BRUSSELS - In Israel, when Elie Barnavi is introduced, the title of professor is usually added before his name, followed by an enumeration of his distinguished resume - a professor of modern history and the former head of the Tel Aviv University history department, the former Israeli ambassador to France. In France, however, he needs no introduction. After the publication of his latest book, "Les Religions Meurtrieres" ("Murderous Religions"), the front-page ads in Le Monde and other newspapers showed a picture of the book's cover next to a picture of the author. The caption read simply: Elie Barnavi.

The book, which takes the form of a brief essay, quickly entered the non-fiction best-seller list and has sold tens of thousands of copies. Discussion about the book on radio programs, in newspapers and newsmagazines has spawned the kind of serious and lengthy debates that the French know and love.

"You thought that God was dead and buried," Barnavi says to readers at the start of the book. Well, think again." The book offers nine theses "for you, dear anxious and distraught European, with which to arm yourself against an enemy very different from those that rose up against you in the previous centuries. This is about your values, your liberties, your children's future."

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According to the book, the centuries in which the ideas of the Enlightenment, of secularism and rationalism, were dominant in Europe had the effect of making Europeans completely ignorant about matters of religion. And today, with political religion reassuming a full role in the international arena and in daily life, Europeans don't quite know how to cope with it. Barnavi writes about history, about Judaism, about Christianity and then about Islam. It is the latter that he finds frightening in this day and age.

The struggle against radical Muslim fundamentalism, he says, will be our major preoccupation in the 21st century. "The very fact that people kill in the name of religion is frightening. Western society is incapable of understanding the phenomenon, of truly grasping it, let alone fighting it."

Why is that?

"Western society is searching for rational reasons to explain a phenomenon that is basically irrational. It sees people killing in the name of God, but tries to understand the religious motivations from outside the religious system. The other reason is tolerance and openness to the other, as an ideology to be adhered to at any price. Even to the point of accepting the other's anger. The reason for this is clear - It's the great guilt syndrome in wake of colonialism and imperialism."

"The objective of this book," he tells his readers, "is to arm you intellectually, so that you'll be better equipped morally for the war that has already begun."

In other words, it's time to don a bullet-proof vest and take up weapons?

"The physical war is only one aspect. And by the way, the Europeans are actually waging this war, [with] the police and the secret services. But I'm talking about an ideological war, about strengthening society's ideological, intellectual and emotional immune system. Nothing is happening in this area. It's a matter of education, of reforming the systems for absorption of immigrants, of reorganizing and redefining society, the absorbing culture, of solidifying the conditions in which a society is capable of absorbing immigrants."

It's a bit surprising to hear Elie Barnavi, the leftist and Peace Now guy, saying such things.

"I'm not speaking from the right, but from the democratic left. I'm a Social Democrat. I want to take people in. Not for them to leave, as the leaders of the extreme right want. Just the opposite. I want to build the conditions here for it to be possible to absorb them. Society needn't be homogenous."

Maybe the problem is that, these days, those who say the kinds of things you do are catalogued as rightists.

"That's a symptom of the problem. My argument is exactly the reverse of what Le Pen and his cohorts on the right say. They want to get rid of the immigrants. I want the country to absorb them. If anyone's loyal to the values of the left, it's me, and not those who say that you have to let everyone do what he wants.

"For a home to be open and hospitable, it has to have windows and doors. The same goes for a culture. A culture without rules is not a culture. I'm talking about a culture that can be flexible, that can be open and take in the other, so that it may also benefit from what the other brings to it. My basic argument, which incidentally applies to Israel as well, is that everyone must share a small but solid number of elements: a common narrative and very solid shared values that are beyond question. Without these, the society can exist, though badly, as a weakened entity that's in conflict with itself. At minimum, a certain value system must be preserved, one that will serve as the framework for the discussions and debates and internal conflicts that are the texture of every society. This no longer exists in Europe."

What are these shared elements?

"The most basic values that are written in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. I'm not inventing the wheel here. I'm talking about basic liberties. About everything that builds a liberal democratic society. The Europeans no longer believe in it. In the United States, which is a nation with all the good and bad that goes with it, it still exists. France was once the paradigmatic nation. The French invented it and now it's no more. And thus, this society, which was an absorbing society, one of the great models for absorbing immigrants - this machine is no longer working."

What if the immigrant absorption machine is actually the source of the problem? After all, during the colonialist period, Algerian children were taught about 'our Gallic fathers.' Maybe this is what aroused the rejection among the second and third generation, who feel that the shared narrative that is being imparted to them really has nothing to do with them?

"France is a nation of immigration that has been taking in immigrants since the 19th century. For about 200 years it took in waves of immigrants: from Poland, Italy, Spain, Portugal ..."

