I am very happy to note that Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason is now available in English. This is the long-awaited follow-up to her fearless The Rage and the Pride, and it continues her chronicling of the Islamization of Europe, and of what has been lost and will be lost.
This English edition also contains the full text of her address at the Annie Taylor Awards ceremony last fall, which I wrote about here.
In that speech, Fallaci says:
…thank you, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Robert Spencer. And please believe me when I say that this award is yours as well as mine. That you are my comrades-in-arms, my pals, my buddies.
Oriana, you accord me an honor that I do not deserve. I am proud and grateful to be your comrade-in-arms, and your friend, in this immense struggle.
I will be writing more about this critically important and much-needed book in the coming days; meanwhile, here is Brendan Bernhard’s excellent review in the LA Weekly (thanks to Olivia):
In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?
How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, “if I hate Americans I go to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?”
In attempting to answer these questions, the author, who is stricken with cancer and has been hounded by death threats and charges of “Islamophobia” (she is due to go on trial in France this June), has combined history with snatches of riveting firsthand reportage into a form that reads like a real-life conspiracy thriller.
If The Force of Reason sells a lot of copies, which it almost certainly will (800,000 were sold in Italy alone, and the book is in the top 100 on Amazon ), it will be not only because of the heat generated by her topic, but also because Fallaci speaks for the ordinary reader. There is no one she despises more than the intellectual “cicadas,” as she calls them “” “You see them every day on television; you read them every day in the newspapers” “” who deny they are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least important component. Nonetheless, to give the reader a taste of what Muslim conquest can be like, in her first chapter, Fallaci provides a brief tour of the religion’s bloodiest imperial episodes and later does an amusing job of debunking some of its more exaggerated claims to cultural and scientific greatness.
Read it all.