I‘ve never been more convinced that Israel is the axis on which Islamic jihad turns than after reading four, clarifying pages of Bat Ye’or’s new book, “Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate” (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 212 pp.). In a first-chapter primer on the relationship between the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ye’or revisits the relentless mission of the Islamic world, with EU encouragement, “to appropriate a tiny piece of land” — Israel — as a political and religious cause despite the fact, as she reminds us, no town, village or hamlet of Israel is mentioned in the Koran or early biographies of Mohammed. Ye’or asks. “Given the immense territories conquered and Islamized over thirteen centuries of expansion and war,” she writes, “why would Muslim countries keep plotting to destroy Israel? … Why is Israel considered so alarming?”