Oriana Fallaci was acutely aware of the changes being brought to Italy by those she called “the sons of Allah.” And while she was in a state of alarm about the tens of millions of Muslims who had been so foolishly allowed, as she saw it, to settle in the very midst of Europe, her anxiety became rage, la rabbia, when she saw what was happening in her own country, Italy.
A few months before her death, Fallaci famously said she was ready to blow up the minaret of a mosque in Chianti [because she did not want to “see a 24-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto when I can’t even wear a cross … in their country!”
Even more than an Italian patriot, Fallaci was famously a Tuscan patriot. The prospect of a huge mosque and Islamic center being built in Colle Val d’Elsa, a small provincial town in the Italian countryside, very close to where she had her house in Tuscany, and where she would certainly have had to endure the muezzin’s call to prayer five times a day (Fallaci could do a very good imitation of that guttural wail she found so unpleasant), sent her into a frenzy. For the Colle Val d’Elsa is not just any place, but quintessentially Tuscan, the embodiment of Tuscan-ness. What in god’s name, Fallaci wondered, were Muslims doing in such an out-of-the-way place, living there and now wanting to erect a large mosque, costing nearly $2 million. She understood: it was a way for Muslims to plant their flag, to stake their claim, to Tuscany itself.
Magdi Allam is an Egyptian ex-Muslim who embraced Christianity, and in Italy became a journalist, both in print and on television, and the leader of his own anti-Islamic party, Io Amo l’Italia (“I Love Italy”). An ideological ally of Fallaci, Allam investigated the new mosque in Tuscany. He discovered that it was being funded by the municipality and a branch of the bank Monte Paschi di Siena, in a naïve attempt to make Muslims feel welcome. He further discovered connections between Feras Jabareen, the head of the Islamic community in Colle Val d’Elsa, who had carefully presented himself as a “moderate” to obtain funds for the mosque, but who turned out to be connected, through the UCOII (Unione delle Comunità e Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia), with the Muslim Brotherhood.
To understand Fallaci’s rage over the placement of this mosque in rural Tuscany, Americans should imagine how they would feel if a large mosque, with minarets, were to be built fifty yards from the Old North Bridge in Concord, or the Battle Green in Lexington.
More than a decade later, her influence on Italian public life has strengthened.
The fact that Oriana Fallaci took such decisive positions after 9/11 transformed her into a figure of reference for the right,” said Francesco Borgonovo, deputy director of the conservative newspaper La Verita.
He claimed that Fallaci was often criticised for warning Western governments against immigration from Muslim-majority countries, but she understood that “in the face of a certain Islam, it is dangerous to say hurray to multiculturalism.”
Borgonovo is sympathetic to Fallaci’s views, unsurprisingly. What is surprising is that Al Jazeera allowed him to state her views both accurately and in apparent agreement, especially her understanding that “in the face of a certain Islam, it is dangerous to say hurray to multiculturalism.”
Before being revered by the Italian right, Fallaci was a respected war reporter, essayist and political interviewer.
And in all these undertakings, it didn’t hurt that she was also beautiful.
“She was the most famous Italian journalist in the world,” said Ugo Tramballi, war correspondent and columnist for the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
He said that while Italy had other prominent journalists, “none of them was known outside Italy and has had bylines on great American magazines as did Fallaci.”
Her interrogative interview style, in which she was vocal about her own opinions, contributed to her popularity.
“When Oriana Fallaci was going to follow the news, she became the news,” said Tramballi.
The daughter of an anti-fascist partisan, Fallaci wrote about the moon landing, interviewed Robert Kennedy and was injured during the repression of student movements in Mexico in 1968.
Some view Fallaci’s early career, sometimes aligned with liberal causes, as distinct from her later days as an anti-Islam polemicist.
But Borgonovo, the conservative commentator, said they are two sides of the same coin: “The reasons behind her attacks against a certain kind of Islam were the same than [sic]those behind her previous battles. She was a feminist, a woman of the left and a libertarian.”
Leonardo Bianchi, news editor of Vice Italy, who wrote a book about Italian populism, sees it differently.
According to him, after September 11, Fallaci became “a darling of the right precisely because she was a public figure previously associated with the left.”
She exemplified that “even ideologically unwholesome [!] people understand that the threat [of Islam] is serious and something needs to be done.”
Bianchi is right. Fallaci had such a long and distinguished career as a left-wing journalist that her anti-Islam ferocity made it possible for many on the Italian left to be anti-Islam as well. The anti-Islamic right could point to her as supporting their own views, and the policies on Islam that they promoted, which made it harder to paint those policies as “right-wing.” Had she been just one more “right-wing” voice against Islam, she would not have had the colossal impact she did have when her books denouncing Islam came out, and that ever since, even in death, she continues to have. Famously on the left for nearly her entire life, that left could not easily dismiss her.
