches and Arab-Christian intellectuals became enthusiastic soldiers and propagandists for Islamic causes.
Arab Christians, meanwhile, would play the role of ambassadors on behalf of Islamic causes to their fellow Christians in Europe. It was in this way that the first seeds of dhimmitude were implanted in Europe,17 as will be described later. It also accelerated the disintegration of the dhimmi Eastern Christian communities of the Middle East, a development that went largely unnoticed due to the European compliance with the Arab/Islamic propaganda war against Israel.
Immigrant groups became vehicles to spread these prejudices throughout Europe, with the active collusion of academics, politicians, and the whole of the EAD’s cultural apparatus.
The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah stigmatized the European Churches for abandoning the Palestinian Christians, who he proclaimed, do not suffer from Muslims—thereby implying that they suffer from Israel.12 However, the facts show otherwise. In July 2003, a Muslim convert to Christianity went into hiding in the territories controlled by the PA; ten days later his body was returned to his family, butchered, and quartered by Palestinian Islamists. He had run afoul of the death sentence prescribed in Islamic law for those who leave Islam. Other Christians were harassed; many took refuge in Israel.13 At present, the only “protection” that European Christians offer Christians living under the Palestinian Authority—1% of the Arab population—and in the Arab/Muslim world is their contribution to the demise of Israel through the Euro-Arab symbiosis policy, and by the weakening of the U.S.A. It is noteworthy that over 125,000 local Christians living in Israel as citizens remain, but the few under Arafat’s Palestinian Authority began emigrating as soon as Israel left the territories, and have continued to do so.
The conception and practice of Palestinianism as a hate cult against Israel has had a profound impact on European society. Even if not everyone adheres to it, many absorb its noxiousness unconsciously, since it is constantly distilled by the EU mainstream media, by the political apparatus of the Euro-Arab Partnership and by the third pillar of the Barcelona process (see chapter 10). It is difficult to assess the resistance to this propaganda, since the EAD press network has silenced most protests against it for years. With the exception of a vigorous rebuttal from the Protestant International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, there has been practically no consistent opposition, nor any strong denunciation from other organizations of this return to the old indoctrination of hate—and certainly not from NGOs.
Among the tragedies of the second half of the twentieth century, historians will recall Europe’s silence and its cynical indifference toward Christianity’s demise in Arab and most Muslim countries—a tragedy paralleled by that of nearly a million Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries through indiscriminate terror, confiscations, expulsion, and insecurity—with indifference from all international bodies.22
Christian distress and isolation were vividly illustrated by the Lebanese war and European support for the PLO. Lebanese Christians were the first indirect victims of the EAD agreements of the 1970s that endorsed European political advocacy for the PLO, which was already the most deadly of terrorist organizations and today still competes with Hamas and al-Qaeda. Lebanon was forced by its Arab “friends” to host the PLO. While the PLO and its allies preyed on the Lebanese Christians, wiping out whole villages, desecrating and burning churches, murdering, and mutilating corpses (as at Damur in 1976), Europe was supporting Arafat.
The agony of Lebanon holds many important lessons for Europe, particularly since the EAD has prepared the conditions for the EU’s future Lebanonization. When the civil war erupted in Lebanon in April 1976, there were twelve thousand regular Syrian troops in the country. Soon this increased to twenty-five thousand, with a Syrian workforce of three hundred thousand. The large Palestinian civil population, with its innumerable groups and factions, impeded the functioning of the state.23 The PLO received help and training from Arab and Communist countries, as well as from Nasserite, Ba’athist, and communist organizations in the region. Factional divisions and pusillanimity weakened the Christian camp, which was blinded by profits from Arab oil and financial contracts.
The Lebanese war was butchery, conducted with the outmost violence. With public attention focused on Palestinian martyrdom, the PLO inflicted mass murder, abductions, untold suffering, and destruction on over a hundred thousand Christians in Lebanon. This was one of the bloodiest phases of the Palestinian jihad since it had initiated international terrorism and indiscriminate murder of civilians with the first hijacking of an El Al airplane to Algiers in 1968.
Yet the valiant Christian resistance was demonized by a European press that sided with the PLO—the jihad camp that believes (as is expressed today in widespread graffiti in PA areas) that after the “Saturday people”—the Jews—comes the turn of the “Sunday people”—the Christians. Europe’s indifference to the long and bloody agony of the Christian resistance against the world’s then most powerful terrorist organization, which it was supporting, was the first sign of the subversion of its values and the perversion of its language, a process that would progressively poison it. Today, when Eurabians remember the Lebanese war at all it is only to lament the massacre at Sabra and Chatila, which was committed by Christian Maronites in retaliation for PLO massacres, and inevitably blamed on Ariel Sharon. That of Damur, which preceded it and was personally supervised by Arafat, is conveniently ignored.24 An eyewitness gave an account of the massacre of 582 Christians in Damur by the PLO and its Muslim allies on January 22, 1976: “The attack took place from the mountain behind. It was an apocalypse. They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar! God is great! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad!’ And they were slaughtering everyone in their path, men, women and children.”25
When, in the 1960s, European Christian theologians were engaged in a painful process of self-criticism and moral reassessment through the examination of Christian antisemitism, the Arab Churches were pursuing a Muslim-Christian dialogue intended to reassure the Muslim world and counterbalance the Jewish-Christian rapprochement.
