What race are Muslims again? Newsweek slimes Fallaci

Mr. Dickey is obviously an ignorant man.

Mr Dickey is a DICKHEAD! Few people are going to take any notice of him while lots rush out to buy Oriana's latest book...

Check out "The Psychology of Appeasement" at freerepublic.com - it dovetails nicely with this.

Islam is not a race it's an ideology. Oriana Fallaci has also received threats because of her
views. One guess at who the people are who are making the threats.

Is anti-Islamic criticism racism?

I dont think racism quite describes the situation-whether it holds or not.

Islam so brainwashes the individual Muslim from birth, that Muslims can now be regarded of an almost different race from other humans.(They certainly do regard themselves as different from non-Muslims). In fact it makes them a different species.

So I suppose 'speciesism' would be a more accurate charge for anti-Islamic criticism.

/sarcasm

Ummm...I think more correctly MUSLIMS have been fanning the flames of inquisition against muslims. They do it to themselves, move into another country, immediatly want things changed to their liking, make no effort to contribute to society, commit crimes against non muslims, generally walk around thinking that they are superior (when if fact they are most INFERIOR), they whine, complain and suck the welfare systems dry...hmm cant at all figure out why it is no one wants muslims immigrating to their country.

Racism is an easy word to just throw out the minute you don't like what's being said against a minority group. It's a lazy word for lazy people. Doesn't matter whether they're technically a race or not, the sole purpose is to shut up free speech. And the only allowable free speech in the lefties' Brave New World is the speech they approve of. They don't like anyone challenging their idiotic 'all cultures are wonderful & equal, but especially non-white, non-Judeo/Christian cultures' mantra they've been shoving down our throats for years. If we complain about certain ethnic groups being obnoxious or causing problems, oooh that's racism! Shut up! You're not supposed to say that.

It's also used by some governments to shut up critics of their dangerously lax attitudes to immigration. Even if those critics are taxpayers who pay these governments' salaries. No, you're not supposed to criticise all these new voters coming in, people who'll vote for the govt who lets them in, and lets them suck on the welfare teat for generations if need be. It keeps the govt in power. So shut up about the high welfare bills, the high incidence of rapes by Muslim men against non-Muslim women, the honor killings and FGM imported into our countries by these barbarians, the attacks on Jews, the increased crime, the new no-go zones for non-Muslims and cops, the hatred and intolerance towards us preached from their mosques, the plotting of terror attacks in our own countries against our countries, etc. Shut up about all that, you racist!!!

Go Oriana! I'll be buying your books. Oriana, as opposed to Mr. Dickhead, is a practitioner of true free speech.

Author of a maudlin, son-finally-comes-to-terms-with-famous-father-and-thereby-obtains-inner peace memoir, Christopher Dickey parrots the ordinary worldview of ordinary Parisians. Whether or not he has special, personal reasons for keeping a picture of Yassir Arafat on his office wall (as, at least until recently he did, and perhaps continues to do so) is a question that deserves to be pondered..

He is not as vicious as Robert Fisk, and unlike Fisk may actually be in the places he reports from (Fisk is famous for false filings). In the list of apologists for Jihad (some but not all of them distinctly antisemitic as well) he is a bit below the languid Chris (“the Israelis kill Palestinian boys for sport”) of The New York Times (now reporting sympathetically, bien entendu, on Islam), or bowtie-wearing H.D.S. Greenway (mightily impressing, before his semi-retirement, those Globe newsroom staffers wondering what car he would choose to arrive in each day – in their view, a most impressive example of Brahmindom, and he is said to have reveled in his years of being the Big Man, not on Campus, but among the ink-stained on Morrissey Boulevard), or the Peter Jennings level of scarcely-contained hostility toward Israel, and a concomitant whitewashing of Islam and its tenets – how much of this is ignorance, how much antisemitism in its currently acceptable avatar (vilification of Israel, and indifference to its plight), how much hatred of the West and its main defender (the clumsy, inarticulate, lovable United States), is not clear.

Oriana Fallaci is a European, or rather a Tuscan; her destiny is tied to Europe even if she lives now in New York (but will undoubtedly choose to die in Tuscany). She is alarmed and enraged, not so much because she will soon die without the consolation of belief (if consolation it is), but with the furious farsighted understanding that Europe, for no very good reason at all, has chosen to commit suicide, in its permitting huge numbers of polyphiloprogenitive Muslims into its lands, and to deliberately trim its politics, and still more importantly, its own understanding of its own past, its own history, its own civilization, to the idiotic demands of the promoters of the Euro-Arab Dialgouge, a “dialogue” which is really a systematic effort at appeasement of Arab Muslims, born originally out of cupidity (rex malorum cupiditas est), a desire to “recycle petrodollars” and also to assure what required no extra assurance – the ability to buy Arab oil. And for these hollow and essentially worthless goals (of course the Arabs would spend their money in Europe on goods and services, and of course they would sell oil to all who paid the market price – in both cases, they had no other choice. One does not do special favors for one’s gas station owner, does one?).

