From Reporter to Attack Dog: Smear Merchant Judith Miller’s Hatchet Job on Bat Ye’or

New York Times toady Judith Miller carried out a calculated smear of Bat Ye’or by citing well-worn critics rather than engaging with her actual work.

Miller ignored extensive documentary evidence behind Bat Ye’or’s thesis and instead framed her as fringe through dismissive language and selective quoting. Anjuli Pandavar portrays this as part of a broader pattern of intellectual dishonesty, where media and academic figures protect prevailing narratives about Islam while attacking dissenting voices. Miller’s article not as journalism, but as a deliberate character assassination designed to discredit rather than debate.

Giving a daughter of the Nile the Anne Frank treatment. Answer to Judith Miller

Judith Miller needed the critics’ dismissals of Bat Ye’or so she could appeal to their authority in order to then be able to dismiss Bat Ye’or herself.

By: Anjuli Pandavar, April 14, 2026:

The year: 1989. The place: anywhere with lots of Muslims. The lead-up: Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa that Salman Rushdie be killed. Muslims the world over for the first time in a long time feel power coursing through their veins again, they can kill again, put fear into the hearts of the kufaar again. The natural order is restored.

The uncouth masses on the Muslim street rage that Rushdie must die, while the “integrated” Muslims in Western television studios explain in measured tones and finer words that Rushdie must die. Itinerant sheikhs and “scholars” walk through Muslim communities, stern of face, banned book in hand. When the multitude in train is swelled, each thumps the ground with his staff, raises the forbidden book with outstretched arm and cries in their tongue, “Something something Satanic Verses!”

The severe expressions of the uncouth masses tremble on their faces, long tortured by an unforgiving culture. The man holding the satanic book is a bearer of knowledge. He is protected from the book’s evil. He can even touch it and no harm comes to him. Everyone is now aware that the murtadd Salman Rushdie’s book is in their midst. They eye it hard. The learned man lowers the book. Strips of paper stick out all around. He shouts something, a kind of preparation, perhaps. The expressions belie a mix of concern and trepidation. The man opens at one of the strips. Breathing stops. He reads a passage, translating on the fly. One shouts: “Something something, Salman Rushdie!” and the crowd erupts: “Something something Salman Rushdie!” This goes on for about two minutes by which time the man with the book raises his hand, now without the book.

The man reads another passage, this time quietly, only to those immediately around him. The sea of agitated faces behind them suspect they’re missing out. They churn in closer, craning their necks, straining to listen. He explains to those within earshot just how bad the passage is. He holds out the book to one of them so he can see for himself. Instantly they recoil in horror, letting out a cry of great fear, arms shoot up as if blocking something.

Even if what was on the page was in their language, they would be unable to read it, for they are all illiterate. It is not the words on the page that put the fear of God into them, it is the physical book itself. For a billion people on earth, the vast majority of whom will never set eyes on The Satanic Verses, and even if they did, would be unable to read it. Yet, a billion people on earth know about this book, know exactly how dangerous it is, because someone in authority told them so. They want to kill its author, personally, because someone in authority told them how bad that author is. It ends with their burning the book.

In Tablet Magazine, 30 March 2026, former New York Times Cairo bureau chief and investigative reporter, Judith Miller, penned a scathing attack on both the personal and intellectual integrity of venerable and intrepid researcher Bat Ye’or, after having interviewed her. Relying almost exclusively on the secondary commentary of Bat Ye’or’s most ferocious critics, rather than touching the authors books themselves, Miller managed to produce an execrable text that places as much distance as possible between herself and the author who is too honest for Miller’s comfort. There is nothing to suggest that Judith Miller wants to do to the author of Eurabia, as the Muslims wanted to do to the author of The Satanic Verses, but that’s where the dissimilarity ends. After her opening scene-setting, she gets right down to the business of character assassination:

As we lunched, it was hard to believe that this tiny woman with piercing blue eyes and impeccably coiffed, short white hair – less than 5 feet tall – has spent the past half-century arousing such gargantuan passion, vitriolic debate, and scathing criticism from historians, political scientists, journalists, Middle East analysts, and students of Islam, as well as social media commentators from around the globe, who know her only as Bat Ye’or.

