Eurabia discourse has migrated from the far Right into mainstream conservative opinion

Evidence

In recent years, however, a new school of conservative opinion has begun to emerge in Europe and the US, which depicts Europe as a doomed continent, on the brink of cultural extinction in the face of a relentless and co-ordinated campaign of Islamicisation. The more pessimistic exponents of this thesis have coined the term ‘Eurabia’ to describe the emergence of a new ‘Islamicised’ European civilisation, in thrall to the Arab world. Similar predictions have been made by the European far Right for some years now, but the growing pessimism regarding Europe’s imminent cultural and political subjugation by Islam is no longer limited to the marginal fascist fringe. On the contrary, the consensus regarding Eurabia spans a surprisingly wide spectrum of opinion, which includes French nouveaux philosophes, ‘hard liberals’ such as the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, acclaimed historians such as Niall Ferguson and Martin Gilbert and the interlocking network of conservative thinktanks in the US that have helped shape the ideological framework of the ‘war on terror’. — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 17

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘Eurabia’ thesis and its claim of an Islamicised Europe in thrall to the Arab world.
• DEEPTHINKING: Tracks how a fringe conspiracy theory achieved mainstream respectability across thinktanks, historians and ‘hard liberals’ — a case study in the laundering of extremist ideas.
• SEED: Angle: ‘How Eurabia Went Mainstream’ — tracing the pipeline from far-Right fringe to mainstream thinktank consensus and its role in shaping war-on-terror ideology.