Oriana Fallaci, the celebrated Italian journalist who has been dead for 13 years, is the woman of the hour in Italy. Italian state television has broadcast a documentary about her life and work, in recognition of what would have been her 90th birthday. All of her books are being republished in a collected-works uniform format. The leading Italian politician, Matteo Salvini, repeatedly refers to her in glowing terms. For many Italians, she is both prophetess and patron saint; the woman who early on warned of the growing Islamic threat inside Europe, and the warrior who called for a campaign to reject and reverse that Muslim presence, which would require an end to the “buonismo” (goody-goodiness) sentiment exhibited by many Europeans, including Christian clerics, who had opened wide the doors of their countries to Muslim migrants – a sentiment, and a policy, that she deplored.
She wrote that Muslim immigration was turning Europe into “a colony of Islam,” an abject place that she called “Eurabia,” (the term made famous by Bat Ye’or), which would eventually “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.” Fallaci argued that Islam had always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the Ottoman Empire’s subsequent assaults on the Balkans and Central Europe, with the highwater mark of Muslim Turkish conquest being the siege of Vienna in 1683. Fallaci argued that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounted to the same thing — invasion — only this time with “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” And, as Fallaci described it, the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled.”
Al Jazeera, the propaganda outlet of the Qatari government, has taken note of Fallaci’s renewed popularity:
At his political rally in Milan in March, Italy’s far-right Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini mentioned two women: the Virgin Mary, who, he said “will lead us to victory”, and Oriana Fallaci, whom he described as “the founding mother of this Europe.”
One of Italy’s most famous journalists, Fallaci, who died in her late seventies in 2006, covered the Vietnam War and interviewed Henry Kissinger, Indira Gandhi, and Ruhollah Khomeini.
This summation of her life was far too brief. Fallaci had a long, distinguished, practically mythic career. She was involved in politics and war from her early youth. Her father was a partisan during the war, captured and tortured by the Germans. As a 14-year-old, she was a bicycle-riding courier for the Italian Resistance in Nazi-occupied Florence. In 1956, she covered the Hungarian Revolution and the crushing of that uprising by the Soviet army. She covered the wars between India and Pakistan. For eight years, from 1967 to 1975, she repeatedly went back to Vietnam to cover the war there, frequently ending up in the midst of the most dangerous battles. She began as a strident critic of the American effort but became increasingly alarmed at the ruthlessness of the North Vietnamese and consequently, more sympathetic to the Americans. She developed a great hatred for certain American leftists, threatening to “kick Jane Fonda in the ass and spit in her face for lying about her coverage of the Vietnam War and betraying the confidence of American POWs.” She went to Cambodia, where she managed to interview Prince Sihanouk just as the Khmer Rouge were gathering. She was with the protesting Mexican students in 1968 when 800 of them were killed by the police; she was shot three times. She interviewed Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and King Hussein in Jordan. She famously took apart Henry Kissinger, who when asked by her to explain his popularity, said: “The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else.” Exposed as comically full of himself, Kissinger always regretted allowing himself to be interviewed by her; he called it “my most disastrous decision.”
Fallaci interviewed Golda Meir, who positively enchanted her for her forthright truth-telling; Meir, she said, was the most impressive of all the people she had ever interviewed. She interviewed Ariel Sharon, who despite her attempts to provoke him, did not take the bait, and she grew to like the aging warrior. She interviewed Regis Debray, the Communist would-be guerilla, in Bolivia, She reported on Spain under Franco, on the appointment of Juan Carlos as king. She interviewed Deng Xiaoping in Beijing; Chinese students flocked to her hotel in hopes of catching a glimpse of her; she was regarded by them as an iconic warrior for freedom. She wrote many books, mostly non-fiction, but also A Man (1979), which was a fictional tribute to her great love, the Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, who died in a suspicious automobile accident in Athens three years after they met. Panagoulis had been imprisoned, and endured torture, for his failed attempt on the life of the Greek junta leader George Papadopoulos, in 1968. Only the tiniest part of her very full life is mentioned by Al Jazeera — that she interviewed Kissinger, Indira Gandhi, and Khomeini.
What Al Jazeera also left out was the fact that Fallaci had a special interest in Islam, Arabs, and Muslim leaders that long predated 9/11. She interviewed not just Khomeini, but Arafat, Khaddafi, and PFLP leader George Habash, a Christian Arab and a terrorist. She even embedded herself with a group of PLO fighters and came under Israeli bombardment. The PLO fighters refused to let her share their bomb shelter, directing her instead to a makeshift shed that was filled with warehoused explosives. She discovered that for the Muslims of the PLO, women, and especially Infidel women, were expendable. Her encounters with Arafat left her feeling only nausea and disgust; Khaddafi she found to be a semi-demented clown; George Habash she found strangely “likeable” at first, but in the end, merely a murderer who told her that “we believe that to kill a Jew far from the battleground has more of an effect than killing one hundred of them in battle.”
Khomeini was a humorless fanatic whom she nonetheless made laugh – his son said it was the only time in his life that he had seen his father laugh – by ripping off her chador in his presence, yelling about “these medieval rags!” He couldn’t believe anyone would dare to defy him as she did; he had to laugh at her chutzpah.
After September 11, she adopted an anti-Islam stance and today her legacy is enjoying a moment of renewed popularity.
She did not, as Al Jazeera claims, “adopt an anti-Islam stance” after 9/11. Her reaction to the atrocity on 9/11, her ferocious denunciation of Islam and the “sons of Allah,” had been decades in the making. She was “anti-Islam” beginning in the early 1960s. She “adopted” nothing, least of all a temporary “stance.” Over many years, she had traveled widely in Muslim countries, had observed Muslim peoples, had interviewed their leaders. Her deep “anti-Islam” convictions were the result of that long familiarity with, and study of, Muslims and Islam.
In 2019 Italy, Fallaci’s unapologetic Islamophobia is alarmingly mainstream. The new ruling class is rediscovering Fallaci as a prescient thinker.
Shall we rephrase this tendentious bit to achieve a modicum of fairness? Can we leave out that propagandistic scare word “Islamophobia”? What about this: “In 2019, Fallaci’s fierce criticism of Islam and Muslims has become widely accepted. Many Italians have come to regard her as a prescient thinker.”
There is no “new ruling class” in Italy. The country’s leading politician is Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister, whose appeal is that he is a populist, of humble origins, who has never part of any political ruling class. His chief rival, also a kind of stand-alone politician, is Beppe Grillo of the “Five Stars” movement and party. Grillo was a comedian before entering politics; he too was anti-establishment and has never been part of any “political ruling class,” nor is he today. The kaleidoscopic realignments of Italian parties and politicians testifies to the absence of such a “ruling class.” It is among all classes of society that Fallaci is being recognized, and hailed, as “prescient” in her Cassandra-like warnings about Muslim encroachments in Europe.
Streets or squares have been renamed after her in Pisa and Arezzo, in central Italy, and Genoa, further north.
A public garden was also dedicated to her in Sesto San Giovanni, an industrial town close to Milan, where the mayor blocked the construction of a mosque.He recently mentioned Fallaci in his inauguration speech: “Her exhortations to the West to wake up still resonate today.”
In July, the lower chamber of Parliament approved the creation of low-denomination treasury bills that could also be used as a de-facto parallel currency to the euro. According to the plan’s main proponent, the League’s MP Claudio Borghi, the 20 euro bill should bear a picture of Fallaci.
For what would have been her 90th birthday, state-owned television channel RAI 2 aired a celebratory documentary about her.
At home, her ideas were not perceived as radical – her anti-Islam manifesto was first published in the country’s most prestigious newspaper [Corriere della Sera].
But with rising anti-immigrant sentiment and with the far-right League party receiving almost 40 percent in the most recent elections, her message resonates with the current climate.
On September 28, 2001, a week [sic] after the September 11 attacks, Corriere della Sera, the Milan-based newspaper, published a five-page article titled La Rabbia e l’Orgoglio, or The Rage and the Pride, in which Fallaci accused the West of being too soft on Islam and Muslim immigrants.
In Italy, she argued, “there is no place for muezzins, minarets, fake teetotalers, their f****** middle ages, and their f****** chadors.”
From then on until her death, Fallaci stirred anti-Muslim sentiment.