Her knowledge of the world of Islam, of its leaders, of its peoples, of their attitudes and atmospherics, of their hysteria and hate, does not come out of books or seminars. She has lived among these people, interviewed their leaders, learned what makes them tick. She cannot be fooled.

Let us compare Fallaci and that eternal bumpkin, despite his 20 years in Paris, Christopher Dickey. Fallaci’s moral roots go back to Garibaldi, Le Mille, Cavour, the republican anticlerical current that created the civic and secular class that managed, in turn, to create – despite everything -- a united Italy. As a teenager she was fighting the Nazis in Florence, along with the rest of her family. She was on the left for much of her life, which maddens the Dickeys of this world, because they cannot put her into the prefabricated categories that they have ready for every occasion. She could not stand the Vietnam War, and regarded it as an enormous failure and mistake. . Her great love (about whom she wrote “Un uomo”) was Alexis Panagoulis, hardly a member of the Young Republicans of Greece. She became the most famous Italian journalist of her day, a female successor of Montanelli and Luigi Barzini. She traveled, especially towhat is misleadingly called the Third World, and especially to the Arab and Muslim world, that is even more misleadingly, given its fantastic wealth, regarded as part of that Third World, and interviewed not only Fidel Castro, but the likes of Khomeini, Khaddafy, Arafat, and toute la galere. She spent time, under Israeli fire, with PLO cowards who abandoned her. She saw the spittle-spewing Arafat up close and very personal – to her, a man disgusting beyond words, and in every way.

She saw the crude fanaticism of Khomeini. She understood, because she would have had to be a fool to avoid understanding (though many journalists, like Dickey, have proven equal to that task) what Islam was all about, what it taught, what attitudes it bred, what the atmospherics of Islam are. And she also saw a deepening vilification of Israel and the United States in Europe, which was not accidental, but the result of clever and deliberate policies undertaken by the Muslim Arabs and their European collaborators, both to prepare the intellectual ground both for throwing Israel to the wolves, and for distancing the European Community from its most powerful and truest ally, the United States – for a a Muslim mess of pottage – and a poisoned mess of pottage at that.

She understood early what more people in Western Europe now recognize but still refuse to say aloud, is that the Muslim population which was allowed in, in a fit of criminal negligence by Europe’s ruling elites who did not take the trouble to thoroughly understand the nature of Islam, its tenets, its history, has now made life, possibly permanently, far more expensive, dangerous, and unpleasant for the indigenous non-Muslim peoples of Europe, among whom this essentially indigestible and deeply hostile (even the “moderates” can in a trice have triggered deep within them a “Manchurian candidate” murderous hostility) now live, and will be budged only at great, and possibly violent, cost. She does not spare either the rightist appeasers in the Vatican, some of whom have harbored a traditional antisemitism that caused them to misidentify the Jihad against Israel (and in so doing, to misidentify the coming Jihad against Europe, which is now underway), nor does she spare the leftist clergy throughout Europe who, having lost their their Christian vocation but kept their jobs, find their truest vocation in ministering to the perceived needs of the Muslims of Europe – even acting as their incessant defenders, to the detriment of the continued existence not merely of the Christians still in Europe, but also to the detriment of post-Christian, freethinking, skeptical Europe as well.

How the days must fly for the likes of busy, busy Christopher Dickey. What with the long lunches (Arpege, anyone?), and the hanky-panky, and the pleasantries of the parley-voo, and the latest conferences or news items to read, and those plane flights hither and yon, that put one right in the middle of things – and of course, it is so much more authentic to be in Baghdad or Beirut, and so much more important to be there, than to stay put and read a book or two. Mr. Dickey has no time to actually read, and think about, what Fallaci has written. Or for that matter, about what generations of European scholars, including a great many French scholars, have written about Islam. He might try to read, rather than just dismiss, La rabbia e l’orgoglio, or La forza della ragione, or even this latest autointervista, which in a week sold 500,000 copies (the previous books each sold between 800,000 and a million).. If anyone has helped to push Italy out of the path of total appeasement, it has been Fallaci, because what she has observed, and dares to write down, is what Italians, on their own, in their small towns and big cities, have observed on their own. It is with a sigh of relief, and the shock of recognition, that Italians read her books. They know she is telling the truth, though sometimes she puts the authorial “I” a bit too much in the foreground.

It is Fallaci, the anticlerical republican, who has done more to preserve Christianity in Italy than either the Vatican (one part of which still wants to make deals with Muslims, still engage in Koran-kissing in Damascus, or in those futile and dangerous “dialogues of civilization” that are based on false symmetries, and lead always to a posture of appeasement) or than Sua Emittenza, Berlusconi. Berlusconi may well be a crook, but he is our crook, a crook loyal to the West (did not Lucky Luciano, during World War II, help the American war effort?). Unlike the crooks in the EU bureaucracy, or like Chirac (on the take for decades – from the Arabs), or Andreotti, also bought and paid for by Middle Eastern admirers, Berlusconi is to be preferred, whatever his many sins, as long as his opponent is the dangerous, though dull, Romano Prodi, one of the leading promoters of Eurabia. One need only look at Prodi’s speeches on the Middle East, including his craven performance at the Library in Alexandria last year.

