Bat Ye'or

"The Yellow Star"

My work on Eurabia, the disclosure of the facts and names reinforced the retribution towards me. I was not long in noticing the effects. Books, articles, exploited my work and omitted my name - a dangerous name, proscribed by the police of thought. The authorized intellectuals stood at a distance, I contaminated.
Some glances watched me with a sort of dread. I now bore the stain of opprobrium. I was not the only one besides, all who professed opinions contrary to the imposed doxa were doomed to the detestation. I do not react to these attacks. I was elsewhere ... much further, out of the events. I watched with a certain distance my new pariah status, evoking discriminatory signs demeaning this character I knew well, the dhimmi: these clothes, these colors, these belts exposing the stain. I wore the yellow star of my books.
And suddenly I felt proud. Proud to belong to this people of slaves who first stood against tyranny in the name of freedom and dignity of man. My work had been cursed because it took its place in three thousand years of history of the people with stiff necks.
He was displaying his strength and wealth behind me, but Europe was collapsing, returning to barbarity, tolerating the killing of innocent people in its streets, as if human life had no value again, as if anyone who could take the right to kill. The call to murder replaced "You will not kill."

It was in the seventies, however, that I had discovered this enigmatic figure from the shrouds of history, the dhimmi. As her lights were lit up ...