Fallaci did not “stir anti-Muslim sentiment.” She was never a rabble-rouser. She did not harangue crowds, even virtual ones. She was much too literate and humorful, qualities rabble-rousers seldom possess. Originally, as a leftist, she was even sympathetic to the Arabs – including the Palestinians. But the reality mugged her. She reported from Muslim countries, interviewing their leaders, and even, in at least one case, accompanying PLO fighters in battle. She grew to detest the Muslims she met, interviewed, reported on. She heard what they said about the West, about Jews, about women. She took note of the triumphalism in their stories – that Islam would conquer Europe, would conquer the world. She paid the Muslims the tribute of taking their hopes and hates and dangerous dreams of genocide and world conquest seriously, something many in the West still refuse to do.
After the article in 2001, she wrote three books – The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason, and Oriana Fallaci Interviews Herself – in which she described the Muslim world as an “enemy we treat as a friend” and warned Europe about what she believed to be the danger of becoming “Eurabia.”
She borrowed the term from a conspiracy theory popularised by the Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or (a pseudonym for Gisele Littman) about an alleged plan to “Islamise” Europe through mass immigration.
Bat Ye’or did not popularize a “conspiracy theory” about a plan to “Islamise” Europe. She provided copious documentation – not merely a “theory” – about the Euro-Arab Dialogue, which began just after the 1973 quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC. The E.A.D. was part of a French-led policy intended to increase European power vis-à-vis the United States by aligning its interests with those of the Arab countries. Bat Ye’or saw this “Euro-Arab Dialogue” as a primary cause of European hostility to Israel. Every charge she makes is backed up by written evidence, much of it little known agreements, including cultural matters, made between Europeans and Arabs, that she included it in her book Eurabia. Al Jazeera’s attempt to belittle Bat Ye’or, and thus to undermine Fallaci, who was influenced by her to the point of borrowing her term “Eurabia,” rests on deliberately using charged phrases – Bat Ye’or’s “conspiracy theory” about an “alleged” plan to “Islamise” Europe – that are designed to undermine trust in her judgment. If she can be painted as a conspiracy-theorizing kook, making up “alleged” plans, then what should we think of Oriana Fallaci, who relies on Bat Ye’or as an authority?
mortimer says
Bravo, RAI !!! Oriana Fallacia was a true investigative journalist who puts the lame fake-news, progandistic ‘journalists’ of today to shame.
Didn’t any of those news people every have a vision of doing clean, objective journalism. Instead they soil themselves shovelling dirt and propaganda.
Oriana Fallaci should be the patron saint of journalists.
gravenimage says
+1
CRUSADER says
According to this, she has many streets named in her honor. Perhaps our own MAP * poster in Italy ( Mario Alexis Portella ) can verify…. ?
====================
After September 11, 2001, Fallaci wrote books critical of Islamic extremists and Islam in general, and in both writing and interviews warned that Europe was “too tolerant of Muslims”.
The first book was RAGE AND PRIDE (initially a four-page article in Corriere della Sera, the major national newspaper in Italy). She wrote that “sons of Allah breed like rats”, and in a Wall Street Journal interview in 2005, she said that Europe was no longer Europe but “Eurabia”. Along with her other book, FORCE OF REASON, she became recognized as a bestsellIng author.
Fallaci became, in her last years, staunchly socially conservative, opposing abortion (except for rape), euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and gay adoptions.
On 27 August 2005, Fallaci had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo. Although an atheist, Fallaci reportedly had great respect for the Pope and expressed admiration for his 2004 essay titled “If Europe Hates Itself”.
Despite being an atheist, she claimed that she was also a “Christian atheist”.
Fallaci died on 15 September 2006, in her native Florence, from cancer. She was buried in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in the southern suburb of Florence, Galluzzo, alongside her family members and a stone memorial to Alexandros Panagoulis, her late companion.
Legacy —-
Streets and squares have been renamed after her in Pisa and Arezzo, in central Italy, and Genoa, further north.
A public garden has also been dedicated to her in Sesto San Giovanni, an industrial town close to Milan. In July 2019, the lower chamber of Parliament approved the creation of low-denomination treasury bills that could also be used as a de-facto parallel currency to the euro. According to the plan’s main proponent, the League’s MP Claudio Borghi, the 20 euro bill should bear a picture of Fallaci.
=========
Favorite bit — Fallaci was in Tehran (1979) to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini, she was required to wear a chador. During the interview, she removed it and attacked the obligation of women to wear it.
=====================
* “Islam Religion of Peace?:
The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-up”
— book by Mario Alexis Portella
Eight hundred years ago, St. Francis of Assisi embarked on a mission to the port city of Damietta, Egypt, to try and convert Sultan al-Kamil to Christianity. While this did not come to fruition, both the sultan and the saint were able to have a peaceful dialogue and establish a mutual respect that is absent from the present-day polemics of Islam.
While many today hold that those who seek to create a universal caliphate through acts of terror in the name of Islam falsely represent their religion, they ignore the original Islamic texts that inspire these perpetrators. The Islamization of our society, however, does not just come from avowed terrorists but from various Islamic scholars and activists seeking to impose sharia law.
As a result of the West disavowing its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots, government officials have catered to such injustices since they consider the petrodollar more valuable than the victims of violence. Consequently, they have capitulated our rights of free speech and religion to the point of classifying anyone who questions Islamists’ intentions as an Islamophobe.
Islam: Religion of Peace? places Islam in its historical and sociopolitical contexts in order to better understand what has bred the Islamic threat facing today’s society, as well as how many of our political and church leaders have failed to address the problem, thereby creating more instability between both Muslims and non-Muslims. Author Mario Alexis Portella also proposes solutions whereby both peoples may enter into a meaningful discourse and establish harmony.
http://www.faithfreedom.org/author/rev-mario-alexis-portella/
https://thegreatarchitect.blog/author/thegreatarchitect2019/page/2/
w says
As i have said before. Imagine if you will if Islam’s armies had conquered Europe after their many attempts were foiled in Southern France and Vienna. Western civilisation would not exist. There would be no literature except Arabic literature, no classical music ballet and opera, no great paintings and sculpture and no drama such as Shakespeare, Schiller Moliere etc. indeed no enlightenment.
We would be spending our lives on our knees.
Of course we most likely would not have any Hitlers or Napoleons, but they were aberrations and we would most likely have avoided Communism also but we survived them.
E says
Even if they had a literature, you would never read it because you’d be illiterate in such a society. The Muslims care not for educational standards and literacy. That education should be accessible to all is a mainly Western idea.
mortimer says
Oriana Fallaci was the only person known to have made Ayatollah Khomeini laugh. Khomeini’s son said it was the only time he saw his father laugh.
RichardL says
And she was seriously rude to the bastard! Nice little detail, mortimer!
Lotus says
She was a brave, principled woman who was not afraid to speak out. She stood up for western values. She had a backbone.
The muslim immigration issues have only got worse since her death.
Recently I have been reading ‘The Strange Death of Europe’ (2017) by Douglas Murray. I highly recommend it.
One key thing he says about Europe is that as a culture and civilisation it is tired and clapped-out. This creates a kind of cultural vacuum which can be filled by Muslims.
He notes, for example, the way that Europeans feel guilty about their history and are always apologising for it. This lack of cultural self-confidence can take bizarre forms.
Here’s a quote of one example of this cultural and personal self-flagellation. I could barely believe my eyes when I read it.
QQ/”Mr Hawkins is a [British] theatre director who discovered in mid-life that he was a descendant of a sixteenth-century slave-trader called John Hawkins. In 2006 he was invited by a charity called ‘Lifeline Expedition’ (which organises trips to ‘heal the past’) to go on a ‘sorry’ trip to Gambia.
‘The upshot was that Hawkins joined 26 other slaver descendants in June of that year who paraded through the streets of the capital, Banjul, with chains around their hands and yokes about their necks. As they walked to the 25,000-seater sports stadium Hawkins and the other participants also wore T-shirts with the words ‘So Sorry’ on them.
‘Weeping and on their knees the group apologised in English, French and German to about 18,000 people in the stadium before being ceremonially ‘freed’ of their chains by the Gambian Vice-President, Isatou Njie-Saidy.”/QQ
What nonsense! The slave trade wasn’t good, but what is this mawkish melodrama supposed to achieve?
Murray goes on to note that such guilt trips can be used by savvy political operators.