As for Dickey, whether he stays another 20 years in Paris, he will always be, intellectually, one of those limited foreigners who never went beneath either the surface of French or European life. His views parrot the potted views of Le Monde. One doubts that he ever managed to read the one perceptive Le Monde correspondent posted to the Muslim world, Peroncel-Hugoz. Nor, one suspects, did Jacques Ellul or Bat Ye’or in French ever cross his desk, or. Jean-Paul Charnay’s books, or even the slim volume of Anne-Marie Delcambre (“L’Islam des interdits”). Another ignoramus, whose duty it is to instruct and enlighten, and who, like Tom Friedman or the editorial board of the New York Times, is full of people who keep ignoring Wittgenstein’s injunction: Whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak.

They know alright -- they know what “everyone” knows (Ionesco used to refer scathingly to Le Monde as “the paper everyone reads”) What Dominique de Villepin, that profound poet and thinker and expert on the Arab Muslim world (he was born in Sale, just outside Rabat, wasn’t he?) knows. Do not ask Dickey, at this point, to take the time to study the Qur’an and hadith and sira. Really. Besides, Armstrong and Esposito, or only slightly better, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, will confirm all he needs to have confirmed. Besides, he’s gotta go. Leaving for Baghdad, or is it Riyadh, tomorrow. Then on to a “Dialogue of Civilisations” in Morocco – great hotel. Then a few days at the house in Normandy. Then New York, Washington, maybe Aspen. Deliver a talk to a Journalism School. Council on Foreign Relations. Maybe change agents for a book contract about the past 20 years in Paris, and how the Americans have screwed everything up. “Conference on Arab Intellectuals” at the Centre du monde arabe coming up next month. Should be great fun. Mahmoud Darwish, Talal bin Jelloun, oh everybody will be there. What insights they offer. Then onto Geneva…The bullying attempt to dismiss, without discussing, the work of Oriana Fallaci, is symptomatic of the larger mental disease. Inside dopesterism. Rushing about with hectic vacancy. Repeating received ideas and the commonplaces of a certain set, in a certain time and place, without bothering to question them – precisely as Oriana Fallaci has questioned them. Not the slightest embarrassment about an attempt to tar as “racism” what is clearly an attack on an ideology – a belief-system that many intelligent people find indistinguishable from Fascism (see Ibn Warraq’s essay on “Islam and Fascism” at www.secularislam.org).

Karl Kraus, disgusted by the journalism of his day (Vienna, circa 1910-1935), created his own one-man journal, Die Fackel. Sometimes he would rail against the mass cretinization of the age; sometimes he would merely reprint, without any comment of his own, examples of the idiocy of journalists. (One often feels that the only way to deal with the likes of Tom Friedman is simply to reprint his columns, in toto). Kraus could assume that intelligent readers of his day would require no commentary. He had high standards; he was also the author of aphorisms in the Lichtenberg line, and of a great many other works. And when one looks at what infuriated him in the early decades of the 20th century, one realizes that Kraus was living in what, by comparison with today, was a paradise of the educated and the knowledgeable. People, even those he made fun of, knew how to compose paragraphs or even, at times, turn a phrase. What would he make of today’s journalists, where the Times is written in a language cats and dogs can understand, and not the slightest glimmer of individual wit is permitted, a house style of surpassing dullness, and a complete absence of what might be called quality control ove r the journalists, especially those who, like Friedman, have been permitted to make careers out of their own stupidity (nothing is as wonderful as seeing Friedman on the Charlie Rose show actually supplying the “quotation mark” signs around something he has said -- with his fingers).

What would Kraus have said were he alive todayWhat would he make of today’s journalists, especially in the United States, who write about the Middle East, or about the Muslim threat within Europe, without knowing a thing about Islam, either its main tenets, or the 1350-year history of how, under Muslim rule, non-Muslims have been treated?

Dickey, in his all-American Parisian coarseness of thought and expression, makes Gomer Pyle look like Henry James. Once the low level of Western journalism was simply comical. Then it became annoying. Then it became infuriating. And now it is truly a menace.

I just finished reading Oriana Fallaci`s books.
I just wish ther were more like her in Europe and here in the US.
Also Carmen Bin Ladin`s book,"Inside the kingdom",is worth reading.
Eventhough each of these books cost about $ 25-30,i will not keep them in my personal library,but i am giving them to friends and relatives to read and educate themselves and spread the word:islam is evil and it needs to be anihylated.

Hugh,
Once again, you have written eloquently--this time about Oriana Fallaci and that fool Christopher Dickey.

One of the characteristics that makes Fallaci's analyses so important is that she is not writing from the Christian perspective. She is, however, writing from the Western perspective; and her personal knowledge of various personae and eye-witness accounts make what she has to say extremely valid. Of course, those who are blind and deaf as to what is really happening in the world try to write her off as a nut. I submit that the real nuts are those who will not analyze the ideology behind the terrorism.

Fallaci is a truth-teller and tells us exactly what the sons of allah stand for. I encourage those of any or no religious persuasion to read and reread "The Rage and the Pride."