Posted on 04/20/2002 2:57:03 PM PDT by Prodigal Daughter
I find it shameful that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swasitka, incite people to hate the Jews. And who, in order to see Jews once again in the extermination camps, in the gas chambers, in the ovens of Dachau and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen et cetera, would sell their own mother to a harem.
I find it shameful that the Catholic Church should permit a bishop, one with lodgings in the Vatican no less, a saintly man who was found in Jerusalem with an arsenal of arms and explosives hidden in the secret compartments of his sacred Mercedes, to participate in that procession and plant himself in front of a microphone to thank in the name of God the suicide bombers who massacre the Jews in pizzerias and supermarkets. To call them "martyrs who go to their deaths as to a party."
I find it shameful that in France, the France of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, they burn synagogues, terrorize Jews, profane their cemeteries. I find it shameful that the youth of Holland and Germany and Denmark flaunt the kaffiah just as Mussolini's avant garde used to flaunt the club and the fascist badge. I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-semitism. That in Sweden they asked that the Nobel Peace Prize given to Shimon Peres in 1994 be taken back and conferred on the dove with the olive branch in his mouth, that is on Arafat. I find it shameful that the distinguished members of the Committee, a Committee that (it would appear) rewards political color rather than merit, should take this request into consideration and even respond to it. In hell the Nobel Prize honors he who does not receive it.
I find it shameful (we're back in Italy) that state-run television stations contribute to the resurgent antisemitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones. I find it shameful that in their debates they host with much deference the scoundrels with turban or kaffiah who yesterday sang hymns to the slaughter at New York and today sing hymns to the slaughters at Jerusalem, at Haifa, at Netanya, at Tel Aviv. I find it shameful that the press does the same, that it is indignant because Israeli tanks surround the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, that it is not indignant because inside that same church two hundred Palestinian terrorists well armed with machine guns and munitions and explosives (among them are various leaders of Hamas and Al-Aqsa) are not unwelcome guests of the monks (who then accept bottles of mineral water and jars of honey from the soldiers of those tanks). I find it shameful that, in giving the number of Israelis killed since the beginning of the Second Intifada (four hundred twelve), a noted daily newspaper found it appropriate to underline in capital letters that more people are killed in their traffic accidents. (Six hundred a year).
I find it shameful that the Roman Observer, the newspaper of the Pope--a Pope who not long ago left in the Wailing Wall a letter of apology for the Jews--accuses of extermination a people who were exterminated in the millions by Christians. By Europeans. I find it shameful that this newspaper denies to the survivors of that people (survivors who still have numbers tattooed on their arms) the right to react, to defend themselves, to not be exterminated again. I find it shameful that in the name of Jesus Christ (a Jew without whom they would all be unemployed), the priests of our parishes or Social Centers or whatever they are flirt with the assassins of those in Jerusalem who cannot go to eat a pizza or buy some eggs without being blown up. I find it shameful that they are on the side of the very ones who inaugurated terrorism, killing us on airplanes, in airports, at the Olympics, and who today entertain themselves by killing western journalists. By shooting them, abducting them, cutting their throats, decapitating them.
(There's someone in Italy who, since the appearance of Anger and Pride, would like to do the same to me. Citing verses of the Koran he exorts his "brothers" in the mosques and the Islamic Community to chastise me in the name of Allah. To kill me. Or rather to die with me. Since he's someone who speaks English well, I'll respond to him in English: "---- you.")
I find it shameful that almost all of the left, the left that twenty years ago permitted one of its union processionals to deposit a coffin (as a mafioso warning) in front of the synagogue of Rome, forgets the contribution made by the Jews to the fight against fascism. Made by Carlo and Nello Rossini, for example, by Leone Ginzburg, by Umberto Terracini, by Leo Valiani, by Emilio Sereni, by women like my friend Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti who was shot at Florence on June 12, 1944, by seventy-five of the three-hundred-thirty-five people killed at the Fosse Ardeatine, by the infinite others killed under torture or in combat or before firing squads. (The companions, the teachers, of my infancy and my youth.)
