Oriana Fallaci, a hero of Freedom.
"Vilifying islam" is not a crime, but a proclamation of truth.
Posted on 06/06/2006 6:25:30 PM PDT by blam
Writer facing jail for mosque threat
By Malcolm Moore in Milan
(Filed: 07/06/2006)
The Italian author Oriana Fallaci, who once wrote that Muslims "breed like rats", may be facing up to three years in prison after she vowed to blow up a mosque.
Ms Fallaci, 75, who has cancer, is due to appear in court next week charged with the lesser offence of vilifying Islam, punishable with a £3,450 fine.
But after her latest outburst in the New Yorker last week Muslim leaders are demanding that she be tried for inciting religious hatred, which carries a three-year jail term.
The former journalist, who has said she will not attend Monday's hearing in Bergamo, told the magazine that she intended to destroy a mosque being built at Colle di Val d'Elsa, near Siena.
"I do not want to see a 24-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto when I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their country, so I blow it up!" she said. In a trilogy of books published after the attacks of September 11, Ms Fallaci lamented the Islam "invasion" into Europe.
Judge Armando Grasso ruled in a preliminary hearing that Ms Fallaci had made 18 statements "offensive to Islam and Muslims".
Following her most recent comments, Adel Smith, the president of the Italian Muslim Union, said he would press for the sterner charge of inciting religious hatred.
A.B.P.
Oriana Fallaci, a hero of Freedom.
"Vilifying islam" is not a crime, but a proclamation of truth.
I've read her work. She is on trial for telling the truth.
She's a VERY brave woman.
Italy should be ashamed.
Sort of the Italian Ann Coulter.
It's outstanding.
Isn't she living in the U.S. right now? If so, they'd have quite a time of it trying to drag her to 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 refuses to recognize the limitations of this metaphor—say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not the same as an annexation by another state. And although European countries should indeed refuse to countenance certain cultural practices—polygamy, “honor killings,” and anti-Semitic teachings, for example—Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices of Islamic fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims. Certainly, European countries have made some foolish compromises in the name of placating Muslim residents. In Germany, where courts have ordered that Muslim religious instruction be offered in schools, just as Christian instruction is, critics have complained that the Islamic teaching often perpetuates a conservative version of Islam. The result, the historian Bernard Lewis argued, in a recent talk in Washington, is that “Islam as taught in Turkish schools is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast.” (This is a good reminder of why the American model of keeping religious instruction out of public schools facilitates assimilation.) Many of Fallaci’s objections, however, have more to do with her aesthetic sensibilities. For her, hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany—she does her own wailing imitation—is a form of oppression. Yet such examples do not rise to the level of argument that she wants to make, which is that the native culture of Italy will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating.
“They live at our expense, because they’ve got schools, hospitals, everything,” she said at one point, beginning to shout. “And they want to build damn mosques everywhere.” She spoke of a new mosque and Islamic center planned for Colle di Val d’Elsa, near Siena. She vowed that it would not remain standing. “If I’m alive, I will go to my friends in Carrara—you know, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I make you juuump in the air. I blow it up! With the anarchists of Carrara. I do not want to see this mosque—it’s very near my house in Tuscany. I do not want to see a twenty-four-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto. When I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their country! So I BLOW IT UP! ”
The magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is opposed to abortion, unless she “were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a Zarqawi.” She is fiercely opposed to gay marriage (“In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals”), and suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past few months “disgust” her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag. “I don’t love the Mexicans,” Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’ I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”
I guess Italy is beyond hope.
This lady has a valid point, If Christians cant wear a cross in a muslim country whay are we allowing mosques in christian countries.
She has cancer and is 75 years old , find her a suicide belt and turn her loose.
Bless you. Has this been posted as a thread yet?
Nice to see ya, by the way.
(steely)
Rats everywhere immediately rose up in protest at the comparison.
What I want to know is why the hell she, and those like her, don't publish any of their work online?
Many of the frontline defenders of western civilization seem to think the internet is just for advertising hardcopies of their work.
HELLO?! I'll spend money on the internet before I trek to a Barnes & Nobel every time.
"Italy should be ashamed. "
Don't they know that they have free speech in the EU????
This has already start here. Heck in Canada they are apologizing to muslims for having to arrest some of them before they killed any of us.
are demanding that she be tried for inciting religious hatred.
But these socialist politically correct aholes would never admit to whats being preached in the mosques.
I am saddened to see Oriana Fallaci being hounded from her native land. But I am heartened at her strength and bravery.
She does have a valid point!
Judge Armando Grasso ruled in a preliminary hearing that Ms Fallaci had made 18 statements "offensive to Islam and Muslims".
A good little dhimmi judge!
Following her most recent comments, Adel Smith, the president of the Italian Muslim Union, said he would press for the sterner charge of inciting religious hatred.
And the aggrieved victimized Muslim - is there any other kind?
She's living in New York and I doubt she has any intention to return to Italy.
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