QQ/”Many years ago, during one of the not-infrequent breakdowns in peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a journalist was interviewing Yasser Arafat in his offices in Ramallah. Towards the end of the interview one of Arafat’s male assistants came into the Chairman’s office to announce that the American delegation was here.
‘Wondering whether he had stumbled upon a scoop, the journalist asked the Chairman who the Americans in the next room were. ‘They are an American delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologise for the crusades,’ said Arafat.
‘Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.”/QQ
CRUSADER says
“mawkish” is an apt description of such a looney demonstration of travesty.
Guilt tripping if accepted will become ENDLESS, and a foolish rabbit hole to go down.
By the way, some prefer referring to them as “palestinians” since it puts them into accurate historic place that way, and also gets folks to ask why the quotations and why without a capital P…. thus starting a conversation much needed in furthering CounterJihad.
Another thing to avoid is calling a massive meeting place where all roads meet as “mecca” …and to halt usage of the term for a large footstool as an “ottoman”….
No apologizing for Crusading, by the way!
Neville Chamberlain doters need not apply themselves,
as appeasing does NOT work!
Lotus says
She was a brave, principled woman who was not afraid to speak out. She had a backbone and stood up for western values.
Recently I have been reading ‘The Strange Death of Europe’ (2017) by Douglas Murray. I highly recommend it.
One key thing he says about Europe is that as a culture and civilisation it is tired and clapped-out. This creates a kind of cultural vacuum which can be filled by Muslims.
He notes, for example, the way that Europeans feel guilty about their history and are always apologising for it. This lack of cultural self-confidence can take bizarre forms.
Here’s a quote of one example of this cultural and personal self-flagellation. I could barely believe my eyes when I read it.
QQ/”Mr Hawkins is a [British] theatre director who discovered in mid-life that he was a descendant of a sixteenth-century slave-trader called John Hawkins. In 2006 he was invited by a charity called ‘Lifeline Expedition’ (which organises trips to ‘heal the past’) to go on a ‘sorry’ trip to Gambia.
‘The upshot was that Hawkins joined 26 other slaver descendants in June of that year who paraded through the streets of the capital, Banjul, with chains around their hands and yokes about their necks. As they walked to the 25,000-seater sports stadium Hawkins and the other participants also wore T-shirts with the words ‘So Sorry’ on them.
‘Weeping and on their knees the group apologised in English, French and German to about 18,000 people in the stadium before being ceremonially ‘freed’ of their chains by the Gambian Vice-President, Isatou Njie-Saidy.”/QQ
What nonsense! The slave trade wasn’t good, but what is this mawkish melodrama supposed to achieve?
Murray goes on to note that such guilt trips can be used by savvy political operators.
QQ/”Many years ago, during one of the not-infrequent breakdowns in peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a journalist was interviewing Yasser Arafat in his offices in Ramallah. Towards the end of the interview one of Arafat’s male assistants came into the Chairman’s office to announce that the American delegation was here.
‘Wondering whether he had stumbled upon a scoop, the journalist asked the Chairman who the Americans in the next room were. ‘They are an American delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologise for the crusades,’ said Arafat.
‘Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.”/QQ
CRUSADER says
Ditto.
Eric Jones says
Bravo to Oriana Fallaci. May we learn from her writings . She saw the danger of Islam coming. May she rest in peace.
Liz says
+1
“She paid the Muslims the tribute of taking their hopes and hates and dangerous dreams of genocide and world conquest seriously, something many in the West still refuse to do.”
Jay says
I had not heard of Oriana Fallaci before reading this tribute to her! She was so brave and so ahead of her time. What an impressive contribution she has made to Italy and the world.
I hope her books are still available! May she RIP!
Thank you to Hugh Fitzgerald for a great article! Thank you to Matteo Salvini for keeping her memory alive!
gravenimage says
Jay, I would highly recommend her books “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason” most of all. The English translations are a bit clunky, and I’ve heard that you don’t get the full sense of her muscular prose, but they are *well* worth reading:
https://www.amazon.com/Rage-Pride-Oriana-Fallaci/dp/0847825043
https://www.amazon.com/Force-Reason-Oriana-Fallaci/dp/0847827534/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CQAP5PGFB5WR1TR6B9S4
CRUSADER says
Check out the David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlets ….
Billy Chickens says
Oriana Fallaci’s interview of Muhammad Ali was chilling. After telling him to “Go to Hell” – because he was resentful and very nasty, snorting and scratching himself and deliberately belching in her face to offend her – she was almost killed by his cronies. Ali was “struck with astonishment” as he sat with a slice of watermelon in mid-air”. But then the Black Muslims went after her.
They shouted “Filthy Christian!” at her then surrounded her taxi, (driven by a terrified black man wearing a Coptic cross). “The street was deserted and the driver couldn’t get the engine to start, couldn’t drive away.”
The Black Muslims lifted the taxi and started to overturn it but BY DIVINE PROVIDENCE a police car drove by and they stopped. Fallaci said: “And if a police car hadn’t happened to pass by (a miracle that seriously put my religious unbelief at stake) I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.”
This is from her book Force of Reason, pp 119-124. She also mentions Elijah Muhammad born Elijah Poole, Ali’s mentor. A carved wood bust of Elijah Muhammad was prominently on display at Williamsburg’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in 2018. Why? Because there was an African American exhibit there at the time and one of the current artists had carved it. The bust of Elijah Muhammad was the FIRST thing one saw when entering the museum that day – and I assume the entire time the exhibit was shown.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
When the awful RINO gave his public tribute to Muhammad Ali, I thought of how he avoided the draft to go to Viet Nam based on his putative status as a conscientious objector. He was no peacenik, he didn’t service his country because his country was Islam and he had no loyalty to America.
I also thought of how ex-Prez George W after 9/11 went to the local DC mosque and prostrated himself to Allah, and how in his nationally televised speech Dubya claimed that Islam is a religion of peace and that Islam in Arabic means peace, not submite.
CRUSADER says
Trump hasn’t liked the Bushes for many reasons.
Despite a wonderful send off of GHWBush recently, which was an outstanding funeral, there’ve been too many compromises made by the Bush family toward their god, Globalism.
Each major league sycophant of Globalism and toward All World Government and developing New World Order have different reasons for their supportive roles, not sure what the Bushes were up to aside from sucking up — as Bonesmen tend to do, but the Rockefellers initially connected onto the world stage of politics out of concern for the masses retaliating against the supremely uber wealthy, as revolution was distinctly in the air a century’s ago,… and gave a great deal away to assuage the public.
Rufolino says
“His country was Islam.”
Thanks for that arresting observation !
FYI says
His mother’s paternal grandfather was a WHITE Irish immigrant,Abe O’Grady.
As for those “Black Muslims”;I mean, they know muhammed,the great “prophet” of islam, was the owner,buyer and seller of black African slaves,right?
sahih muslim 3901
Me says
A rare Gem she was… Kudos lady…!
Billy Chickens says
Here’s Williamsburg’s link to the “Bust of Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975)”. Note the description of Elijah Muhammad. Also the Black Muslims became the Nation of Islam as we know it today.
http://emuseum.history.org/view/objects/asitem/classification@39/4/title-asc?t
Billy Chickens says
Apologies…here’s the entire link.
http://emuseum.history.org/view/objects/asitem/classification@39/4/title-asc?t:state:flow=a1b78b1f-fa8f-49be-ae39-9e98bd6b5987
CRUSADER says
That’s how I picture him !
The cad !
Billy Chickens says
Apologies…here’s the entire link.
http://emuseum.history.org/view/objects/asitem/classification@39/4/title-asc?t:state:flow=a1b78b1f-fa8f-49be-ae39-9e98bd6b5987
CRUSADER says
Why Won’t Women’s March Leaders Denounce Louis Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitism?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/is-it-so-hard-to-denounce-louis-farrakhans-anti-semitism.html
Two weeks ago, during a Saviours’ Day event to commemorate the life of Nation of Islam founder Master Fard Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan had some things to say about Jews. The “powerful Jews,” he told the audience inside Wintrust Arena in Chicago, “are my enemy.” The Jews are also “responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men” — that is, for the existence of transgender people, which Farrakhan apparently views as a pressing moral concern. He issued a warning to a subset of the Jewish community — “Farrakhan has pulled the cover off the eyes of the Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through. You good Jews better separate because the satanic ones will take you to hell with them because that’s where they are headed.”