“Historians, political scientists, journalists, Middle East analysts, and students of Islam” – of course, Bat Ye’or is none of these. For Miller, she is not a tenacious scholar who, in the face of a barrage of a “half-century [of] gargantuan passion, vitriolic debate, and scathing criticism,” not to mention vile personal attacks, has never been challenged on her material or on her academically-disciplined use of that material. Instead, Bat Ye’or is “this tiny woman with piercing blue eyes and impeccably coiffed, short white hair, less than 5 feet tall”. And that is the set-up for the take-down:

It didn’t take long, however, to see that her warm smile, impeccable manners, and ingratiating style were deceptive. By the end of our appetizers, I began to grasp why Bat Ye’or—which means “daughter of the Nile” in Hebrew—has created such a series of intellectual firestorms. Though she downplays her own role in the current debate in Europe over its demographic and political destiny, this self-described “pathologically timid” wife and mother is as intense, tough-minded, and unshakable in her views as both her supporters and critics assert.

The last sentence is easy to mistake for a compliment, but what follows quickly disabuses the reader of that possibility. What she means is that Bat Ye’or is a headbanger impenetrable to her betters. Miller reviews her subject’s contribution to scholarship thus:

For nearly 50 years, Bat Ye’or has doggedly explored the historical subordination of Jews and Christians in Muslim-ruled countries as so-called “dhimmis.” For over three decades, she has also been asserting that corrupt, cowardly politicians, Eurocrats, politically correct scholars and the mostly mindless liberal media have championed a mass migration of Muslims that has Islamized the historic cradle of Western civilization, likely leading to its demise. Due to this secret betrayal of its own citizens and history, she writes, Europe has become “Eurabia,” a term she coined in 2005.

It is evident that Judith Miller has not herself read Eurabia, for in it Bat Ye’or acknowledges the term “Eurabia” does not originate with her, but was the name of a magazine or journal already extant in the mid-70s. One also notices the verb assert, “For over three decades, she has also been asserting…”. In my day, undergraduate humanities students learnt that argument by assertion was not acceptable, that claims had to be substantiated, not merely asserted. Miller acknowledges that Bat Ye’or’s thesis is based on:

Voluminous official statements, meeting notes, conference minutes and the declarations of a little-known project within the EEC called the Euro-Arab Dialogue… a mountain of painstakingly unearthed documents.

This is the very opposite of asserting; it is proving, voluminously, that you know whereof you speak. But the transgression that Judith Miller falls foul of is worse than argument by assertion; it is argument by appeal to authority, the ultimate validation, as far as Muslim “academics” and their Western sycophants are concerned.

After a relatively accurate two-page summary of Eurabia, the central discovery of which is the existence of a semi-secret group called Euro-Arab Dialogue, whose purpose was to orchestrate the Muslim take-over of Europe. Miller sums up:

[Bat Ye’or] argues, although the dialogue was couched in the language of mutual respect and benefit, it was, in fact, the vehicle for a three-decade-long series of concessions by Europe’s leaders to Arab Muslim demands that amounted to “moral justification for their own self-destruction.”

Powerful as this is, Judith Miller could do nothing with it, neither could what by then passed for “analysts” in the West. “For many analysts,” observes Miller, “Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia thesis appeared to have come from Mars”. Yet, she needed those analysts. How else would she know what is written in Eurabia?

Miller offers a string of quotations from a selection of these “analysts” from among Bat Ye’or’s critics. The quotations, firstly, are offered as assertions, rather than as reasoned arguments. For example, against Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia thesis based on “Voluminous official statements… a mountain of painstakingly unearthed documents,” it is enough for Daniel Pipes to say, “I don’t think… etc.,” and he prevails. How so? Because he is “a long-standing anti-Islamist activist”. Marc Weizmann, Judith Miller asserts, “argues that Bat Ye’or has it backwards”. The basis for her assertion is, in turn, Weizmann’s assertions about the aims of Muslims in Europe, nothing remotely approaching “a mountain of painstakingly unearthed documents,” but this still trumps “this tiny woman with piercing blue eyes and impeccably coiffed, short white hair – less than 5 feet tall,” because Marc Weizmann is “an author and expert on antisemitism who writes for Tablet”.

