Bat Ye’or is no mere polemicist. Though she has faced resistance in academic circles to exploring the idea of dhimmitude (dhimmi is an Arabic term for an adherent of a faith other than Islam, supposedly “protected” but actually discriminated against by Islam), Bat Ye’or has done pioneering work on the decline of Christian churches under Islamic control throughout the Mediterranean region. Much of this book is an academic detective story of the diplomacy and maneuvering by which, she says, the Arab world has succeeded over the years in undermining Europe’s ability to resist the controlling forces of jihad. Bat Ye’or’s narrative is not for the weak-kneed, because it suggests that the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe, along with the rise of anti-Semitism, has been all along engineered by forces seeking to subvert completely Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage.

Bat Ye’or’s book is radical and confrontational, but is setting Europe’s “creeping Islamicization” in the context not of haphazard immigration patterns but of deliberate Islamic design, she does the entire subject of Europe’s future of major service. Europe, willy-nilly, at some point will have to decide whether it wishes to acquiesce in part of the Arab world’s overall plan to eliminate Israel, thereby provoking not just disagreement with the U.S., but possibly confrontation, or return to its normative cultural roots (Judeo-Christian and, by Weigel’s [The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God] reckoning, those of the Cathedral).