Under normal circumstances, sadly, none of this would come as a surprise. As the Anti-Defamation League and plenty of other organizations have amply documented, Farrakhan has been a hardened anti-Semite — not to mention a committed enemy of LGBT rights — for a long time, and the broader Nation of Islam movement has a longstanding problem with anti-Semitism (as the ADL noted, Farrakhan was not the only speaker to make wildly offensive remarks about Jews that day). This is a man who has described Adolf Hitler as a “very great man.”
What made this address different was one of the attendees: Tamika D. Mallory, co-president of the successful Women’s March organization that has served as an important part of the anti-Trump resistance movement ever since it was formed. During the portion of his speech not dedicated to recycling ages-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Farrakhan explicitly praised both the March and Mallory herself. Mallory posted an Instagram video of herself at the event, and previously had posted a photo of herself with Farrakhan describing him as the “GOAT,” or “greatest of all time.”
Once Mallory’s attendance at the event was revealed, she was repeatedly asked to denounce Farrakhan’s rhetoric, and she declined to do so. When she addressed the controversy, she did so vaguely. In one tweet, she did denounce anti-Semitism and transphobia without explicitly mentioning Farrakhan; in another, she made the dispute out to be some sort of thorny moral dilemma entailing “nuance & complexities.”
The Women’s March followed a similar tack: not really addressing the controversy head-on at all. Yesterday, a full nine days after the controversy broke out, it finally posted a statement:
——
The phrasing is strikingly milquetoast: “Minister Farrakhan’s statements about Jewish, queer, and trans people are not aligned with the Women’s March Unity Principles, which were created by women of color leaders and are grounded in Kingian Nonviolence.” Also striking is the group’s explanation for why it took a week and a half for it to issue a statement: “Our external silence has been because we are holding these conversations and are trying to intentionally break the cycles that pit our communities against each other. We have work to do, as individuals, as an organization, as a movement, and as a nation.”
Who is being pitted against whom here? The only question is whether or not viciously anti-Semitic claims — claims that have historically led to the murders of millions of Jews — should be swiftly denounced. And there is no version of “social justice,” whatever one’s conception of that might be, where the answer isn’t obvious. There is nothing to discuss here.
But more than one member of the Women’s March has described Farrakhan’s rank anti-Semitism in exactly these terms: not as a decades-long pattern of bigotry to be denounced, but as a political maneuver (presumably from the right) that requires a deft, careful response. In January, for example, Women’s March co-chair Carmen Perez told Refinery29: “In regards to Minister Farrakhan, I think that is a distraction.” She continued: “People need to understand the significant contributions that these individuals have made to Black and Brown people… There are no perfect leaders. We follow the legacy of Dr. King, which is Kingian non-violence. We say we have to attack the forces of evil, not the people doing evil. We never attack people.” The view that this is a “distraction” slots neatly into Mallory’s desire not to “redraw the lines of division”:
@TamikaDMallory
This is a thread. It seems I am not being clear. I am and always have been against all forms of racism. I am committed to ending anti-black racism, antisemitism, homophobia & transphobia. This is why I helped create an intersectional movement to bring groups together.
Contrary to others, I listen. I have been in deep reflection and trying to be as thoughtful as possible. I want my own work to speak for itself but I will reiterate my commitment to building this movement. I won’t go back, I won’t redraw the lines of division. I want a new way.
To be fair, there are definitely situations in which nuance is required to evaluated complicated, flawed figures, particularly when it comes to the leaders of bygone eras where different social mores reigned. But in this case, the subject at hand is a man who, in 2018, continues to spout murderous propaganda against a group that was, in his lifetime, almost entirely removed, via gas and bullet and starvation, from the European continent. If you’re a Jew, it’s absolutely baffling and infuriating for anyone to meet this sort of rhetoric with “Look, it’s complicated,” or “But what if our political enemies use this divide against us?”
More broadly, it’s simply difficult to think of any other situation in the left-of-center universe where the response to hate speech would be anything like this, where the act of responding aggressively to that hate speech would be seen as a “distraction” or a political trap to be avoided. The Women’s March, throughout this whole controversy, just hasn’t come across as taking anti-Semitism very seriously.
Rarely says
What an incredible courageous person.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Oriana Fallaci is an historical figure… if that history is ever written. The author here writes the contemporary history, but one wonders if that will survive in the near future. If the Moslems take over, it’s certain that this small piece of history will not be written, much less read and understood.
gravenimage says
Yes–this is great from Hugh Fitzgerald.
Here’s more on Oriana Fallaci, from Robert Spencer:
“New Robert Spencer pamphlet: Oriana Fallaci: Europe’s Cassandra”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/06/new-robert-spencer-pamphlet-oriana-fallaci-europes-cassandra
CRUSADER says
“Now that this suicide is blazingly obvious, Oriana Fallaci deserves the gratitude of all free people for sounding the alarm, at immense personal cost.”
gravenimage says
+1
Bronxgirl says
About this “white guilt and a supposed diminishing of pride in their culture”, working class and most lower middle class people generally don’t have those feelings because they are busy making a living and interacting with all sorts of people. In NYC, as opposed to London, there is more healthy interacting, it seems. The ass kissing and refusal to judge or even see lifestyles and beliefs which so go against Western civil and human rights, such as misogyny etc., I think, is due to the fact that in the back of people’s minds, they very much do realize the ugliness of Islam. And Islam informs so much of the culture. Instead of just judging people on an individual basis, as most working people do, the wealthier, who do not interact as frequently with minorities, in general, find it easier to just push away the thought that the beliefs and culture of a major religion is dangerous. It is easier to malign the less prosperous of your own culture. And about having lost pride in one’s Western values of equal rights, we need to act to enact laws and enforce laws that support our values; laws that go against misogynistic practices, for example.
cornelius says
My tiny little contribution in the much-needed immortalization of a great lady.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Cornelius. I remember this from a few years ago when you first posted it. Great stuff! You are very talented.
CRUSADER says
Wonderful.
Captured her beauty.
Gratitude.
Perhaps a penned song to Theo Van Gogh or Pim Fortuyn,
both having been assassinated for rightly speaking up,
could be in order someday by someone as talented as well?
Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn
(19 February 1948 – 6 May 2002), was a Dutch politician
who formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn or LPF)
in 2002 before his assassination.
Fortuyn had controversial views on multiculturalism, immigration and Islam in the Netherlands. He called Islam “a backward culture”, and was quoted as saying that if it were legally possible, he would close the borders for Muslim immigrants. Fortuyn also supported tougher measures against crime and opposed state bureaucracy, wanting to reduce Dutch financial contribution to the European Union. He was labelled a far-right populist by his opponents and in the media, but he fiercely rejected this label. Fortuyn was openly homosexual and was a supporter of gay rights.
Fortuyn explicitly distanced himself from “far-right” politicians such as the Belgian Filip Dewinter, the Austrian Jörg Haider, or Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen whenever compared to them.
While he compared his own politics to centre-right politicians such as Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Edmund Stoiber of Germany, he also admired former Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl, a social democrat, and Democratic U.S. president John F. Kennedy.
Fortuyn was assassinated during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign by Volkert van der Graaf, a left-wing environmentalist and animal rights activist. In court at his trial, van der Graaf said he murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as “scapegoats” and targeting “the weak members of society” in seeking political power.
Van der Graaf was released on parole on 2 May 2014, after having served two thirds of his sentence as required by Dutch law.
When asked about his opposition to Muslim immigration, Fortuyn explained that, “I have no desire to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.”
“I am also in favour of a cold war with Islam. I see Islam as an extraordinary threat, as a hostile religion.”
Fortuyn also maintained that he did not object to Muslim migrants because of their race or ethnicity, but for what he saw as lack of integration and unwillingness to adapt to Dutch standards of modernity and social liberalism.
“Muslims in the Netherlands did not accept Dutch society… the religion of Islam was fundamentally intolerant and incompatible with Western values. Muslims in the Netherlands needed to accept living together with the Dutch, and that if this was unacceptable for them, then they were free to leave….. I want to live together with the Muslim people, but it takes two to tango.”
