+ Fallaci fans
Posted on 09/15/2006 8:20:40 PM PDT by Bokababe
Oriana Falacci was not a favorite with the PC crowd. She made no bones about her loathing of what she called Eurabia. This was no latter-day Crusader readying for the onslaught of the Islamic invader. As she saw it, the incursion had already taken place, and post-Christian Europe was the worse for it.
When she died last week she bequeathed to the world a series of books, some luminous, some overwrought, but all written with an ardent mind and heart.
Falacci’s last volume, The Force of Reason, uses a litany of radical Islam’s recent crimes—anti-Semitic and anti-Christian screeds, beheadings, explosions, murders, mutilations—and reinforces her critique with the most unbearable weapon of all: sarcasm.
“Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. Always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us.”
Small wonder that the howls of her quarry can still be heard in Continental courts, where she was forever being sued for “xenophobia” and “bias” for observations like this:
“If you are a Westerner, and you say your civilization is superior, the most developed that this planet has ever seen, you go to the stake. But if you are a son of Allah or one of their collaborationists and you say that Islam has always been a superior civilization, a ray of light…nobody touches you. Nobody sues you. Nobody condemns you.”
To further her argument, she dug out some aphorisms and advisories from the Ayatollah Khomeni that would make a cow cringe: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.”
“If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.”
In the main, however, her withering remarks were not only aimed at the enemy but at her friends, her colleagues, her associates. She saw Christians and Jews, and atheists like herself, out-populated, sated, world-weary, ripe targets for a cultural defeat. All this because of a decline in common sense, in the intelligence that was once a fact of life in the West.
“Refusing to admit that all Islam is a pond inside which we are all drowning, in fact, is against Reason. Not defending our territory, our homes, our children, our dignity, our essence, is against Reason Accepting the silly or cynical lies which are dispensed to us like arsenic inside the soup is against Reason.”
She had sounded taps over the Europe of her childhood, but to the end she believed in the United States, to which she had transplanted herself. Recalling the courage of the American bounceback after 9/11, the indefatigable Oriana discarded her perennial pessimism to declare in her final pages: “I set aside the anger I feel for the half-witted who want to remove the Christmas Tree from the Rockefeller Center. I set aside the contempt I feel for the multimillionaire third-worlder Hollywood stars, the bastards dressed up as University professors, the wretches who support pro-Islamic obscenities of Pro-Islamic UN. I set aside the disappointments that America has inflicted and inflicts upon me and upon Americans who fight like me, and I savored the salt of hope. The same hope I feel when I look at the photos transmitted by the probes seeking life on Mars, while looking at them I think: we cannot lose.”
R.I.P. Orina Fallaci, writer, prophet, warrior princess. We shall not like upon her look again.
Ditto that. See the interview/profile in The New Yorker from earlier this year for further evidence of what a force she was. May we heed her warnings. R.I.P.
Oh, yes we will, and we will honor her by doing so.
Here.
RIP.
We already are. His name is Mark Steyn.
+ Fallaci fans
ping...
Another tribute here from Debbie Schlussel...
Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.: Brave Fighter Against Nazis, Islamofascism
By Debbie Schlussel
Some of the best writer/researchers on the truth about extremist Islam and jihad didn't start out that way.
One is Joan Peters, who wrote "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine," an excellent book that answers Israel's critics. The book is so well done that Alan Dershowitz plagiarized Peters' research for his rehash of it in his "The Case for Israel." Peters originally set out to write an anti-Israel, pan-Arabist tome, but her research showed her the opposite view was the correct one.
Then, there is Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer. When I was growing up, Fallaci's unwavering leftism put her among Israel's most vocal, vicious non-Arab critics in journalism and one of the Islamists' best friends in the world of the printed word.
Oriana Fallaci, RIP
Then, one day, she finally saw the late--perhaps, way too late. But she certainly did try to make amends for it, in a couple of books and countless articles on extremist Islam.
Fallaci's essays, columns, and articles over the last several years were so spot on and well written that my father would constantly send them to me, even though we knew that before this new era of her enlightenment she was the Islamofascists' useful idiot in friendly interviews with the likes Yasser Arafat--she called the terrorist murderer "charming" (though, at least, in an interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, she attacked Islam's lack of women's rights). Fallaci's newer work was the truth she had denied for so long.
For that, Islamofascists repeatedly tried to silence her, stop the publishing of her material in countries like France, and she was put on trial. They don't have the free speech in Europe that we have here.
It's ironic because Fallaci--at the age of 10 in 1939--joined her father in the anti-fascist freedom fighter resistance against the Nazis. She lived to see them defeated early in her life. But she did not live to see the new Nazis--Islamofascists--defeated. And she warned that they may win, in her books, "The Rage and the Pride," and "The Force of Reason."
Unfortunately, in the era of her best work--her exposes on Islam's extremist takeover of Europe--Fallaci was not only on trial for her work, her health went through its own trial. She was struck with cancer.
Sadly, today, Oriana Fallaci passed away at 77. Oriana Fallaci, Rest In Peace.
Some snippets from the Times, LOL:
----
Though her temperament was of the Left, the keystone of it was the value she placed on personal freedom, a trait which led her into an almost unquestioning admiration of the United States....
Two weeks after the attacks she wrote for an Italian newspaper a hostile critique of Islam — specifically, of the demands of Muslims to follow their cultural practices in the predominantly Christian West. The highly positive reception with which this met in her home country, one of the most homogenous and least multi-cultural in Europe, prompted her to expand it to book length, as La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride, 2002). It sold more than a million copies in Italy and several hundred thousand elsewhere in Europe.
Since its literary merits were slim, reading, as it did, as part memoir, part intemperate call-to-arms, its arguments rarely coherent, its success must be attributed to its having caught the mood of the times. Ironically, though one of Fallaci’s concerns was that what she saw as the servility of Europeans in the face of Islam’s imperial ambitions was caused by their having forgotten the lessons of the Second World War, the cheap potency of The Rage and the Pride recalls above all the rabble-rousing of the Fascist leaders.
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Twerps.
R.I.P. Oriana
What an utterly exquisite epitath--wish I could ping Ann Coulter.
Resto nella pace...
Wow. I had no idea she had passed away.
There are no fatwas in heaven. Rest in peace.
She told the truth as she saw it. Not much more can be asked of any of us.
Great Lady RIP.
Remarkable ping.
I had not heard of her passing. A sad day ... from whence shall our aspiring essayists learn shadow of the old trade, now that a most brilliant light has been extinguished?
She was a great and courageous lady, a voice crying in the wilderness.
RIP
Naturally, my Mother Land, my Italy, is not today’s Italy. The Italy of leisure time, a little sly, vulgar of those Italians whose only goal in life is to retire before reaching 50 and whose only passions are foreign vacations and soccer games. The bad, stupid, cowardly Italy, of the little hyenas who in order to be able to shake hands with a Hollywood celebrity would sell their own daughters to a Beirut bordello and who when the kamikaze of Osama Bin Laden reduce thousands of New Yorkers into a mountain of ashes that looks like ground coffee, scornfully say “it serves them right.” -- Oriana Fallaci
A great defender of America culture and values who was so much hated by Muslims and the European intelligentsia will never undermine the profound effect her books had in the minds and hearts of her readers. Rest in eternal peace, Oriana.
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