Italian firebrand takes her fight to the ‘Islamo-fascists’ (ORIANA FALLACI ALERT)

The Sunday Times ^ | December 15, 2002 | Sarah Baxter

[MadIvan]

THE door to her home in New York is barred and the police pass by every night. In Italy she is accompanied by bodyguards. There is no fatwa against Oriana Fallaci, but in France her opponents have tried to silence her in court.

The fiery Italian, once one of the world’s most uncompromising political interviewers, has stirred anger with The Rage and the Pride, a polemic on Islam and the September 11 attacks. She rarely meets the press herself, but has come out fighting after the failure of last month’s bid to ban her book in France.

“My rage hasn’t diminished,” she said. “I have contempt for a culture that puts my sisters under the burqa and cuts the hands off thieves. I would never have contempt for someone who says ‘I am a Muslim’, but I would ask ‘What kind of Muslim are you? Are you one of them?’ ”

By “them” she means “Islamo-fascists”, the admirers of Osama Bin Laden, whom she is determined to fight as bitterly as her father, a Tuscan resistance leader, fought Mussolini. “They are multiplying like protozoa,” she warns readers of her book. “There are millions and millions of extremists.”

Her views led the Movement against Racism in France to accuse her of inciting religious hatred. Its attempt to force the publishers to withdraw the book or insert a warning about its contents infuriated Fallaci.

“France guillotined thousands of people and subjugated Europe in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet it wants to forbid my freedom of expression,” she said.

The legal action failed on a technicality, convincing Fallaci that the decision to drop the action was political. The Rage and the Pride has sold more than 1m copies in Italy and topped bestseller lists in France and Germany. Its success has persuaded her that a politically correct elite is out of step with public opinion.

Fallaci declared war on political correctness before the term was invented. She was a war reporter in Vietnam and after she criticised the Americans she was lionised by peace campaigners and invited by the communists to visit north Vietnam. But when she denounced Stalinist repression there, “Hanoi Jane” Fonda and the left turned on her in fury.

“I judged Hanoi and Saigon with the same heart and brain. There is red fascism and black fascism. The roots of illiberality are the same,” she said.

The world’s most notorious leaders opened their doors to her, from General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. She admired Khomeini’s intelligence and made the severe cleric laugh by questioning him cheekily about a forbidden topic, the chador.

Even so, Fallaci is unforgiving: “You can be the most sympatico person in the world and be a bastard who kills us and destroys our civilisation. Everything started with him.”

Western culture is superior to that of the Arab world, she says — and she is angry with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, for backpedalling on this issue: “Not a single one of those countries has a drop of democracy. Our laws are superior. Our standards of living are superior. Our respect for women is superior.

“We are not beheaded if we cuckold our husbands. We don’t wear the burqa. This is superior, for Christ’s sake. In 1,400 years, Islam has never made an act of self-criticism. It is the immovable mountain.”

Fallaci never married her companion, the Greek resistance leader Alekos Panagoulis, who died in the 1970s, and to her lasting regret she miscarried a child. Now 73 and suffering from cancer, she lives alone in New York surrounded by her books and anti-fascist mementos from the 1930s. She had given up journalism for fiction until Al-Qaeda’s suicide pilots attacked her city.

She immediately declared war on Islamic fundamentalism. The Rage and the Pride, written in the weeks after the collapse of the World Trade Center, is a bitter and angry polemic. Muslim immigrants to Italy are denounced for urinating on Florence’s beautiful churches, for peddling drugs, pimping and turning its cities into casbahs. New York is depicted in a heroic glow, led by its mayor with the Italian name Giuliani.

The book was meant to be over the top, she insisted. “It’s an invective. I wrote it on the wave of a terrible trauma. If you ask me, do I repent what I have written, the answer is no.”

She condemns rampant anti-Americanism in Europe as suicidal. “America is us,” she writes in her book. “If America collapses, Europe collapses, the whole of the West collapses.”

