This word was invented by scholar Bat Ye’or, a European Jew born and raised in Egypt who now lives in Switzerland and is an expert on Islam’s history of governing non-Muslims, Jews and Christians in particular.

Although this journalist has not been a fan of Donald Trump, the man’s latest idea of barring the entry of Muslims into America hit a bull’s eye. The hysterical reaction by Americans of many stripes is evidence of that, but also of a terrifying reality: the growing triumph of dhimmitude in the United States.

The Arabic word dhimma means “protected” and refers to the status of a non-Muslim community living under Muslim rule. Muslims commonly brag that they have been good to the minorities whom they “protected,” but never mentioned is why they needed protection and from whom. The answer is from ordinary Muslims with no inhibitions about abusing ­the dhimmi, the ‘‘protected” people, such as throwing stones at them in the street for fun, stealing from them, molesting their daughters and wives, etc. Think of the life of Negroes in the Deep South in the ugly heyday of “Jim Crow” when white trash called every Negro man “boy.”

Muslim governments “protected” their Jews because, unlike their own Believers who were largely illiterate, they provided services that the regime could not do without. They could keep records, manage commerce, speak foreign languages. They were protected lest the abuse became too oppressive and the community fled. For example, in 1679 in Yemen, the entire Jewish population was expelled into the desert to die, during which their immovable property was looted, but when it became clear the regime could not function with them, they were invited back.

As per sharia law, the Jews as dhimmi were allowed to practice their religion but only by paying a huge, communal tax each year called the jizya. Commonly, the chief rabbi would deliver the cash to the local pasha who took the coins and, in these very public ceremonies, ritually slapped him in the face as a concrete manifestation of the Koranic commandment to “oppress and humiliate” the dhimmi and punish them for refusing to convert to Islam. For fourteen centuries, on a daily basis, Jews in Islam were abused like this.

Scholar Bat Ye’or in her work not only studied the history of dhimmi life but observed how Europeans in our time have changed in reaction to the massive influx of Muslims who clearly do not come to Europe to become Europeans but only to enjoy a higher standard of living. The goal of these immigrants is not to assimilate into European culture but have Europeans adopt theirs.

Dhimmitude, she said, was taking root in Europe as Europeans began to retreat and kowtow to Muslim demands. Europeans have been gradually morphing into a simulacrum of medieval Jews and Christians under Islam when non-Believers kept their heads down and bowed to the superiority of the One True Faith.

And now the hysterical response to Donald Trump’s reasonable suggestion is evidence that the process is well advanced in America too. All Trump did was reference World War II when there were no tourists, businessmen or students entering the United States from Germany, Italy and Japan, let alone be given Green Cards as Muslims are today, whose ideology/religion is no less violently totalitarian than Nazism and Fascism. Trump merely raised the comparison between World War II and the present crisis, but across-the-board Americans shuddered at his “bigoted” idea.

This is dhimmitude. Dhimmis are not allowed to be negative about Islam. His critics left and right also surely know, at some level of consciousness, that to criticize Islam is to make of oneself a target for Muslims who will license themselves to kill the critic, as the staffers at Charlie Hebdo in Paris found out.

In Holland, Geert Wilders is a “prisoner” of his bodyguards. Likewise in the States, the lives of two American heroes, Pamela Geller and her partner Robert Spencer, are similarly constricted, and who wants to live like that?

It is indicative of dhimmitude that not even one major pundit or politician has remembered the famous American history of the Mormons who began life as polygamists and for this were driven, sometimes violently, from town-to-town in the East until they fled into the wilderness of the West. Next to the Great Salt Lake their community flourished, and when their numbers reached the requirement for statehood, they applied but were rejected by Congress for being polygamists, when that behavior was illegal in every state and still is.

Over the next Biblical generation of forty years, the Mormons repeatedly applied for statehood and were rejected every time until 1890 when they revamped their doctrine, outlawed polygamy, and entered the Union in 1896.

On similar, legal grounds, Islam must be declared illegal in the United States, and all of its mosques padlocked by court order. Polygamy is a root cause of many of Islam’s social pathologies. It is organically connected to their abuse of women, cruel violence, inbreeding, rampant male-to-male sodomy and the fathering of too many children for their economies to support.

Thus, the truly shocking aspect of Trump’s analogy was not the idea of barring Muslims but the cowardly response by Americans of not only Democrats but many Republicans and Conservatives who apparently have become obedient dhimmi to the politically correct cliché that all religions are of equal worth.

No, they are not. Judeo-Christian civilization is superior to that of Islam. There are fifty-six officially Muslim states and not one is a liberal democracy that Americans would want to live in.

Europe is now committing suicide by letting Islam grow inside of it, and what has happened there is happening in the U.S. Obama promised a “fundamental change” and this it: the Islamization of the United States. In his time in office, he has allowed into the country 680,000 Muslims and repeatedly refused to say anything negative about this culture that is so alien to Judeo-Christian America.

Dhimmitude is a failure of nerve and loss of pride in one’s own life of the mind, religion, society and civilization.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com and www.deprogramprogram.com.