To be fair, when reporting that “Chase F. Robinson, a historian of Islam and [who] is now the Director of the Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C.,” claimed that Bat Ye’or’s work contained “too many errors to list,” Miller added that, “though he failed to mention a single error in Bat Ye’or’s work”. Yet, this did not prompt her to wonder whether there were any errors in Bat Ye’or’s work at all, and if there were none, why was she valuing Robinson’s throw-away soundbites over Bat Ye’or’s “mountain of painstakingly unearthed documents”? Why is Sydney Griffith allowed get away with “dismiss[ing] her book as a ‘political tract,’ not ‘historical analysis’”? Because he is “a professor emeritus of early Christian studies at Catholic University”. Mark R. Cohen told her, “Dhimmi meant protected, not persecuted”. Why does she accept this glib assertion over the claims of a tiny woman with a mountain of document? Because the glib assertion comes from, “the preeminent historian of Jewish-Muslim relations who taught at Princeton”. He called Bat Ye’or’s account of the dhimmi plight “exaggerated” and so it must be. For Judith Miller, it is perfectly fine for “the preeminent historian of Jewish-Muslim relations” to claim that Bat Ye’or, with her mountain of documents, “concentrated too heavily on incidents and periods of the most severe repression”. She should instead have given more weight to the incidents and periods with less severe repression.¹ If you are “the distinguished British American historian at Princeton,” such as Bernard Lewis was, you get to “challenge [Bat Ye’or’s] assertion that Islam had always disparaged Jewish and Christian minorities”. You don’t have to prove it. Lewis might or might not have known, but Millar certainly does not know, that during each of the Muslims’ five daily prayers, the Muslims several times “disparage Jewish and Christian minorities”.

Many of what Miller calls “scholars,” especially those ensconced in Middle Eastern or Islamic studies, a species closer to New York Times reporters than to intrepid independent researchers, pick up on such unscholarly critique and take it deeper into the hallowed pit of academia with their penchant for ad hominem attacks. Judith Miller sees no problem with: “a nonacademic parvenu whose screeds were hardly worth serious scholarly consideration,” or, “independent researcher who had never held a university post,” or, “presumably Jewish nobody with a Hebrew pen name”. Above them, those with real academic skills can hover over the pit, but never fly away. “There is no giant plot,” asserts Lorenzo Vidino. This must be true because Vidino, “heads Georgetown University’s Program on Extremism.” Vidino is in a position to pronounce the cardinal sin that no critic of Islam shall fall foul of, and Judith Miller, who will never commit this sin, faithfully quotes Vidino’s pronouncement:

While acknowledging that many of the social developments that Bat Ye’or foresaw are real and continuing, Vidino also takes issue with the author’s refusal to distinguish between “mainstream” Islam and “Islamism,” or the extremist interpretations of the faith. “She continues to insist that the religion itself is the problem,” he told me, calling the lack of such a distinction not only wrong, but “counterproductive.”

Counterproductive to what, one might ask. But Judith Miller will not ask, because the Oracle has spoken, or as Muslims proudly insist, “We hear and we obey”. The dhimmitude of which Bat Ye’or so ably writes and that her critics so slavishly condemn her for, is perfectly encapsulated in the very passage quoted above. Miller does not see, and cannot be expected to see, that the pathological refusal to ever say anything unflattering about Islam is one of the characteristics of the dhimmi, imposed on him on pain of death. A Muslim will be in serious trouble if found badmouthing Islam, and will be sentenced to death for “insulting” Muhammad. The dhimmi will be killed for any of it. The West’s pre-emptive dhimmis have the intellectual acumen to get around the risk of inadvertently criticising Islam by relegating all the ills of Islam to “Islamism”, while reserving for Islam what remains, precious little as it is, supplemented with idealism and fantasies, all cemented with cowardice and dishonesty. If they lack the necessary intellectual acumen, they rely on indignation and moral outrage to put distance between themselves and those who are vocal and honest about Islam, and who will brook no “Islamism” obfuscation.

This is why Bat Ye’or has to be “deceptive,” while the only way that Judith Miller can buttress her character assassination of Bat Ye’or is through argument by appeal to authority. Miller trawls for concurring assertions from those on “the Left”.

