16 Facts About Bat Ye'or

Gisele Littman, better known by her pen name Bat Ye'or, is an Egyptian-born, British-Swiss author and historian, known for her promulgation of the Eurabia conspiracy theory.

Ye'or has written about the history of Christian and Jewish religious minorities living under Islamic governments, as part of which Ye'or has popularised the term dhimmitude to define the treatment of religious minorities in such contexts.

Bat Ye'or was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt in 1933.

Bat Ye'or's father was Italian and had fled Italy during Mussolini's rule, and her mother was from France.

Bat Ye'or was married to the British historian and activist David Littman from September 1959 until his death in May 2012.

Bat Ye'or has provided briefings to the United Nations and the United States Congress and has given talks at major universities such as Georgetown, Brown, Yale, Brandeis, and Columbia.

Bat Ye'or is credited with popularising the neologism dhimmitude, which she discusses in detail in Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide.

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.

Only when Bernard Lewis published the book 'Jews of Islam' with quotations from Bat Ye'or did they begin to pay any attention to her.

Mark R Cohen said that Bat Ye'or "has made famous" the term dhimmitude, which he says is "misleading".

Whenever the possibility is raised of actually comparing circumstances of non-Christians in Europe to non-Muslims under Islamic governance in a careful, thoughtful manner, Bat Ye'or forecloses such comparison.

One has the impression that in their bulk they are simply meant to undergird the contentions made in the first part of the book", concluding that thus Bat Ye'or has "written a polemical tract, not responsible historical analysis.

Bat Ye'or argued that she had turned this area, which he believed the "Middle East studies establishment" has hitherto been afraid of or indifferent to, into a field of academic study.

Carr argues that Bat Ye'or is the "main inspiration" for many conspiracy theories current on the far-right.

Bat 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 counter-jihad movement.