Who were all Catholic.

"Many Jews came too, and they were all absorbed. It wasn't that easy. It's never easy. But the machine that grinds down foreign identities and makes everyone French worked very well. In the colonies this was impossible. You can create a small elite of people who are similar to you, but you can't go any farther than that. The colonial failure is built into the system itself. This is true everywhere. Including in regard to us [Israelis], though we don't acknowledge that we're a colonial society. But within the borders of France, the system worked. Suddenly it's not working anymore and this is happening just when the system ought to be absorbing a new wave of immigrants.

"Certainly, there are objective problems. It's true that it's a lot easier to absorb and transform other Europeans into Frenchmen than it is to do that with North Africans. It's also true that the numbers have a force of their own. This is the largest wave of immigration that this country has ever known. But there are also subjective causes. This wave arrived just when the machine was no longer what it once was. The main parts of this grinder were no longer working - the army, and primarily, the schools, because the republican ethos upon which the whole story was based had become quite weakened."

France has changed, says Barnavi. "France is no longer a Jacobean state, it's no longer the state that turned the Republic into an alternative religion. It has become a very capitalistic country with the same multicultural ethos that exists everywhere else, just in a slightly different wrapping. This French republican model, which was so effective, has now collapsed and what remains is the second model of absorbing immigrants from Europe, the British model, which is also the one used in Holland and Germany. And my argument is that the British model was mistaken from the outset."

Sara and Mohammed

in Brussels

To meet with Barnavi these days, you have to go to Brussels, where he has been living for the past year and a half, serving as director of the Scientific Committee of the Museum of Europe, which will present its exhibits in the corridors of the European Parliament in Brussels. The offices of the museum, which is due to be opened next year at the initiative of the Belgian government and the European Union, are located in a narrow building built in the classic northern European style.

Next month, the European Union will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community. For Brussels, it really is cause for celebration: The institutions of the European Union that are located there continually pump new life into the city, with officials and related personnel from its 27 member countries settling there either temporarily or permanently. Then there are the thousands of lobbyists representing a whole spectrum of interests, primarily economic ones. The dozens of languages spoken and all the money that changes hands in the city have lent Brussels the title of "the capital of Europe."

And even here, Muslim veiling is seen on city streets more and more - and not just scarves covering the hair, as is common in Paris, for instance. In Brussels it is not unusual to see a woman covered from head to toe, including the face. European newspapers published a Christmas Eve survey that found that the most common names given to children throughout the EU are Emma and Thomas. That same morning, a radio broadcaster divulged that "a survey done in Brussels found that the most common names in Brussels are Sara and Mohammed."

Reading Barnavi's book, one gets the feeling that the violent Islam of Al Qaida frightens him less than the young woman in the head-covering on the streets of European cities. "The Arab world has tried everything - liberalism, socialism, pan-Arabism - and everything failed. The secret to the West's happiness is secularism. If I had to find a reason for the West's leap forward, I'd say it is secularism. It is the possibility of separating the earthly from the divine and giving the human spirit full autonomy.

"The West is not Christianity; it's the possibility of being liberated from Christianity. The secular structure is the only one that enables each individual to believe what he wants, or not to believe, without sticking a knife in his neighbor's chest.

"In contrast, the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is 'Islam is the Solution.' This is Islamism essentially. The moment you say 'Islam is the Solution,' then Islam must be imposed. Since this is a universalistic religion that aspires to conquer the world, it has all the elements for Al Qaida and all the crazies. Al Qaida is just an example, only the most visible part of the story. It's not true that I consider them less dangerous than the young woman. But between the woman's headscarf, which is a political matter and therefore so frightening, and Al Qaida, the line is not necessarily direct, but it exists nonetheless."

Can one say that this line stretches also to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, as part of an attempt to impose Islam as a political religion?

"Yes."

A so-called axis of evil?

"Yes, an axis of evil. This terminology doesn't scare me. Politically speaking, it's not such a clever phrase, though. What we have here isn't an axis of evil, but rather different paths, different models of behavior and organization with the aim of imposing political Islam on the world. Remember, the first target of Al Qaida isn't the United States, it's Saudi Arabia. First of all, they want to get rid of the rotten regimes in the Arab world. The project is a worldwide caliphate. They say so. When you look at the Islamist Web sites, it makes your hair stand on end. And there are millions of people who visit these sites. In Europe, they've started to clamp down on the extremist mosques and to deport violent imams. But the mosque is not the real place to focus, since it's obvious that will get complicated. The main place, the virtual caliphate, is the Internet, and today there are thousands of Web sites that teach the tenets of the faith, the political ideology and how to build a bomb."