Bat Ye’or’s views, expressed in 10 books, most of them originally published in French, have made her a deeply polarizing figure, dismissed or attacked by the left, and revered as a prophet by the right. Her supporters, like the esteemed late historian Martin Gilbert, Robert Wistrich, a leading expert on antisemitism, the historian Niall Ferguson and his wife, writer/activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have called her an utterly original thinker whose research uncovering and dissecting long-suppressed historical grievances is “courageous” and “taboo-breaking,” a key to unlocking some of the greatest dangers of our time. Her critics, with equal fervor, accuse her of Islamophobia, selective reporting, and the deliberate distortion of history.” (My emphasis)

To be “a deeply polarising figure” means nothing more than that those on the Left are really upset about the things you say and do. That’s it. One has to keep in mind that Judith Miller is not reviewing a book, but a writer’s oeuvre. It is not enough to simply divide those who have responded to Bat Ye’or between “the Left” and “the Right”, quote uncritically from the Left and dismiss without a further thought those on the Right. This is the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ writ large, packaged up for the West as wokism. Again, by her very way of writing, Judith Miller shows herself to be exactly the Western dhimmi that she criticises Bat Ye’or for imagining, while at the same time accepting that she is right. For example, this is how Miller describes a Muslim immigrant beheading a French schoolteacher in the street: “In 2020, a year after the beheading of Samuel Paty—a teacher who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad”.

Judith Miller did manage to devote a few pages to the actual interview, in which she describes Bat Ye’or’s account of their flight from Egypt under rapidly-worsening conditions for Jews:

Their departure, swift and secret, came early one morning in 1956 after Gamal Abdel Nasser had seized power. Each family member took one suitcase and the maximum currency allowed–20 Egyptian pounds. “At the airport, we were made to sign documents certifying that we renounced our Egyptian nationality, all our property, and promise never to return to Egypt.” Their suitcases’ contents were thrown on the floor at the airport; their money was confiscated. A soldier cracked open her mother’s leg cast, searching for hidden jewels.

If it had crossed Miller’s mind that this was a mild version of how Muslims collected jizya from their dhimmis, she did not mention it. Like Muslims, she joins no dots; like dhimmis, she sees only the ground before her feet. She has no vision; no awareness of her own condition. The fragmented way she perceives the world is all there is to it. One might even be tempted to feel sorry for her, but this woman is also far from innocent.

The closest Miller comes to criticising Bat Ye’or’s critics is when she admits: “Bat Ye’or’s books on the dhimmis brought her a grudging measure of academic recognition,” but goes no further. Does this not imply that she might have been right all along and that her critics had reason for so fiercely denying it? The former New York Times investigative reporter had no interest in investigating. She was already an integral part of Islam’s da’wah infrastructure in the West. Miller writes:

In the minutes and declarations of that obscure group [Euro-Arab Dialogue], Bat Ye’or found what she believed to be a blueprint for the social transformation of Europe against the will of its citizens–a transformation that was now becoming evident to even casual observers. (My emphasis)

This should be dynamite to an investigative reporter, yet there was no spark from Miller, despite observing that the “transformation… was now becoming evident to even casual observers.” Armed with this, she could say nothing against the battalion of critics she had lined up to dismiss and disparage Bat Ye’or’s discoveries. Instead, by simple sleight of hand, “what she believed to be,” Miller can annul Bat Ye’or’s “voluminous official statements, meeting notes, conference minutes and the declarations of… the Euro-Arab Dialogue,” and summarily scrap the “blueprint for the social transformation of Europe against the will of its citizens.”

Judith Miller knows that Bat Ye’or’s thesis is watertight, and that is exactly why it is a problem for her. Over several paragraphs in which she describes French schoolteachers’ accounts of France capitulation to galloping Islamic control of the French education system, she demonstrates impressive honesty. For example:

The threat of violence has silenced many educators, said Evelyne Tschirhart, a teacher who has written extensively about the failure of France’s educational system. “Teachers are pressured to say that Islam is a religion of peace and justice, and warned not to say that jihad is a war against non-Muslims,” she said in an interview. “They fear teaching about the Holocaust, or anything about the historic persecution of Jews.”

