Islam and Dhimmitude Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Ye’or; tr. Miriam Kochan and David Littman (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. 528 pages.)

Abstract

Islam and Dhimmitude is an attempt to confute the concept of “protected
minority” (under which Islamic civilization established what was, up to its
time, the most successful model of pluralistic society) with the worst aberrations
from that model. The subtitle “Where Civilizations Collide” indicates
how the author expects her polemic to serve the current wave of neoimperialism.
The book seeks to recruit Christians in support of the Zionist
project by explaining away Christian expressions of appreciation of
Muslim tolerance as a false consciousness inspired by a self-hatred she calls dhimmitude, meaning a state of mind that acquiesces, even promotes,
the victim’s own subjugation.
The book’s first half is devoted to proposing a paradigm in which
Qur’anic verses in favor of human rights are ignored, official acts to the
benefit of dhimmis are brushed off as machinations to breed resentment
between dhimmi groups, and injustices against Muslims are figments of the
imagination invented to whitewash the Islamic master plan for subjugating
the non-Islamic world into a state of dhimmitude. The second half works
within this paradigm to vilify Christian anti-Zionists (including Europeans
as well as Arabs) as dhimmi pawns of Muslim oppressors. (Curiously, she
does not attempt to dismiss Jewish critics of Israel in the same manner.) ...