A great leap forward

Dressed in a tweed jacket and clutching a wooden pipe, Barnavi looks much more at home here in elegant, European Belgium than back in dusty Tel Aviv. Since immigrating to Israel from Bucharest at age 12, he has always maintained a close connection with the continent he left behind. After earning a master's degree in history and political science at Tel Aviv University, he traveled to Paris and completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne on the history of Europe in the modern era. Most of his 30-year academic career was spent at Tel Aviv University, interspersed with numerous brief jaunts to give lectures and attend conferences in France, his intellectual second home.

He first assumed his present post at the Museum of Europe in Brussels about eight years ago. Barnavi, 60, married for the second time and a father of four (the youngest children are now 7 and 11), left Brussels when he was appointed Israel's ambassador to France - a political appointment made by then foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, a colleague from the university. He calls the two years he spent at the Israeli Embassy in Paris "one of the most important periods of my life." He won many plaudits for his performance and attained a level of standing unusual for an Israeli representative abroad, particularly in a tricky place like France at the start of the second intifada.

When Barnavi arrived at the embassy in Paris, he was already well known there as an intellectual (at least 17 of his books were published in French) and as a regular commentator on Israeli affairs. Upon becoming ambassador, he had a broad network of friends and acquaintances in the press, academia and politics, who helped him become a fixture in the salons of ministers, on the television programs and in the opinion pages of the major newspapers. He returned to Israel when Shimon Peres, as incoming foreign minister, wished to appoint his associate Nissim Zvili in his place. He went back to teaching at Tel Aviv University, remaining there for three years before returning to Brussels about a year and a half ago.

The fact that he, an Israeli, is playing such an important political role as head of the museum's scientific committee, in which he is responsible to a large extent for presenting Europe with its official history, is just "coincidence," he says. "Because I'm a historian of Europe and because they're a lot more liberal than we think, and less anti-Israel than we think, when they started to work on this project, they looked for a historian who would assist them with the Jewish dimension of European history and I, because I'd published an atlas of Jewish history, was called upon to help. It very soon became clear to me that what they needed was a general historian. So I began building the museum's intellectual program, and gradually I became the scientific consultant to the whole project."

Was your return to Europe motivated by a desire to recapture the kind of status you enjoyed here, which had faded with your return to Israel?

"Not at all. After the time in the embassy, I came back to Israel. I taught for three years at the university and the truth is that I got a little tired. 30 years in academia is a very long time and the current project really interests me, because Europe interests me very much as a unique political project in history. Sovereign states decide to give up a significant chunk of their sovereignty for the sake of a supra-national entity. This is something that has never been done before. It's a tremendous revolution! In my view, it's a great leap forward in civilization. But they don't fully grasp the importance of what they're doing. It's fantastic. This is why I came here."

The Dutch model

Barnavi wants to stress that he is not talking about a struggle by the Western world against Islam, but "a struggle by civilization against barbarism. I say that without allies among the Muslims, and there are many of them, we will not be able to triumph in the struggle. They themselves are frightened and don't feel that they have allies among us. There are more and more Muslim intellectuals, in France, too, who are starting to make their voices heard.

"The problem is not with Islam, but with the way in which it is being interpreted. You can see the same thing in Judaism. What does the Judaism of [the late extremist rabbi Meir] Kahane have in common with that of [Hebrew University professor] Avi Ravitzky? The texts are the same. But each one reads what he wants in them. If you quote the prophets, you're 'Peace Now,' and if you quote Joshua, you're an annexationist. It's that simple. People are running to the Koran to try to understand how fundamentalist Islam works, but that's not all you'll find there."

So what exactly is the Europeans' problem? That they don't take these extremists seriously enough, or that they see American imperialism as a bigger threat to their culture?

"That's a symptom of the disease. The moment you hate the Americans more than you hate Al Qaida, it's impossible to defend yourself from Al Qaida. The intellectual and moral confusion between a band of fanatic murderers acting in the name of God, and the conservative and unintelligent administration of a large democracy, is dangerous.

"After the terror attack in Madrid, there were big demonstrations that threw Prime Minister Aznar out of office. The scenes from the demonstrations showed protestors holding signs that read: 'Killer.' The 'killer' wasn't Al Qaida, it was Aznar. The guilty party wasn't those who did the killing, but the person who sent troops to Iraq. Debating whether to send troops to Iraq is a political issue of the first rank, but this moral and intellectual inversion is frightening.

"The rationale is that Islam is the new ideology of the weak and that an alliance must be made with them, because today they're the ones who are downtrodden and this is their way of amending that. That is, people are ready to go with Al Qaida or with the Taliban, no matter what they've done, just as long as they'll be against the Americans. When America becomes not the axis of evil but evil itself, then it's impossible to fight Al Qaida, because you have to fight Bush. But Bush won't be in office two years from now, and those guys will still be with us."

