Bat Ye'or

Ye'or's Eurabia theory gathered additional media attention when it was quoted and praised by the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway massacre Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto released on the day of the attacks. Ye'or expressed regret that Breivik took inspiration from her writings.

Bat Ye'Or sits on the Board of Advisors of the International Free Press Society, identified as a "key organization" of the Counterjihad-movement. She is considered as its "main ideologue", with roots in Ye'or's Eurabia important to the movement. In 2007 she held a keynote speech at the international counter-jihad conference in Brussels.

The notion of "Eurabia" has been dismissed as a conspiracy theory by other commentators. For example, writing in Race & Class in 2006, author and freelance journalist Matt Carr states, "In order to accept Ye'or's ridiculous thesis, it is necessary to believe not only in the existence of a concerted Islamic plot to subjugate Europe, involving all Arab governments, whether 'Islamic' or not, but also to credit a secret and unelected parliamentary body with the astounding ability to transform all Europe's major political, economic and cultural institutions into subservient instruments of 'jihad' without any of the continent's press or elected institutions being aware of it."

She is the author of eight books, including Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005), Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2001), The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (French: 1991, English: 1996), and The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (French: 1980, English: 1985).

Bat Ye'or acknowledges that not all Muslims subscribe to so-called "militant jihad theories of society," while arguing that the role of sharia in the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam demonstrates that what she calls a perpetual war against those who won't submit to Islam is still an "operative paradigm" in Islamic countries.

Hans Jansen, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Utrecht University and MEP for Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom, wrote in Middle East Quarterly that "In 1985, Bat Ye'or offered Islamic studies a surprise with her book, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, a convincing demonstration that the notion of a traditional, lenient, liberal, and tolerant Muslim treatment of the Jewish and Christian minorities is more myth than reality."

Her books Eurabia and Europe, Globalization, and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate are about the alleged relationship from the 1970s onwards between the European Union (previously the European Economic Community) and the Arab states.

She was married to the British historian and activist David Littman from September 1959 until his death in May 2012. Many of her publications and works were in collaboration with Littman. Her British citizenship dates from her marriage. They moved to Switzerland in 1960 and together had three children.

In 1958 she attended the UCL Institute of Archaeology and moved to Switzerland in 1960 to continue her studies at the University of Geneva, but never finished her master's degree and has never held an academic position.

Gisèle Littman (born 1933), better known by her pen name Bat Ye'or (Hebrew: בת יאור, Daughter of the Nile) is an Egyptian-born British author, best known for creating and popularising the Eurabia conspiracy theory in her writings about modern Europe, in which she argues that Islam, anti-Americanism and antisemitism hold sway over European culture and politics as a result of collaboration between radical Muslims elements on one hand, and European political elements on the other. In addition, Ye'or has written about modern European politics and the history of Christian and Jewish religious minorities living under Islamic governments. Concerning the later subject, Ye'or has popularised the concept of dhimmitude, which she describes as the "specific social condition that resulted from jihad," and as the "state of fear and insecurity" of "infidels" who are required to "accept a condition of humiliation." Ye'or's theories have been a subject of controversy.

Bat Ye'or was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt in 1933. Her father was Italian and had fled Italy during Mussolini's rule, and her mother was from France. She and her parents fled Egypt in 1957 after the Suez Crisis of 1956, arriving in London as stateless refugees.

In a review of The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, the American historian Robert Brenton Betts commented that the book dealt with Judaism at least as much as with Christianity, that the title was misleading and the central premise flawed. He said: "The general tone of the book is strident and anti-Muslim. This is coupled with selective scholarship designed to pick out the worst examples of anti-Christian behavior by Muslim governments, usually in time of war and threats to their own destruction (as in the case of the deplorable Armenian genocide of 1915). Add to this the attempt to demonize the so-called Islamic threat to Western civilization and the end-product is generally unedifying and frequently irritating."