The Arab states exploited their dhimmi Church leaders to impede this timid rapprochement. Eastern Christian communities were blackmailed and threatened. Any criticism of the pejorative characteristics attributed to Jews by the church fathers—especially those of St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom33—was considered blasphemous by Muslims, since they are echoed in the Qur’an.
The contribution of Arab Christian politicians and intellectuals to dhimmi militancy in the Islamic cause, following the banner of Edward Said, has been overwhelming in Europe and America. Middle Eastern Christians in America, as well as Greek, Serbian, and other Slavic historians, have often denounced the type of Christian collaboration that reproduces the permanent pattern of dhimmi behavior customary under Muslim colonization. In spite of their tenacity and courage, Lebanese, Coptic, and Assyrian refugees from Arab countries could hardly compete with the “Arabists,” their brother-enemies, who are generously funded and protected by powerful lobbies—and whom they consider as traitors.51
The search for a Muslim-Christian common ground has led since the middle of the twentieth century to a “de-biblicizing” of the Bible. In line with the Massignon school and one of its most active defenders, the late Abbé Youakim Moubarak, the Bible was reinterpreted from the viewpoint of the Qur’an. Some Arab Palestinian clergy are currently campaigning to induce the Church to forego the First Testament altogether, as well as its spiritual links with Judaism. They recommend retaining only the Gospels, interpreted in line with Qur’anic assertions. They hope to suppress the Judeo-Christian connection in order to attach the Gospels to the Qur’an, in particular through the adoption of the Qur’anic interpretations of the Palestinian Arab (Muslim) Jesus.
The dhimmi Churches’ Arabized interpretation of the Gospels combines traditional anti-Judaism with the psychological conditioning of dhimmitude. Jesus, his mother Mary, and the Apostles are all assimilated with the local Arabs and lose their Jewish historical and cultural identity. This Islamization of the Jewish sources of Christianity, disseminated through European Islamophile church networks, plays into the hands of Muslims eager to co-opt Christianity and instrumentalize Christians as partners in their struggle against Israel. It is aggravating the disintegration of Christian identity, compounding the dhimmi’s cultural amnesia with falsification of the Christian faith’s foundations.
Some theologians recommend the reading of the First Testament with an exclusively Christian understanding—amounting to an expulsion of the Jews from their own Scriptures. In Britain, an evangelical Anglican, the Rev. Dr. Steve Motyer, who promotes this view, calls it “a broadly ‘replacementist’ position” and pleads that Christians must interpret the Old Testament from the perspective of the New.9
The Arab dhimmi Churches—especially the Syro-Palestinian ones—have elaborated an entire theology of the non-Jewish, Arab roots of Christianity: Palestinian Liberation Theology. According to this trend, Christianity was born in an Arab tent and with a Palestinian identity. This new Arab-Palestinian sui generis embodiment of Christianity evidently also denies any historical rights to the modern State of Israel in its Hebrew-Israelite birthplace.
The rooting of Christianity in Arab Palestinianism involves the mechanism of the perversa imitatio: the perverse imitation, i.e., the duplication of Jewish history in an Arab-Palestinian context.10 This device is a rehash of traditional anti-Judaism that has repeatedly been condemned since Vatican II, as well as by several Christian scholars and clergymen, but it has become the root of the Palestinian theology that is flourishing in Western Churches.
Since the emergence of Palestinianism in the 1970s, the Arab dhimmi churches have striven for a united front against Israel by identifying totally with the Arab Palestinian cause. They saw their service to Islam as bringing together the whole Christian world in solidarity with the Palestinians and promoting an anti-Israel campaign in the West.
The Christian service to Islam thus consists primarily in its worldwide support for the Muslim jihad against Israel. It has also included spreading Islamic propaganda through Western religious channels, encouraging and giving practical or moral succor to anti-Israel terrorism by blaming it on Israel, demonizing Israel and America, vindicating Islam, and, above all, concealing the Islamization and religious “purification” of Arab societies—including the discriminatory and humiliating restrictions imposed on native Christians. These tendencies, implicitly enunciated in the January 1969 Cairo International Conference in support of the Arab peoples, were prevalent in the EAD. They fostered the foundation of a European and church “Muslim policy.” The criminalization of Zionism in the West, which the Arab countries made an essential condition for Muslim-Christian rapprochement,14 reinforced the elimination of the Jewish state as a common priority.
Church activism in Europe also operates in the service of Muslim immigration. Church leaders have preached the abolition of frontiers and of “chauvinist” nationalisms in order to merge both shores of the Mediterranean. The EAD policy of mass Muslim immigration into Europe is often backed by a generous clergy who strenuously advocated an open immigration, matched with full political rights. This is motivated not only by the imperative of human rights, but in the hope—often voiced—of obtaining equivalent rights in Muslim countries for indigenous Christian communities. However, this reasoning is based on the principle of reciprocity between equals, a principle denied by the shari’a legislation applied to varying degrees in most Muslim countries, despite the Partnership agreements.
Muslim leaders are aware that churches and clergymen have always been their strongest allies. Thus, citing the evidence of history, the Iranian jurist Abbasali Zanjani suggests that Muslims should favor exchanges with Christian priests, clergymen, and theologians, since they have always encouraged the propagation and the supremacy of Islam.15 Such Christian advocacy in the service of Islam has given the Arab Christian clergy a political voice that is of strategic advantage to Arab governments.
- By Tainari88
- By Negotiator