What do you think about the change in the attitude of European governments toward their Muslim citizens - like Tony Blair's support for limiting the practice of veiling, or the French "anti-veiling law," which prohibits overt displays of religion in schools?

"The anti-veiling law will spread everywhere, to Holland and England, too. It's inevitable. The problem with veiling isn't the religious symbol, it's the political symbol. What's scary about veiling is that there's a political argument behin d it. The French said that on the street and in universities we can't prohibit veiling, but school is a neutral place and we want it to stay that way. This is not a radical argument per se. All the various defenders of freedom cried foul, but it turns out that a majority of French Muslims welcomed the law, and the women's organizations certainly did, too. You have to understand, what the democrats won't do, the fascists will do. In the end the reaction will come, because the social body cannot tolerate this.

"That's as far as ordinary veiling, the sort that allows the face to be seen. Now there's a problem with the niqab and the burqa - portable prisons that prevent you from seeing the person's face at all. This is not just a political or aesthetic matter, but a matter of how we experience the public space - what it means for us to live together. If I can't see the other person's face, then I cannot communicate with him. This is something people won't tolerate."

Barnavi finds the best example of public reaction in Holland. "This is a society that we perceived, and rightly so in large part, as the most tolerant in the world. And suddenly, the murder of Theo Van Gogh transformed Dutch society into the least tolerant society in the West. To a society in which a government minister, like Rita Verdonk, can propose bills that would be inconceivable to any French, British or Belgian politician. Like, for example, prohibiting the speaking of any language besides Dutch in public. Or a prohibition against wearing the veil in public!

"As I see it, Van Gogh's murder only served as a pretext for this to burst out. These are undercurrents that were already at work for some time within Dutch society. What's happening now is only the beginning, and it's frightening. So if the Social Democrats don't bring about the change, it will be Le Pen, Haider and Verdonk that do it, because otherwise the society cannot live."

In the book you cite a forecast that in another 50 years, a majority of people living in France will be Muslims. If this is true, then maybe the French ought to just give up the fight?

"Being of Muslim extraction isn't the problem. The problem is what kind of citizens these people become. If they become European citizens and accept the democratic ethos, I wouldn't care if they came from Mars. This forecast says that if we don't do what needs to be done, there will be a majority here and we'll have to pick up and go somewhere else. Where? Who knows? Maybe Israel will be the last Western democracy left ..."

Can what you say be applied to what's happening in Israel, too?

"No, because we have a problem of a national minority. Our problem is not to turn the Arab citizens of the State of Israel into Jews, but to make them Israelis. It's a different story. In France the problem is of third-generation citizens who are still foreigners, or perceive themselves as such. In Israel the problem is different - How do you organize a state with such a large national minority without making them Jews and without alienating them from the state's institutions? In this, the Zionist state has been only partially successful, of course."

The real danger

In his book, Barnavi writes of the point of no return in the historical process, though he cannot clearly define it. "One of the problems in this process is that whenever you lose something else, it becomes apparent that it's still possible to live and then the point of no return never arrives. There's a moment in which the process becomes irreversible, but it's never clear when. This is exactly what's happening in Israel with the territories. Time and again, we said, 'If such and such happens, we won't be able to tolerate it.' But then it happens, and you can tolerate it, because that's how life is. And we got another settlement and another illegal outpost - as if all the rest are legal - and a wall that cuts through fields and a law that prohibits citizens from marrying. Things we never believed we'd be able to accept and now we've accepted them, because while this is happening, other things are more or less okay. It's not as if a dictator came and wiped out the government and stationed tanks around the Knesset. Then it would be clear that this was the point of no return.

"Therefore there are some who are skeptical when they read a book like this, people who say: He's exaggerating. Because in the meantime, life goes on. But if you take all of these signs, one after the other - the fact that in Berlin there's already self-censorship and an opera is canceled because it could offend Muslim sensitivities, and on the Swiss-French border they cancel Voltaire's 'Mohammed or Fanaticism,' then you have to stop and try to understand what's going on here. In other words, the danger isn't just that radical fundamentalism will impose things on you when it comes to power. But that you yourself are legislating foolish laws and restrictin g your own freedom of expression and essentially eradicating the pillars of your culture before someone else even bothers to do so. By the time fundamentalism takes power, it won't have anything left to fight over. That will already be behind us. This is the real danger. This is what led me to write the book." You're not afraid that Muslims will try to kill you?

"Not for a moment. First of all, I have nothing against Islam itself and I don't say that Islam is the villain. And besides - shall we just stop talking then? The feeble response from the West over what happened with the caricatures and with Rushdie - that's exactly the reason that one must fight." W