Fortuyn used the word achterlijk, literally meaning “backward”, but commonly used as an insult in the sense of “retarded”. After his use of “achterlijk” caused an uproar, Fortuyn said he had used the word with its literal meaning of “backward”:
“I don’t hate Islam. I consider it a backward culture. I have travelled much in the world. And wherever Islam rules, it’s just terrible. All the hypocrisy. It’s a bit like those old Reformed Protestants. The Reformed lie all the time. And why is that? Because they have standards and values that are so high that you can’t humanly maintain them. You also see that in that Muslim culture. Then look at the Netherlands. In what country could an electoral leader of such a large movement as mine be openly homosexual? How wonderful that that’s possible. That’s something that one can be proud of. And I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much.”
Fortuyn wrote “Against the Islamization of Our Culture” (1997).
gravenimage says
CRUSADER, Cornelius has also done a fine tribute song to Robert Spencer:
“Robert Spencer, Here’s to You”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/04/robert-spencer-heres-to-you
Angemon says
May allah deliver us from such a fate!!!! 😉😘
Yup – “Israel kills foreign civilians” is the sort of headlines that gives the likes of PLO wet dreams…
lebel says
I was thinking of Mr. Spencer’s condemnation of the two congresswomen as acting nazi-like because the Nazis called for a boycott of Jewish goods. I wonder if that same logic worked both ways, and of course we know it does not when the target is Muslims.
Exhibit A: “Jews proliferate like rats”, the eternal Jewr, Nazi propaganda film
Likely Jwatch reaction: “disgusting”, “horrible”
Exhibit B: “Muslims breed like rats”, the rage and the price, Orianna Fallaci
Likely Jwatch reaction: “appropriate”, “accurate” or “she didn’t mean that, you disgusting Muslim”
In other words, the usual double standards
gravenimage says
Muslims regularly urge the Jihad of the womb to take over the world and impose brutal Shari’ah law. Of course, lebel has no problem with this.
This was from just the day before yesterday:
“Iranian official: ‘Shiites must take on the jihad of childbearing to counter the goals of the enemies’”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/08/iranian-official-shiites-must-take-on-the-jihad-of-childbearing-to-counter-the-goals-of-the-enemies
The above is Shia; but this is common with all Muslims.
CRUSADER says
No guarantee of Islam dominating — if the womb muzzies begin to convert away to a truer faith than the River of Blood of Islam….
gravenimage says
+1
Angemon says
From “likely reactions” to assurance there are double standards – the usual lebel dishonesty and sand-tossing. Of course, this does nothing to disprove that Fallacci was right regarding what she saw in islam and the dangers emanating from it…
Ole Pederson says
She was one of the greatest humans to ever live.
Courage, spine and brain!!! Straight like nobody else.
I loved to read her books, including her rants.
They made me feel so well like breathing fresh air again after all the media brainwash.
Thank you Oriana.
R.I.P.
Rufolino says
A woman of extraordinary prescience, given the period.
An acute awareness of world-historical developments whilst almost everyone else was asleep.
Brilliant person, justly celebrated.
gravenimage says
Al Jazeera Bemoans the Celebration, in Italy, of Oriana Fallaci (Part 1)
………………..
*Of course* Al Jazeera hates a brave and principled person–a woman most of all–who courageously spoke out against the horrors of Islam.
And she started early, giving the Ayatollah Khomeini what for in an interview shortly after the takeover of Iran in 1979. She just upped her game after 9/11.
I did not agree with her on everything, but she will always have my greatest admiration. How I wish there were more like her.
CRUSADER says
David Horowitz Freedom Center offers this pamphlet ….
Oriana Fallaci: Europe’s Cassandra
Summary: Robert Spencer, the editor of the Center’s Jihad Watch Program and Fallaci’s personal friend in her last years, has written this pamphlet on the legacy of this great defender of the West and its values. The late Oriana Fallaci became a leading international journalist in the 1970’s and 1980’s with her interviews of figures such as Yasser Arafat and Indira Ghandi. She was always irreverent in the face of authoritarianism and once even angrily ripped off the chador she was required to wear to see the Ayatollah Khoumeni in the middle of their interview. But after 9/11, her Leftist allies turned on her one after another when she directed her anger toward radical Islam in a prophetic trilogy of books written just before her death. In them, Fallaci gave a final warning cry as to how Western societies were committing suicide by not taking up arms against the jihadis seeking to destroy them.
https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/pamplets/products/oriana-fallaci-europes-cassandra
tim gallagher says
It is great to see the recognition and celebration of Oriana Fallaci in Italy. I see it mainly as a promising sign that people in Italy have woken up in large numbers to the evil and dangerous nature of Islam. It is a very good sign. These people, such as Fallaci and Bat Ye’or and the others (I think people mention Conor Cruise O’Brien and maybe Ibn Warraq as people who woke up early) who woke up to the vile nature of Islam early on (way ahead of most people) intrigue me. I guess you would have to describe them as the people who dug the well for the other fighters against barbaric Islam who have followed. They deserve to be celebrated. From the article above, I like how Fallaci identified the “goody-goodiness” attitude that so many fools in the western world have had towards Islam, which has been a huge problem. And, along the same lines, seeing Islam “as the enemy we treat as a friend”. Political correctness and the fantasy of multiculturalism, when it comes to islam, have done so much damage.
CRUSADER says
Daniel Pipes on CCO’B
http://www.danielpipes.org/6336/conor-cruise-obrien-the-state-of-the-zionist-state
Conor Cruise O’Brien, born in 1917, is an acclaimed author, public intellectual, international statesman and former government minister in Ireland. He was a member of the Irish delegation to the United Nations from 1956 to 1961 and represented Dag Hammarskjold in the breakaway province of Katanga during the Congo crisis. He has been vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University and editor-in-chief of the Observer in London. He is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and writes regularly for newspapers and magazines in Europe and North America. His more than twenty books and plays include To Katanga and Back, Herod: Reflections on Political Violence, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, and his biography of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody. His most recent book is entitled Memoir: My Life and Themes. His main work concerning the Middle East is The Siege: The Story of Israel and Zionism (1986). He was interviewed in New York City on March 14, 2000, by Daniel Pipes and Joseph Skelly, the editor of Ideas Matter: Essays in Honor of Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Israel’s Isolation
Middle East Quarterly: The Siege postulated that Israel’s isolation in the Middle East was an unalterable fact of Middle Eastern politics and one that would persist “in some form, into an indefinite future”1—despite the Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement and some subtle hints of moderation heard at the time. Nevertheless, you recognized that “in certain conditions the siege could become – for a period, at least – a largely latent and metaphorical affair.” How do your thesis look fourteen years later?
Conor Cruise O’Brien: Well, of course, there have been developments that I didn’t anticipate. I didn’t anticipate the agreement between Arafat and Israel, because it came about as a result of the Gulf War. Nobody expected the war or the isolation of Arafat after it. He had to come in from the cold; he was flat broke; and therefore he went to Washington more or less on hands and knees and asked them to broker a deal. Israel also had strong reasons for maintaining good relations with Washington on acceptable terms, and they did. The agreement hasn’t worked very well, and it’s not very complete, but it’s there.
Apart from that, it is true that Israel has not achieved peace with all its neighbors, because Syria is a holdout. And it’s probably true that if, God forbid, relations between the United States and Israel should break down, and Israel no longer had any backing from Washington, all the Arab states would join in a combination against Israel. Fortunately, that hypothesis is quite remote.
MEQ: So the isolation does persist?
O’Brien: The isolation does persist. But there are circumstances in which Israel could get an agreement with Syria. It would be at a pretty stiff price, but you could get it.
MEQ: And that would end the isolation?
O’Brien: It would end the isolation in the region of the Fertile Crescent. Israel could be in peace with all her immediate neighbors.
MEQ: What would such a peace really mean? Wouldn’t it be merely a piece of paper?
O’Brien: No, it could be more than that. After all, the peace with Egypt is peace: it has held. Israel and Egypt used to be at war, or at the threshold of war.
MEQ: But one could argue that there has been no more war between Syria and Israel in twenty-five years than there has been between Egypt and Israel.
O’Brien: There has been no direct war, but most the paramilitary groups that regard themselves as at war with Israel are subsidized and supported by Syria. Damascus keeps that going, and it won’t stop until there is a settlement with the Golan Heights.
MEQ: But wouldn’t that just lead to deterrent peace—similar to the peace between the United States and Cuba—as opposed to harmonious peace, which is what we have with Canada?