I find it shameful that in part through the fault of the left--or rather, primarily through the fault of the left (think of the left that inaugurates its congresses applauding the representative of the PLO, leader in Italy of the Palestinians who want the destruction of Israel)--Jews in Italian cities are once again afraid. And in French cities and Dutch cities and Danish cities and German cities, it is the same. I find it shameful that Jews tremble at the passage of the scoundrels dressed like suicide bombers just as they trembled during Krystallnacht, the night in which Hitler gave free rein to the Hunt of the Jews.
I find it shameful that in obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest, and for them extremely advantageous fashion of Political Correctness the usual opportunists--or better the usual parasites--exploit the word Peace. That in the name of the word Peace, by now more debauched than the words Love and Humanity, they absolve one side alone of its hate and bestiality. That in the name of a pacifism (read conformism) delegated to the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot's feet they incite people who are confused or ingenuous or intimidated. Trick them, corrupt them, carry them back a half century to the time of the yellow star on the coat. These charlatans who care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all.
I find it shameful that many Italians and many Europeans have chosen as their standard-bearer the gentleman (or so it is polite to say) Arafat. This nonentity who thanks to the money of the Saudi Royal Family plays the Mussolini ad perpetuum and in his megalomania believes he will pass into History as the George Washington of Palestine. This ungrammatical wretch who when I interviewed him was unable even to put together a complete sentence, to make articulate conversation. So that to put it all together, write it, publish it, cost me a tremendous effort and I concluded that compared to him even Ghaddafi sounds like Leonardo da Vinci.
This false warrior who always goes around in uniform like Pinochet, never putting on civilian garb, and yet despite this has never participated in a battle. War is something he sends, has always sent, others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent who playing the part of Head of State caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton's mediation. No-no-I-want-Jerusalem-all-to-myself. This eternal liar who has a flash of sincerity only when (in private) he denies Israel's right to exist, and who as I say in my book contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is, so that you can never trust him. Never! With him you will always wind up systematically betrayed.
This eternal terrorist who knows only how to be a terrorist (while keeping himself safe) and who during the Seventies, that is when I interviewed him, even trained the terrorists of Baader-Meinhof. With them, children ten years of age. Poor children. (Now he trains them to become suicide bombers. A hundred baby suicide bombers are in the works: a hundred!).
This weathercock who keeps his wife at Paris, served and revered like a queen, and keeps his people down in the shit. He takes them out of the shit only to send them to die, to kill and to die, like the eighteen year old girls who in order to earn equality with men have to strap on explosives and disintegrate with their victims. And yet many Italians love him, yes. Just like they loved Mussolini. And many other Europeans do the same.
I find it shameful and see in all this the rise of a new fascism, a new nazism. A fascism, a nazism, that much more grim and revolting because it is conducted and nourished by those who hypocritically pose as do-gooders, progressives, communists, pacifists, Catholics or rather Christians, and who have the gall to label a warmonger anyone like me who screams the truth.
I see it, yes, and I say the following. I have never been tender with the tragic and Shakespearean figure Sharon. ("I know you've come to add another scalp to your necklace," he murmured almost with sadness when I went to interview him in 1982.) I have often had disagreements with the Israelis, ugly ones, and in the past I have defended the Palestinians a great deal. Maybe more than they deserved. But I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews.
I stand just as I stood as a young girl during the time when I fought with them, and when the Anna Marias were shot. I defend their right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time. And disgusted by the antisemitism of many Italians, of many Europeans, I am ashamed of this shame that dishonors my Country and Europe. At best, it is not a community of States, but a pit of Pontius Pilates. And even if all the inhabitants of this planet were to think otherwise, I would continue to think so.
© Oriana Fallaci, Panorama, Corriere Della Sera, 12 April 2002
Now that is an editorial!
Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's best known women writers - the author of Interview with History and Letter to an Unborn Child - gave vent to her anti-Islamic spleen in a mammoth article published by the Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, last Saturday.
Titled The Anger and the Pride, it takes the form of a letter to the editor, beginning on the front page and occupying four full pages of the prestigious broadsheet.
Ms Fallaci, who lives in New York, described her personal reaction to the horror of the destruction of Manhattan's twin towers. She went on to praise Americans for their unity, tolerance and patriotism, to chastise Italy's divided and mean-spirited political class and to blast Islam.
The article, which breaks a 10-year media silence since she last reported for the Corriere della Sera on the Gulf war, unambiguously sets aside political correctness and good taste.
"Wake up, people, wake up! Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the tide and appearing racist (an inappropriate word since we are not talking about a race but a religion), you don't understand or you don't want to understand that a crusade in reverse is under way here ... Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, in any case a war of religion," she wrote.
Strident and excessive, the article makes no attempt to distinguish between the various currents of Islam. But being written by someone who has travelled widely in the Muslim world - Ms Fallaci famously cast off her chador as a "stupid medieval rag" during an interview with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - its criticisms, however shrill, cannot simply be dismissed.
"What do we make of polygamy and the principle that women should count less than camels, that they should not go to school, should not go to the doctor and must not allow themselves to be photographed?" she asked.
Ms Fallaci provides a harrowing account of the execution of 12 "impure" youths which she witnessed in a sports stadium in Dacca, the bodies trampled to pulp under the feet of the crowd.
"Slowly they formed a cortege and, always in the name of God, they walked over the corpses ... They reduced them to a bloody carpet of squashed bones," she wrote.
Harsh and prejudiced, the article is also about what patriotism means to Italians today and appears to have struck a chord with many readers.
"I bought 65 copies of the paper at two news stands (all that were available) and distributed them to passers by: I did it for my Motherland," one enthusiast wrote to the paper the following day.
"I read and re-read the letter from Oriana Fallaci: just two words of comment: I cried," said another, while other readers suggested the text should be studied in schools. Not everyone was delighted.
"Couldn't Signora Fallaci's decade-long silence have been continued?" wondered Franco Cosi from Trento.
Commentators have complimented Ms Fallaci on her courage, without necessarily agreeing with her views.
"She is not a hypocrite and she takes sides," said the journalist Gad Lerner, but he dismissed the text as "a devastating invective where, affirmation by affirmation, there is almost nothing with which one can agree."
The writer Vincenzo Consolo described the piece as "violent, unjust and partisan" and said reading it had made him profoundly depressed.
Perhaps what impressed readers most was Ms Fallaci's readiness to cross ideological boundaries and flout intellectual conventions - something of a rarity in the Italian media.
Whether now is the time for such adventurousness, even in a writer, is another question.
The Anger and the Pride translation at the bottom of this page
-La rabbia e l'orgoglio (Rage and Pride) by Oriana Fallaci---
Yes, there are currents of Islam. And Jihad is at the core of all of them.
Here's a happy thought from Middle East expert Daniel Pipes:
Islamists constitute a small but significant minority of Muslims, perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the population. Many of them are peaceable in apearance, but they all must be considered potential killers.
How does 400,000 to 800,000 -- in our country -- potential killers sound?
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
Download 8 Mb zip file here (60 minute video)
Way to go.....!!!!
The significance of an old "leftie" like Oriana Fallaci writing with this perspective can not be overstated. She is an icon of Italian and European and Leftist journalism.
She is also old enough to know the history of which she writes, unlike the pathetic excuses of what passes for jounalists nowadays.
The problem is that there is no historical memory being applied to the present conflict in Israel. This may excuse the younger student protestors, but it does not excuse the leadership in Europe.
The effects of the fifth column in Europe ( the huge minority of Muslims) have come to bear fruit.
The fruit is rotten.
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