What about Saudi America?

"Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" is a book by controversial writer Bat Ye'or, an Egyptian-born British national of Jewish descent. Her pen name means "Daughter of the Nile". While the author's political tendency is very right-wing (the present reviewer is not), her book was nevertheless less extreme than I expected. The somewhat awkward term Eurabia refers to a real or perceived Euro-Arab political axis, not a new political entity. "Eurabia" details the partnership between the Arab world and the European Union (including its predecessor, the European Economic Community).

Bat Ye'or traces the partnership to Charles De Gaulle's France and its ambitious plans to become a great power competitor to both the United States and the Soviet Union. Cultivating friendship with the Arab world, while isolating Israel, was part of this French plan. Bat Ye'or makes the interesting point that France is really trying to rebuild its old colonial empire in North Africa and the Middle East. For reasons of Realpolitik, France has to make the Arabs equal partners in the modern version of the Francophone sphere of influence. This French great power agenda has gradually spread to most of the EEC/EU. As a Jew, Bat Ye'or also suspects more sinister agendas at work, including a "sanitized" version of age-old European anti-Semitism, now in cosy alliance with Arab-Muslim versions.

"Eurabia" meticulously documents various Euro-Arab partnership projects. The author believes that the Euro-Arab axis is the ultimate reason behind the positive views of (supposedly) tolerant Muslim culture, the strong European support for the Palestinians, the "Islamization" of Christianity and (more controversially) Muslim immigration. An important part of the Eurabian agenda is to create a rift between Europe and the United States. The long term goal from the Arab side is to make Europeans subservient to Muslim goals of world conquest and domination, in effect turning Europeans into a kind of ersatz "dhimmis". Throughout the book, the author uses the neologism "dhimmitude" in the sense of "servitude" or "subservience".

Bat Ye'or's book is interesting, but extremely tedious and repetitive. Despite being a Number One controversialist, "Eurabia" also gives a naïve impression. Gisèle Littman (the author's real name) talks a lot about Eurabia, but fails a mention another Muslim-Western axis which is arguably an even more important factor in world politics. Coining another awkward neologism, we could perhaps call it "Amerabia". I'm referring, of course, to the strategic partnership between the United States of America and various "conservative" Muslim nations both in the Arab world and beyond...