Bat Ye’or is an internationally recognized scholar of the conditions of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam was first published in France in 1980. The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude followed—again in France—in 1991. Since then, her work has assumed an urgency that the lethal complacency of today’s Christians and Jews can no longer go unmentioned.
She coined the word dhimmitude to describe the dysfunctional psycho-spiritual condition of non-Muslims wherever Islam has gained the ascendancy. In her rendering the word means:
The totality of the characteristics developed in the long term by collectives subjected, on their own homeland, to the laws and ideology, imported through jihad.
Western non-Muslim apologists for Islam glide over or misrepresent the bedrock of Islam’s goal, its doctrinal disdain for non-Muslims, and the reality of its undiminished doctrinal impetus toward killing.
Apologists for Islam broadcast a false portrayal of Islam as a “religion of peace.” What they neglect to tell us is that the word peace means something very different to Muslims than it does to Christians and Jews.
James V. Schall, S.J., in his essay “How Much do Christians and Muslims Have in Common?” put paid to the unexamined assumption that there are significant commonalities between Islam and Catholicism:
. . . Catholic-Muslim dialogue fails, or is dangerous, because Muslims usually know exactly what they mean in their own theoretic terms, while many Catholic participants tend to assume that words have the same meaning in Islam as in the Western tradition.
If a Muslim and a Catholic agree that they should work for “peace,” for example, the Catholic means by this word simply a condition of non-war or nonviolence. By true “peace,” however, the Muslim means a world in which everyone is Muslim. Less than that, we have a state of war between Muslim seekers of “peace” and those who are not yet Muslim.
Schall continued:
Muslims understand “dialogue” to be a practical means to further Muslim goals of a world at “peace” where everyone worships Allah. Those who do not accept this understanding are seen to be in opposition to Islam.
Ralph H. Sidway’s Facing Islam (2010) is an impassioned plea to discard uncritical interfaith dialogue and face reality:
The dhimma is the contract of protection offered by Islam to Christians and Jews. Islam, in accordance with the Koran and Muhammed’s example, invites all people to . . . convert to Islam, to submit to the rule of Allah . . . . If a people neither convert nor submit, they may be killed. For those who choose not to convert, but agree to submit to Islam’s political rule, Islam offers a third choice, the contract of protection: the dhimma. . . .
The components of the dhimma are explicit and severe. The jizya tax [is] a crippling levy meant to humiliate the dhimmi subjects and their communal sense of self-worth. . . . [It is] paid each year in a ceremony graphically intended to remind the dhimmi of his being subdued and spared from slaughter by Islam. . . . The prescribed public ceremony involved a simulation of the dhimmi’s execution with the Muslim laying a sword against the dhimmi’s neck as he submitted his jizya payment.
There are numerous humiliating aspects of the public jizya payment. They are established reminders to the dhimmi’s fellow religionists of their complete subjugation to their Muslim overlords:
This practice is documented as extending for well over a thousand years, across North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Persia, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Spain, and Afghanistan, even down to the mid-twentieth century.
Anglican theologian and linguistics scholar Mark Durie wrote The Third Choice in 2010 as a wake-up call to a somnolent West. Fifteen years later, the news out of Britain—and the rest of the landing spots for waves of unvetted migrants—provides us almost daily with evidence of how debilitating is our reflexively deferential treatment of Islam. The creeping Western policy of appeasement toward Islam lulls the sense of danger appropriate to “its supremacist, aggressive, and violent relations toward the non-Muslim world (the dar al-Harb, the House of War).”
Durie draws well-documented parallels between Islam and twentieth century totalitarian dictatorships—whether communist or fascist:
Islam’s institutionalized practice of dominating and subduing “People of the Book” presaged brutal Soviet methods. And Adolph Hitler used the Armenian genocide by the Turkish Muslims as inspiration and justification for the Holocaust. Historical evidence confirms the interlocked motives and practices of Nazi German with then-leader of the Muslim world, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el Husseini, who raised up whole battalions of Bosnian Muslim SS units to exterminate ninety percent of the Balkan Jews, and assisted SS leader Eichmann personally in the slaughter of thousands of Jews in Europe.
Whatever tomorrow brings in New York City, the fact that a slick, subversive poseur like Zohran Mamdani could have finessed his way onto the ballot—win or lose—is an ominous sign.
Be very afraid.
