Due to academic commitments over the past few months I haven't had the chance to write up any replies to any of Randy's prior posts concerning the subject of "Eurabia" or to even begin reading Bat Ye'or's book, which Randy had not read at the time of his postings. Having finally begun reading the book, I feel that it is time to begin to to dispel some of his assertions. The first is this:

For instance, searching on Google for the keywords "Euro-Arab Dialogue" returns a bit over four thousand, up from under a thousand the last time I checked, back in 2002. There's even a two references to the Euro-Arab Dialogue in the top 10 hits returned by Google which aren't Ye'or's endlessly copied articles. This compares to 33.5 million hits for "European Union," 439 thousand for "Commonwealth of Independent States," a bit over three million for "ASEAN," 3.7 million for NAFTA, and almost 1.4 million hits for "Mercosur" or "Mercosul." I'd have expected that such an important group as the Euro-Arab Dialogue--the central body behind Eurabia, after all--would have a bit of a higher presence outside of Ye'or's literature than it does. Surely more people would have noticed by now?

Then again, reading the various non-Ye'or descriptions of what the Euro-Arab Dialogue is supposed to do and what it has actually done, I begin to suspect that accepting Ye'or's thesis about the Euro-Arab Dialogue is something like believing that the Canada-Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group is actually a mechanism intended to ensure Canadian military participation in Taiwan's upcoming war of independence against China.

Contrary to what Randy is saying, the Euro-Arab Dialogue is not a formal institution and really has never been used in a formal diplomatic context. Nor is it a fantasy invention of Ye'or, as is implied in his post. Indeed, if he had of read just a few pages of Ye'or's book and looked up her citations before writing his posts, he would have found that Ye'or actually got the term from the title of Saleh al-Mani's book, The Euro-Arab Dialogue: A Study in Associative Diplomacy, published in the early 1980s. Al-Mani used the term to describe the diplomatic proceedings between the EEC/EC/EU, various Arab states, and the Arab League (which was much more prominent at the time than it is now). Ye'or uses it in the same context, citing al-Mani regularly throughout her book. This dialogue between civilizations led to the development of groups such as the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation.

Next, Randy states that Ye'or "created" the concept of "Eurabia":

Created by Bat Ye'or, "Eurabia" has come into a new vogue among conservatives (particularly Anglophone ones) who blame European reluctance to support United States foreign-policy initiatives (like, say, Iraq) on large and growing Muslim populations which will, in the end, destroy Western (read Judeo-Christian) civilization on the far shores of the Atlantic.

Again, this is simply false, as a simply Google search would have shown. Ye'or actually got the term from a defunct journal titled Eurabia, published by the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity (another part of the EAD). It is not some Nazi-ish lingual invention.

Randy regularly refers to demographics, but never discusses the question of influence. If he had read the book, he would have known that Ye'or rarely discusses demographics and certainly does not lay out any numbers in her book pretending to show that Europe is going to be dominated by a religiously-Muslim majority within a certain number of years. I know this is the context in which Bernard Lewis has used the term "Eurabia," but it is not the context in which Ye'or uses it. Ye'or's focus is on economic and political influence that has grown since the oil embargos in the 1970s. Randy's post would be a great refutation of Lewis, but it's nothing but a straw man when applied to Ye'or.

This gets me to my final (at least until I finish reading the book) point, Randy equates Ye'or to the Nazis. First, there's the title of one of his posts:

Why "Eurabia" Is Like "Jew York City"

Then there's all this:

Racism is, then, a critical element--perhaps a dominant concept--relative to these concepts. If European Muslims or New York City Jews are inherently subversive, undermining legitimate decisionmaking processes in political and social life, how can anyone who belongs to either category be allowed to participate at all? Eurabia and Jew York City are, at their roots, concepts which demand the ghettoization of the groups from which they take their names, their exclusion from any non-subordinate role. These terms' use is a good marker for some sort of highly exclusionary racism.

Resorting to racist and profoundly exclusionary rhetoric that has little connection with what's actually occurring on the ground only obscures the issues being debated. Worse, racist and profoundly exclusionary rhetoric carries its own serious set of problems. Does anyone remember what happened on the last few occasions when entire national subpopulations were deemed inherently subversive?

He continues on and on following this theme throughout numerous posts... he's basically saying that studying the influence of an ethnic or religious actor is the same as advocating the cleansing and/or genocide of minority populations. This is the exact same rhetoric used to attack those who study psychometrics, population genetics, etc. It's the idea that the study of subjects deemed politically incorrect will inevitably lead to a new Holocaust. This blog regularly discusses how absurd this is, but Randy still had the gall to say all he did. It's ultimately a fallacious argument and a nasty, ad-hominem attack upon Ye'or.

When Randy wrote these posts, he was obviously not "desperately searching" for the truth.