O’Brien: Well, it wouldn’t be anything like the peace between the U.S. and Canada, no. The Arab world has never accepted the legitimacy of the existence of Israel and is not likely to do so. These things are handed down from generation to generation.
MEQ: So, aren’t you implying that the isolation will continue?
O’Brien: Well, in a sense the isolation will continue, but it will not be any longer isolation under threat of, and sometimes more than threats of, reality of, military action from Israel’s neighbors. The more distant Muslim countries, such as Iraq and Iran, will continue to be hostile and will continue to try to stir up hostility against Israel; I don’t see any early settlement to that. But I do see a prospect—under certain conditions, such as the deal with Syria, of Israel’s having tolerable connections with all its neighbors, Egypt-style, if you like. They won’t be cordial relations, but they will work.
Hostility to Israel
MEQ: What are the origins of Israel’s isolation? How much of Israel’s isolation goes back to bias? Does the country suffer from anti-Semitism on an international level?
O’Brien: Well, anti-Semitism is undoubtedly there. Let’s go back to the very beginning, the time of covert Zionism — the build-up of Zionist settlements in Palestine more than a century ago. The settlements were established mainly by bribing Turkish officials to turn a blind eye to them. Then, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, things changed greatly to Israel’s disadvantage. And this was because of the liberalization of the press, which was run by revolutionary governments. An Arab press, as distinct from an Ottoman press, developed, a press in the Arabic language. The Arab newspapers all denounced the Zionist movement, inciting against it and prophesizing its destruction at the hands of the emerging Arab states. That set the tone which then continued and intensified after the foundation of the State of Israel, culminating in the attack on Israel by all its Arab neighbors after the British withdrew in 1948. The defeat of the Arab countries came to be called an-nakba, the disaster, and then all the Arabs’ rhetorical energies and some of their other energies were devoted to canceling out that disaster. That psychology has undergone various mitigations and other evolutions, but it’s still very much around, as the event of a weakening of the State of Israel would show.
MEQ: Is there a Muslim-Jewish dimension to this problem?
O’Brien: Rooted in the political and linguistic realities of the region, Muslims and Jews are not about to be reconciled. The Arab propaganda against Israel is brutally anti-Judaic: It includes justifying the Holocaust and circulating again the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and believing in this admitted forgery.
MEQ: How much does Israel depend on the United States?
O’Brien: Very much. It exists in a kind of symbiosis with the United States. That is one of the reasons why it is not being attacked by Arab neighbors who very much dislike its existence. So if that relationship should break down, which is very unlikely, there would again be a serious, terrible threat to the existence of the State of Israel. That’s a theoretical catastrophic possibility; it doesn’t appear to be in any sense imminent.
MEQ: Where do these attitudes leave Israel? Is it still a country in jeopardy, or is its long-term existence now reasonably ensured?
O’Brien: Yes, Israel will be around for a long time.
European and American Attitudes
MEQ: Has the Roman Catholic Church undergone a shift in attitudes following the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1994?
O’Brien: Yes, there is a shift, and we experienced that in Ireland. For a great many years, the Irish government supported the view that Israel’s position on Jerusalem was unlawful, and therefore Israel could not be recognized. There were no diplomatic relations for a long time, then there was only an attenuated form of diplomatic relations. Now there is an Israeli ambassador in Dublin, fully accredited, and relations with Israel are much more relaxed. They occasionally deteriorate when there is some clash involving Israel and United Nations forces. If relations are somewhat strained, though, they not so strained as they used to get under comparable conditions in the old days. So, in my lifetime, there has been a definite and clear improvement in the relation.
MEQ: You’ve spent a lot of time in the United States. Could you give us some thoughts on the differences between attitudes towards Israel here and in Europe?
O’Brien: They are very different. Most European Jews are simply not there anymore, because they were wiped out, whereas here, in the United States, Jews are an important factor. Although a majority American Jews didn’t always support Israel, they came to support Israel when it appeared that the British government was backing the Arabs against Israel. At the Biltmore Conference of 1942, the representatives of American Jewry came out strongly in favor of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The recognition that followed was partly a result of that pressure and that force, and the force is still there. The identification with the State of Israel of this really large block of voters in key states is a critical part of that country’s security.
MEQ: You imply it is just a matter of nose counting? Wasn’t there a strong Christian Zionism in America going back to before there was any kind of significant Jewish vote in the United States? One thinks of the Blackstone Memorial of 1891, in which many of the most powerful leaders in the country called for “an international conference to consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home[DP1] .”
CCOB: Yes, that pro-Zionist sentiment was always around.
MEQ: And it didn’t have a parallel in Europe.
O’Brien: No, it didn’t.
MEQ: Still today some of the strongest supporters of Israel in America are among the Christian Right; again, there is no parallel in Europe, correct?
O’Brien: Very true. This reminds me of my travels in Israel with some leaders of the American Christian Right. I found the experience a bit weird. As we drove along, they said things that I found quite congenial and acceptable politically concerning their support for the State of Israel. Then, as we were returning to Jerusalem, their conversation took a different turn as they explained why they favored of State of Israel. This had to do with their belief that Israel is being prepared for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The first stage will involve tearing down the Arab temples on the Temple Mount. The next stage will be the Second Coming.
MEQ: Such views are virtually non-existent in Europe, right?
O’Brien: It’s not nearly as significant, certainly not. Most people wouldn’t even be aware of it.
MEQ: And this comes out of an American history of Christian Zionism?
O’Brien: Yes, right.
….
CRUSADER says
….
Israeli Attitudes
MEQ: Looking at Israel itself, some say that the Zionist spirit that built the country is now defunct. It’s a country where people are absorbed with making money, and Americanization has taken hold in terms of consumer culture and individualism. Would you agree that this is a profound change, or would you say that things are basically as they used to be?
O’Brien: That’s a very complex question; I’d much rather listen to a group of Israelis discussing it than try to answer it myself.
Zionism, in my view, still goes pretty deep. Most Israelis today are not formally religious, but then most of them never were. Some of the rabbis, quite early on, said that the Zionists didn’t notice that they were about God’s business. The religious feeling was strongly present among all the senior Israelis, and I don’t think it’s gone away altogether, but it may have weakened. But in moments of crisis, when Israel seems to be isolated and threatened, it comes back.
MEQ: As you pointed out, the essence and heart of Zionism used to be among the secular; now it is among the religious. Is that going to work?
O’Brien: Again, it’s a very complex relation, because many of the most fervently religious Jews don’t accept the existence of the State of Israel, will not serve in the Israeli armed forces, and appear to be outside the consensus altogether. Whether they’re really out of the consensus, I’m not sure. If you take their declarations literally, they are. But when Israel is under direct threat, most Israelis, including them, tend to close the ranks. In more relaxed moments, they indulge in this business of not being part of Israel at all and not recognizing the Israeli state.
Two Peace Processes
MEQ: In the past you were very skeptical about the land-for-peace formula. You argued that “Israel could indeed surrender territory,” but would not “get in return anything that could properly be described as peace. Israel could get peace of sorts with the particular Arab states who signed up for a deal. But other Arabs who did not sign up for a deal would continue to engage in terrorism, and the Arabs who did sign up would be likely to collude with the terrorists, partly out of fear of those fearsome people and partly out of a sneaking sympathy with them.”2 Do you still maintain this to be the case?
O’Brien: Generally, yes. Particular pieces of land in a particular context—for example, the Golan Heights—could be exchanged for a kind of cold peace. But in the region as a whole, it’s not possible. Israel did deliver a certain amount of land to Arafat and it hasn’t really got a solid peace in return because terrorist organizations, based on the territories which it gave up, are still active against Israel, with the connivance of Syria and the secret collusion (or impotence) of Arafat himself. So it’s very difficult to get clean-cut solutions. The best of them is with Egypt, because Egypt neither carries out attacks nor connives at attacks by others.
MEQ: Although you have expressed guarded support for negotiations between Israel and Syria, you oppose the peace process in Northern Ireland, suggesting that while the former may lead to “stability in the Middle East,” the latter “will not lead to peace” in Northern Ireland.3 Please explain.
O’Brien: Well, the Irish peace process that we’ve known up to now, and that has now collapsed, was based on getting Sinn Fein, the political front of the IRA [Irish Republican Army], involved in the administration of Northern Ireland, even as the IRA itself, Sinn Fein’s master, continues to hold all its weapons. That effort has not been sustained, and there are grave dangers now.