The next edition of her book will be even more intemperate, she promises. “I don’t want the burqa. I want to stuff it in their throats.”

[headsonpikes]

"There is red fascism and black fascism. The roots of illiberality are the same."

She is admirable for her moral courage.

[aculeus]

“I don’t want the burqa. I want to stuff it in their throats.”

Throat-stuffing bump.

[headsonpikes]

Oriana's a pistol. ;^)

[A_perfect_lady]

Thanks, that makes me feel a little better.

[VOA]

Turkey put out the invitation to Spanish Jews in 1492 after they were kicked out of Spain.

A few months ago The Los Angeles Times had a notice on their obituary page about the
passing of a Turkish diplomat who pulled a bit of an "Schindler" on the Nazis
during WWII.
I can't recall the particulars, but I think he cobbled together Turkish papers to
protect a number of Jewish Turks (and maybe those of other nationalities) in
some area of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Apparently he not only put the documents together for these endangered souls, but he
did a good job of "huffing-and-puffing" to bluff the Nazis into letting him
get these folks onto transports to Turkey.

Even though I've got a bad attitude about a lot of Islam...I try to add to my
posts that there are some outposts of sanity in the Muslim world like Islam.
I just wish the locations of Insane Islam could be converted to something like Turkey...
(or even better, what progessive Turks wish to make of their country)

[VOA]

In all fairness, it (Turkey) has tried mightily.
However, now, the fundamentalists are gaining massive strength and are a real threat
to undo the decades of progress.

You have enunciated in a few lines what would take me pages to say about Turkey.

To my naive mind, one of the greatest dangers is that (if I understand correctly),
the real core of progressive/sane social thought in Turkey is with her military corps.
I've heard a couple of news reports that say that whenever Turkey starts to go
off the path to what we'd consider something like Western democracy/republicanism,
it is the educated group of the military that usually tells the civilian "authorities"
that they've made a mistake.

When I post my caveats about Turkey being one sane outposts of the Muslim/Islmaic world...
I suppose I should say "relative to the rest of that sphere".

And I'll say that I'm really praying for them to choose the right path...

[VOA]

Fundamentalists in Turkey, Marxists in Brazil,
Zimbabwe fixing to nationalize the gas stations...

I think there was a post here yesterday that Zimbabwe is out of petrol (or something
to that effect.

I'll give Dubya credit...he's had some harsh words for Mugabe.
Although I have mixed feelings about propping up the mess that Central/Sub-Saharan
Africa has become, at least on a humanitarian level, I think Dubya could earn
some sort of humitarian-saint status (and the further disdain of the U.N.)
by carpet bombing the suffering areas of Zimbabwe with pallets of grain, bottled water,
and M-16/ammo.
The latter so the suffering masses can protect themselves and their food
from Mugabe's thugs/"civil servants".

[A_perfect_lady]

Nice thought, but Bush could single-handedly save the world and the left, UN included, would purse up their lips and say, "Well, we didn't want YOU to do it." Nothing a conservative will ever do is going to get any credit with the rest of the world. Indeed, nothing America does even under a liberal gets any credit with the rest of the world. We are capitalists and they will hate us till they can destoy us. And if they destroyed us and the rest of the world's economy sank into hell as a result (which it would), they'd blame our corpse for that too. I'm all for carpet-bombing Mugabe's palace in Zimbabwe, but that's it. As South African blogger Kim du Toit has noted, Africa is a black hole of corruption and all aid simply disappears into the void. His advice to the US is "Let Africa Sink."

[Shermy]

Thanks for the ping.

[Billthedrill]

I just finished her book - "fury" is right - you certainly don't end up with any misapprehensions about where she stands on the issue if Islam's treatment of women. For those who don't know her, “I don’t want the burqa. I want to stuff it in their throats" manifested itself once during an interview with a Very Important Moslem. She did tear off the burqa she had to wear in order to be admitted into his presence and threw it in his face. That was the Ayatollah Khomeini.