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June 11, 2006
Literary lion Oriana Fallaci still roars
The New Yorker's interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci is a fascinating read, both for the insight into her life's experience, as well as her more recent role as a vocal opponent of the spread of Islam into the West.
Fallaci, energized by the attacks of September 11, has seen three non-fiction tomes (The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason, and The Apocalypse, published in Europe and not yet available in the U.S.) on the topic become bestsellers -- and faces trial in several nations for blasphemy and hate crimes.
As in past years, she remains particularly repulsed by perceived acts of rank hypocrisy.
According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard.
“If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination.
"If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.”
The threat we face is nothing new, according to Fallaci, merely a more recent iteration of a struggle in which she participated more than 60 years ago, when she was a young teen living in Mussolini's Italy.
Fallaci sees the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She told me, “I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing.”
She elaborated, in an e-mail, “Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”
Fallaci, who was shot three times during the 1968 riots in Mexico City, is no stranger to controversy and danger, and she refuses to back down when questioned on her seeming intolerance.
I started wondering if Fallaci would tolerate any Muslim immigration, or any mosque in Europe, so I asked her these questions by e-mail, and she sent back lengthy replies.
“The tolerance level was already surpassed fifteen or twenty years ago,” she wrote, “when the Left let the Muslims disembark on our coasts by the thousands. And it is well known . . . that I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says. Whatever its version.
"Of course there are exceptions. Also, considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good Muslims must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and secularism. But, as I say in the ‘Apocalypse,’ . . . good Muslims are few. So tragically few, in fact, that they must go around with bodyguards.”
(Here she mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch parliament, whom Holland, shamefully, declared last month that it would strip of her citizenship, citing an irregularity in her 1997 asylum application.)
She wrote that she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques in Europe “insidious” and “offensive,” because it “aims to portray me as the bloodthirsty fanatics, who during the French Revolution beheaded even the statues of the Holy Virgin and of Jesus Christ and the Saints. Or as the equally bloodthirsty fanatics of the Bolshevik Revolution, who burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used the churches as warehouses.
"Really, no honest person can suggest that my ideas belong to that kind of people. I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its ‘Mein Kampf,’ its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”
The whole interview is a fascinating picture of a woman who, despite the best efforts of cancer and age (she's 77), remains a vigorous, articulate and impassioned intellectual force, as much a threat to the forces of political correctness and appeasement today as she was to tyrants and politicians 40 years ago.
Read the whole thing, will ya?
Posted by Mike Lief at June 11, 2006 08:57 PM
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Comments
What an amazing woman... passionate, reasonable, disciplined, courageous. An intellectual the likes of which we don't see these days.
How she could take the religious focal points of Islam and turn it all on its head in front of Khomeini AND complete an interview is pretty ambitious. She interviewed the greats, the obscene greats and the near greats with an intense, perceptive, combative style. And maybe the lesson is, no truthful interview is possible without it.
Posted by: Vermont Neighbor at June 12, 2006 08:06 PM