Instead, the government should comprise the Catholic party and the Protestant Unionists, without paramilitary affiliations. The only democratically healthy form of government in Northern Ireland would be one in which two political groupings, which have no paramilitary associations, ruled together: that would be the Social Democratic and Labor Party, the Catholic party in Northern Ireland, and another Unionist party, perhaps the Official Unionists. These two should form a government with the associates of paramilitary parties rigidly excluded. Then, if the excluded paramilitaries resumed military operations, they would be dealt with by the security forces, with whatever additional backing these might require, perhaps internment without trial, until the security authorities thought the paramilitary operations would not to resume. If that were done resolutely, you could have peace in Northern Ireland within at most a couple of years and an end of paramilitary blackmail.
The key should be respect for democracy and for democratic institutions and exclusion of undemocratic forces from the cabinet. And that’s not what is happening.
MEQ: What perspective does this give you on the Israeli-Syria negotiations? Damascus is not exactly democratic.
O’Brien: No, they’re not democratic in Syria, and they’re not likely to become democratic.
But the Irish and Israeli cases are widely different. In Northern Ireland, the conditions are such that a democracy based on the unarmed sections of the Protestant and Catholic traditions could be built. In contrast, if Israel is to achieve peace, it has to be negotiated with a party that is essentially totalitarian. So, although there are some resemblances between the two situations, they are also quite widely different in character.
1 Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege: The Story of Israel and Zionism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 656.
2 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Memoir: My Life and Themes (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1998), p. 372.
3 Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Barak the Man to do Business on a Middle East Pact,” Irish Independent, July 31, 1999.
http://www.danielpipes.org/6336/conor-cruise-obrien-the-state-of-the-zionist-state
tim gallagher says
Thanks for the information about Conor Cruise O’Brien, CRUSADER. On people waking up to Islam’s evil and menacing nature, the thing that strikes me is that we had all those clearsighted people back in the past, like John Quincy Adams, who I recall absolutely nailed islam”s nature, Alexis de Tocqueville and Churchill and others, and then, it seems to me, people seemed to forget what a barbaric, vile ideology islam was and, I guess, political correctness and ideas about how we could all get along wonderfully (which could never work with Islam) took over. I remember going to Europe in the early 1980’s and hearing about Turkish Muslims going to Germany as guest workers or whatever and there didn’t yet seem to be problems. I guess there weren’t enough Muslims there then to start the inevitable trouble. I think the Pakistanis in England didn’t yet seem to be a problem, not like now with the rape gangs, etc. Again, maybe their numbers weren’t big enough yet. I am interested in how Fallaci , Bat Ye’or, O’Brien and Fortuyn ( who you mention up above and who I recall was one of the first opponents of Islam I came across when I was just starting to wake up to the problems of Islam myself) woke up way ahead of most people. It must have been a very lonely struggle when those first people began to say, hey, there’s a big problem with Islam, because I don’t think many people could see the truth in what they were saying. Probably, not many people would have believed them at first. I imagine it was probably somewhat similar for Robert Spencer when he first started writing about Islam’s nature. There seemed to be a period when people forgot about Islam’s vile nature ( still not enough people are awake) and I think Fallaci and the other early critics of Islam would have had a hard time and would have needed plenty of courage.
CRUSADER says
9-11 was a strategic wake up call for USA which many of Muslim Ikhwan
didn’t want to awaken from slumber.
Brigitte Gabriel recognized what was occurring to America after seeing
it first hand happen to Lebanon….
Interesting quote that could NOW be said of the following:
liberals, leftists, relativistic spiritualist church movement, millennials,
islamists, narcotraffickers, academia, media, Hollyweird writers, celebrities,
etc…. and Russian agents.
“The John Birch Society is Communism’s greatest ally. With its help we will divide and confuse the American people until they have lost faith in their Government, their nation has ceased to be a major world power, and their country is ripe for revolution.”
– Nikita Khrushchev, 3-1/2 years after his visit to the US.
The Wheel of Fortune turns!
tim gallagher says
All good points you make, CRUSADER. I wish everyone had woken up about Islam’s evil nature by now, and I can’t believe what incredibly slow learners some people are, but I do think we are making progress and a large number of people are, at last, waking up. On the subject of people waking up to Islam’s nature, I have a pretty amazing story. I have mentioned it before here at Jihad Watch. I met a Belgian man who was holidaying in Australia in 1979. He was the friend of someone I knew. He said to me, “Australia’s a great place. Keep Muslims out of the place or it will be ruined.” I remember saying something like, “Oh, I think it’ll be alright”. I can’t believe how right he was and how wrong I was. So far back, he had that insight. I think he’d had a run in with some violent Muslims back in Belgium even back then. At that time, I didn’t have a clue. It took me a while to notice the vile behaviour of Muslims out here in Australia. There was the usual rape gangs in 2000, violent crimes and even a violent riot at a Rugby League football match I was watching on TV. I began to think, hey, these are the worst people we’re ever had here and I began to look into Islam a bit and realised why. I’m still amazed at the Belgian guy who was so aware way back in 1979. Talk about a prophet, who could see into the future.
CRUSADER says
From 25 Years Ago, Conor Cruise O’Brien, On the Subject of Salman Rushdie, a Fatwa, and How One Attains “Harmony” with Islam
https://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/58683/From-25-Years-Ago-Conor-Cruise-OBrien-On-the-Subject-of-Salman-Rushdie-a-Fatwa-and-How-One-Attains-Harmony-with-Islam
“Islam: Back to the Dark Ages: We Should Not Repeal the Enlightenment to Appease Ayatollahs, Says Conor Cruise O’Brien”.
‘Friday 12 August 1994.
‘THE ECONOMIST has devoted more than 30 columns to a ‘survey’ on the subject of how to love fundamentalist Islam.
‘As I realise that I stand in need of instruction on this subject, I read the survey with interest.
‘Specifically, I was curious to read what it would say about the fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death.
‘I thought it would be difficult to avoid this topic in any sustained discussion of the relationship between fundamentalist Islam (that is: pure Islam, real Islam, classical Islam, or simply, to cut the cr*p and get right to the point, ISLAM – CM) and the West.
‘Difficult, but not impossible, as I found when I had ploughed my way through that survey.
“Not a word about Salman Rushdie, unless perhaps we are to understand his case somehow to be subsumed in the following paragraph about the case of Iran, in the context of the hope for ‘harmony’ between the West and fundamentalist Islam:
“The hope (of harmony) even survived the Iranian revolution of 1979…Iran’s revolutionaries started out as snarling enemies. They can still growl and bite. But time, and the sobering experience of government, have made them noticeably milder in their foreign policy as well as in what they do at home.”
‘This is the sort of thing that British and French devotees of appeasement used to write in the mid-Thirties. “Time, and the sobering experience of government”, were forever about to do wonders for Adolf Hitler, and we may be sure that these factors will exert an equally chastening influence on the character and disposition of Ayatollah Khomeini.
‘To say that the Iranian regime has got ‘noticeably milder’ is not just untrue; it is the reverse of the truth. The regime in Iran is getting noticeably more ferocious, as the recent bombings of Jewish targets in London and Buenos Aires attest.
‘The Argentine authorities at least have no doubt as to the origin of that bombing that took the lives of nearly 100 people in Buenos Aires. They believe that the atrocity was planned in the Iranian embassy in the city, on the orders of Ayatollah Khamenei, chief religious authority in Iran and also Minister for the Interior.
‘There is no distinction, in Islam, between the spheres of religion and politics, and no terrestrial limit to the dual jurisdiction of such an official. For infidels to seek ‘harmony’ with Islam is an illusion. The only way of attaining harmony with Islam is by conversion.
Let all those fools, warbling about ‘unity’ in France this past week, take note. They need to be slapped in the face with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s brisk Irish commonsense. – CM
‘The Economist seems to think that this might not be too bad an idea.
‘According to the survey, “…Islam claims to be an idea based upon a transcendant certainty. The certainty is the word of God, revealed syllable by syllable to Mohamed in a dusty corner of Arabia 1400 years ago and copied down in the Koran. As a means of binding a civilisation together there is no substitute for such a certainty.”
