What happens when someone dissents from the leftist establishment narrative in a way that is so compelling and convincing that the continued wide acceptance of that narrative is imperiled? What happens is that the leftist media establishment deploys its strongest rhetorical weapons against the offender, hoping to destroy or at least cripple the dissident before he or she is able to amass a significant following, or to dishearten and disperse that following if it already exists. This is why the April 2026 issue of Tablet magazine contains a massive article, over 6,000 words long, damning with faint praise the pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or.
Former New York Times writer Judith Miller, who for decades has been a reliable conduit for the establishment line, pulls out all the stops to ensure that her readers will come away with the idea that Bat Ye’or, for all her admirable qualities, is a bit of a nutter. It is a shabby way to treat one of the great thinkers of our age, and demonstrates how deeply threatened the academic left is in the face of the truths Bat Ye’or has uncovered.
Bat Ye’or is a 92-year-old independent scholar, born in Egypt. Her books, including The Dhimmi, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, and Islam and Dhimmitude, shed unprecedented light upon a previously neglected area of the study of Islam: dhimmitude, Islamic law’s institutionalized system of discrimination and persecution of unbelievers, primarily Jews and Christians.
Then in her equally groundbreaking 2005 book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Bat Ye’or showed how and why Europe embarked upon the path that is now leading, as more and more people realize daily, to the destruction of its own civilization: the admittance of massive numbers of Muslim migrants without any expectation that they would ever assimilate and adopt European Judeo-Christian values and mores.
If events have vindicated anyone who has written anything over the last quarter-century, they have vindicated Bat Ye’or. Islamic apologists in the West have, over the last few years, sharply curtailed their protestations of Islam’s tolerance and now are increasingly open about their supremacist designs and contempt for their hosts. Eurabia, for years dismissed as a conspiracy theory, is now obvious and unavoidable on the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and elsewhere.
Bat Ye’or should consequently be celebrated as the visionary she is, and as someone who stood her ground courageously against the ridicule and contempt of the academic establishment, which assured us that Islam was peaceful and tolerant and that Europe would never be in any danger from the Muslim migrants it took in. Instead, Judith Miller gives us more of that contempt.
Miller is at least polite about it, and professes to admire Bat Ye’or’s intellectual integrity. Miller semaphores repeatedly throughout her windy piece, however, that right-thinking leftist intellectuals should not dare to take Bat Ye’or seriously, or to notice that she has been proven correct about everything.
Miller’s pull quotes themselves tell the tale: “Critics accused her of inspiring both Anders Breivik [a Norwegian mass murderer] and the ‘Great Replacement’ theory of Renaud Camus.” That’s another “conspiracy theory” that has turned out to be absolutely correct. “Bat Ye’or insists that jihad is central to the practice of Islam.” Miller would have been hard-pressed to find an honest Muslim scholar who would tell her it wasn’t, but she clearly didn’t even bother to look. “Dismissed by academics but revered on the right, the author of ‘Eurabia’ sees Muslim migration as the result of a grand conspiracy.” “For many analysts, the ‘Eurabia’ thesis appeared to have come from Mars.”
While admitting that Muslim migrants have inundated Europe and are rapidly changing its culture and more, Miller insists that Bat Ye’or, in tracing the seeds of this inundation to a series of agreements that the European Commission concluded with the Arab League beginning in the 1970s, allowing Muslim migrants to stream in and not assimilate in exchange for a steady supply of oil, is engaging in baseless conspiracy theorizing.
In support of this claim, Miller quotes an academic from the Saudi-funded Georgetown University: “‘There was no giant plot,” said Lorenzo Vidino, an Italian American writer on Islamism who heads Georgetown University’s Program on Extremism. ‘Not even the Muslim Brotherhood, which plans 200 years ahead, thought of moving millions of Muslims to Europe,’ he said. Rather, it happened ‘serendipitously.’”
Serendipitously? Seriously? But what a remarkable coincidence that this serendipitous occurrence is discussed in a series of conferences and agreements concluded at those conferences, which bore the name… Eurabia. Miller also invokes Daniel Pipes, “a long-standing anti-Islamist activist, said that while Bat Ye’or was right to be concerned that Europeans were acting ‘pre-emptively like dhimmis,’ blaming this development on an obscure Euro-Arab working group from the 1970s was inaccurate. ‘I don’t think that a group of bureaucrats who began meeting 30 or 40 years ago in Brussels ever had that importance,’ he told me.”
Here again, maybe it didn’t, but to think that, one has to close one’s eyes to what Europe has become. Miller would apparently have us believe that this obscure “group of bureaucrats” just happened, by sheer luck, to conclude a series of agreements with Arab Muslim states that opened the door to Europe becoming exactly what it is today, but that those agreements had nothing whatsoever to do with that outcome, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a conspiracy theorist. The real conspiracy theorists, however, are those who, like Miller, insist that although these conferences were clearly devoted to bringing about a certain outcome, and that outcome did indeed come about, that the conferences, which included high-level government officials, had nothing to do with it. Serendipity!
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I spoke at some length with Judith Miller about this, as well as about her bizarre claim that Bat Ye’or was wrong to predict twenty years ago that the establishment media would begin to whitewash Islam and cover for the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings. I told Miller that at my news site, Jihad Watch, I had a “journalistic bias” category that currently contains 2,668 examples of establishment media outlets doing just that. I doubt, however, that she looked at it, any more than she considered my defenses of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia thesis against the claim that it was a baseless conspiracy theory.
In her lengthy article, Miller has scant room for defenses of Bat Ye’or, but lavish space for her critics. This is what the left does to defang dissidents. Those who are aware of this dishonest gambit, however, will note the fear of Judith Miller and The Tablet that anyone will read and heed Bat Ye’or, and rather than shun this great scholar, read and study her work with the careful attention that it deserves.
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