Judith Miller has shown that she has enough integrity to have challenged Bat Ye’or’s critics, so why does she allow them to escape that honesty? The answer is, because she needed their dismissals of Bat Ye’or so she could appeal to their authority in order to be able to dismiss Bat Ye’or herself. We must keep in mind that not only did she not read Bat Ye’or’s books, she also knows nothing about Islam. It is not important to know anything at all, if your mind is already enslaved. It is only important that you hear and obey. And since her brain is now wired into the da’wah hive, in which everything about Muslims and Islam are axiomatically above reproach, her highest priority is to defend Islam and protect Muslims, like the hosts of parasitoids. Everything else comes below that. Veracity, cohesion, ethics, etc., all fine principles of the non-fiction craft, now mean nothing to this once-investigative reporter. All that matters is that she destroys this enemy of Islam.

It is perfectly plain that Judith Miller is aware that Bat Ye’or is not only correct, but profoundly so, earth-shatteringly so. She could get very far riding on Bat Ye’or’s back. But this is no longer a world of intellectual honesty; it is a world of oppressors and oppressed, a world of “my community, right or wrong”, Beduin tribal allegiance transplanted into 21^st century metropolises, and unfortunately for Judith Miller, Bat Ye’or, hails from a world of intellectual honesty and remains firmly within it. She writes:

[Bat Ye’or] insists that Muslim leaders have never abandoned the command to wage perpetual war on non-Muslims and that the impetus to jihad is central to the practice of Islam in both the religious and the political spheres, which Muslims understand to be one and the same. What gives her insistence added bite is that in the past 20 years, both violent and nonviolent forms of Islamism have increased dramatically in Europe and Britain. Lethal attacks throughout the continent have left hundreds dead, injured, or scarred for life. (My emphasis)

If she stood on the side of Bat Ye’or, she would have to confront Islam and Muslims, and by extension, the Left, which leads to the next problem, in fact, a horror about which there can be no equivocation: Bat Ye’or is honest about Donald Trump. Miller writes:

She called President Donald J. Trump a “strong leader” who has steadily “supported Israel and understands the need to curb migration”. Seemingly untroubled by the bullying that has alienated some of America’s closest European allies, she refused to criticize even his avowed determination to own Greenland. “Better the U.S. than China,” she replied.

The determined daughter of the Nile, now issuing her prophecies from the Swiss countryside, seems equally unfazed by the rise of the far-right throughout much of Europe and the U.K.

That this “rise of the far-right throughout much of Europe and the U.K.” is exactly a consequence of “a transformation that was now becoming evident to even casual observers,” Miller fails to join the dots. In the world of woke, Bat Ye’or had crossed a red line. At this point, the woke cancel you and dox you. It is just a matter of time before they do as the Kouachi brothers did to those who dared to cross the line at Charlie Hebdo.

The depth of Judith Miller’s loathing for her interviewee emerges early. Mass murderer Anders Breivik claiming inspiration from Bat Ye’or’s writing had traumatised the author, Miller’s host. Miller writes:

Such [death] threats increased sharply in 2011 after Anders Breivik, a right-wing Christian fanatic who killed 77 people in a terror attack in Norway, cited her writings 59 times in his 1,500-page manifesto as a basis for his hatred of Muslim immigrants and European liberalism. Though Breivik also cited dozens of other thinkers and writers, including Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, and Napoleon Bonaparte, among others, critics accused her of being the likely inspiration not only for Breivik’s shocking slaughter.

The question of whether Bat Ye’or’s battalion of critics were right to accuse her is no longer an issue for Miller. As far as she is concerned, Bat Ye’or had brought it all upon herself when she took to writing material that encouraged hatred of Muslims, and had forfeited all claims to sympathy, decency or respect when she said something positive about President Trump. It was too late for tears.

Horrified by Breivik’s crime, Bat Ye’or expressed regret that a man she had never met or written to had claimed to have been inspired by her books. But the damage was done.

Judith Miller turned out to be the kind of person who should never have been let anywhere near Bat Ye’or. One wonders by what deception, whether a warm smile, impeccable manners or ingratiating style, she had snaked her way into the writer’s presence.

On 12 August 2022, Hadi Matar launched himself at Salman Rushdie and stabbed him multiple times, as the writer was about to give a talk in Chautauqua, New York.

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For Bat Ye’or’s response to Marc R. Cohen’s “scholarship,” see her eviscerating rejoinder.