‘Is there not? If so, the West, and Britain in particular, are in quite a bad way, as compared at least with the civilisation of the Muslim world, whose rulers are happily bound together by Islamic certainty.” (ROFLMAO. – CM)
‘The survey goes on to discuss the important thing that is in common between the West and fundamentalist Islam. The thing is religion, which should link rather than divide Western civilisation and the Islamic variety. “Both have their origins in religions that believe in a single God, and any Westerner who asks what that has to do with modern life needs to think about what made the West as it is today”.
….
CRUSADER says
….
Seeing the author of that ‘Economist’ article burble on about ‘religion’ and ‘a single God’ (the ‘monotheism’ canard so much beloved of interfaith dawa-peddling Muslims) in order to blur the distinction between Jews and Christians – whose faith did in fact, all things considered, do quite a lot to make the west what it is – and Islam, whose main contribution to the West was to spend centuries continually attacking it and damaging it both economically and intellectually (see Emmet Scott’s magnum opus, ‘Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited”, for details on the extent of the wounds inflicted by Islam) makes one realize just exactly why Jacques Ellul, at about the same time, in the early 1990s, felt it necessary to write his brilliant essay “Les Trois Piliers du Conformisme”, tackling and demolishing the exact same canard. Conor Cruise O’Brien, staunchly anti-clerical lapsed Catholic that he is, takes a slightly different tack to that taken by Ellul, but no less bracing, for all that. – CM
‘I had thought that the Enlightenment, that potent dispeller of illusory certainties, had more to do with ‘what made the West as it is today’ than had the Age of Faith.
‘I had also thought that the fact that the Islamic world is still stuck in the Age of Faith, and apparently determined to get stuck still deeper in it, had something to do with the present not altogether enviable mental and material condition of the inhabitants of the Islamic world.
Pace O’Brien at this point, the misery of the Muslim world is not simply due to ‘faith’ as such. Even in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the Christian West was steadily forging ahead of Islam in the arts and music, in technology, in thinking about government, in the slow social outworking of the institution of monogamous marriage, and in the fizz and sizzle of debate in the multiplying Universities. The misery of the Muslim world is caused by a very particular ‘faith’; by the total and totalitarian belief system, centred on a ‘pantheism of force’ (as one astute 19th century scholar described it), on an apotheosis of despotism and unreason, that is Islam. – CM
‘The Economist, however, implies that we would do well to repeal the Enlightenment in order to attain the bliss of harmony with the likes of Ayatollah Khamenei.
‘Readers will make up their minds as to whether or not this would be a good bargain…”.
‘I suspect that the Economist, when it writes in this lofty strain about religion, history and civilisation, may really be thinking about oil and money. That is its proper sphere, after all.”
Having thus hinted at the influence wielded by petrodollars upon organs such as The Economist, Conor Cruise O’ Brien then proceeds to mention certain very foolish moves made by the Catholic church at that time, to seek the Muslims as allies for furthering a couple of moral and social agendas (abortion, and contraception), and wonders whether the Catholics might not also be admiring of Muslim blasphemy laws and intending to seek a revival of blasphemy laws in the West. At that point his old-fashioned anticlericalism – his willingness to believe that the Catholic Church of the 1990s had in mind “the repeal of the Enlightenment, with the aid of Islam” – perhaps kept him from seeing who was making use of whom; or that there were quite other agencies of western society, separate from the church and even hostile toward it, that Muslims would coopt and corrupt, make use of, in a sort of ju-jitsu, in order to bring about a de facto conformity with the sharia blasphemy law, by a total silencing of almost all public criticism and mockery of Islam. And if the very bravest dare to breach that silence – Theo Van Gogh, and ‘Charlie Hebdo” – the sharia enforcers, from within the Muslim fifth column now established within the west – will move to snuff them out.
It is impossible to imagine that any secular newspaper in the West would dare to publish, today, what The Times, on the 11 May 1989, was still able to publish: the expressed opinion of Conor Cruise O’Brien himself, on the subject of Islam and Islamophiles. I will reproduce it here, in the hope that some UK reader might be able to track down and unearth the whole of the article from which these two acid paragraphs are excerpted. For the assistance of any such intrepid researcher, here is the title of the article – “Sick Man of the World: Conor Cruise O’Brien Reviews a Sharp Book of Disobliging Truths About the State of Islam”.
“Muslim society looks profoundly repulsive…It looks profoundly repulsive because it is repulsive…
“A Westerner who claims to admire Muslim society, whilst still adhering to Western values, is either a hypocrite or an ignoramus, or a bit of both. At the heart of the matter is the Muslim family, an abominable institution….
“…Arab and Muslim society is sick, and has been sick for a long time. In the last century, the Arab [sic] thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: “Every Muslim is sick, and his only remedy is in the Koran.” Unfortunately, the sickness gets worse, the more the remedy is taken.”
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/islam-back-to-the-dark-ages-we-should-not-repeal-the-enlightenment-to-appease-ayatollahs-says-conor-cruise-obrien-1382946.html
It might be good to have the most telling portions of this article translated into French, and re-circulated, as widely as possible. And if the Independent, and other outlets, had any brains, and any guts, they would be republishing it, within the week.
gravenimage says
Fine post.
CRUSADER says
“Mohammed and Charlemagne — Revisited”
by Emmet Scott
During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an astonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, which Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western provinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs, whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further trading and cultural contact with the East.
According to Pirenne, it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic features of classical life disappeared from Europe, after which time the continent began to develop its own distinctive and somewhat primitive medieval culture. Pirenne’s findings, published posthumously in his “Mohammed et Charlemagne” (1937), were even then highly controversial, for by the late nineteenth century many historians were moving towards a quite different conclusion: namely that the Arabs were actually a civilizing force who rekindled the light of classical learning in Europe after it had been extinguished by the Goths, Vandals and Huns in the fifth century.
And because Pirenne went so diametrically against the grain of this thinking, the reception of his new thesis tended to be hostile.
Paper after paper published during the 1940s and ’50s strove to refute him. The most definitive rebuttal however appeared in the early 1980s. This was “Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe”, by English archaeologists Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse. These, in common with Pirenne’s earlier critics, argued that classical civilization was already dead in Europe by the time of the Arab conquests, and that the Arabs arrived on the scene as civilizers rather than destroyers. Hodges and Whitehouse claimed that the latest findings of archaeology fully supported this view, and their work was highly influential.
So influential indeed that over the next three decades Pirenne and his thesis was progressively sidelined, so that recent years have seen the publication of dozens of titles in the English language alone which fail even to mention his name.
In “Mohammed and Charlemagne — Revisited” historian Emmet Scott reviews the evidence put forward by Hodges and Whitehouse, as well as the more recent findings of archaeology, and comes to a rather different conclusion. For him, the evidence shows that classical civilization was not dead in Europe at the start of the seventh century, but was actually experiencing something of a revival.
Populations and towns were beginning to grow again for the first time since the second century – a development apparently attributable largely to the spread of Christianity.
In addition, the real centres of classical civilization, in the Middle East, were experiencing an unprecedented Golden Age at the time, with cities larger and more prosperous than ever before. Excavation has shown that these were destroyed thoroughly and completely by the Arab conquests, with many never again reoccupied. And it was precisely then, says Scott, that Europe’s classical culture also disappeared, with the abandonment of the undefended lowland villas and farms of the Roman period and a retreat to fortified hilltop settlements; the first medieval castles.
For Scott, archaeology demonstrated that the Arabs did indeed blockade the Mediterranean through piracy and slave-raiding, precisely as Pirenne had claimed, and he argues that the disappearance of papyrus from Europe was an infallible proof of this. Whatever classical learning survived after this time, says Scott, was due almost entirely to the efforts of Christian monks.
The Pirenne thesis has taken on a new significance in the post 9/11 world. Scott’s take on the theory will certainly ignite further and perhaps heated debate.
gravenimage says
Yes–an important book by Pirenne. I read it at university, and have revisited it several times since.
Judith Harding says
I never heard of Fallaci. Hugh Fitzgerald, I am indebted to you for this magnificently researched, brilliantly penned portrayal of an amazing journalist. This article was fascinating, lively, and inspiring. God bless you and yours.
SAFI says
As a child Oriana had been involved in the Italian Resistance against the nazis and Mussolini. She knew an (islamo)-fascist when she saw one.
To hell with the evil emirate of Qatar and the Gutter that is Al Jazeera.
gravenimage says
Yes–Oriana Fallaci started early fighting against totalitarianism.