After the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Fallaci’s work resurfaced on social media platforms, with some arguing she was right to bemoan Islam after all.
Recently, social media savvy Salvini was photographed while reading one of her books on holiday.
And Facebook is now full of fans groups with names such as Oriana Fallaci, the power of truth and Aphorisms by Oriana Fallaci.
“Fallaci is no longer a simple journalist but has become, said Bianchi, “a prophetess of misfortune who warned us that Islam wanted to attack us.”
From beyond the grave, Fallaci is having a deep and salutary effect on Italian politics. Thirteen years after her death, the threat of Islam in Europe that she warned about becomes ever more apparent. Since her death, many more Muslims have been allowed into Europe, more than two million into Germany alone. But because of Fallaci’s influence – her books on Islam have sold four million copies — there is a much wider understanding of the Muslim menace in Italy than in, for example, Germany or Sweden. And her influence has made it easier for Salvini to turn back all those boats full of migrants coming from Libya. It is not Pope Francis who is defending Christian Italy; he has turned out to be a a simple-minded apologist and Defender of Islamic Faith who exhibits all the features of that “buonismo” which so enraged Fallaci. The stoutest defender of Christian Italy turns out to be the anticlerical atheist Oriana Fallaci.
Fallaci started to form her opinion of Islam in 1960, while on a world tour to research the status of women. “These veiled women are the unhappiest women in the world,” she wrote of her experience in Pakistan. “The wearer gazes out at the sky and her fellow man like a prisoner peering through the bars of her prison. This prison reaches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and includes Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. It is the immense reign of Islam.” Fallaci later told friends that the Pakistani dictator Ali Bhutto cried when he told her he had been forced to marry his wife, a 23-year-old woman, when he was 15, and that Palestinian fighters in Lebanon refused to let Fallaci into a bomb shelter during a shelling, directing her instead to “a shed that turned out to be an explosives depot.”
In her novel “Inshallah,” published in 1990, after a stint covering fighting in Lebanon, one of the characters predicts that the next war wouldn’t be between capitalists and communists but that future conflicts would be channeled through religion — “between those who eat pig meat and those who don’t, those who drink wine and those who don’t, those who mumble Pater Noster and those who whisper Allah rassullillah.” Nothing has happened since in Europe to suggest that prediction is false.
Fallaci made many lapidary comments on Islam, Muslims, and Muslim leaders; none of them were reprinted in the Al Jazeera article, not because they are false, but because they are true. Here are a few:
The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.
The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.
Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.
Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.
War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton’s mediation.
Arafat contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is.
She was a steadfast supporter of Israel – a convinced Zionist — and deplored the rise in antisemitism, connected to the large Muslim presence that had re-infected Europe with that mental disease:
I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans.
I find it shameful that in nearly all the universities of Europe, Palestinian students sponsor and nurture anti-Semitism.
I defend Israel’s right to exist, to defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second time.
The Muslim migrants in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, when without a mosque nearby, would hold their prayer sessions in the middle of city streets, blocking traffic, in complete disregard of the laws or the well-being of the Infidels. That was maddening enough. But what infuriated Fallaci even more were the Muslim migrants who urinated on Renaissance masterpieces, and defecated just outside, or even inside, venerable churches – a most nauseating way to show their contempt for Christians. She more than once mentioned the Muslim Somalis who in Florence urinated against Lorenzo Ghiberti’s east doors of the Baptistery – a masterpiece, described by an admiring Michelangelo as the “Gates of Heaven” – their yellow streams flowing down those fabulous doors for which the Somalis had no interest or respect; after all, these were created by and for “the most vile of created beings.” Why should Muslims care about damaging “Christian” doors in a Christian building?
Fallaci begins The Rage and the Pride with a note to Ferruccio de Bortoli, the then-editor of the Corriere della Sera, in whose pages her book first appeared. A few paragraphs provide a telling example of her lucid, angry prose:
I don’t go pitching tents at Mecca. I don’t go singing Our Fathers and Hail Marys in front of Mohammed’s tomb. I don’t go peeing on the marble of their mosques; I don’t go shitting at the feet of their minarets. When I find myself in their countries (something from which I never derive pleasure), I never forget that I am a guest and a foreigner. I am careful not to offend them with clothing or gestures or behavior that are normal for us but impermissible to them. I treat them with dutiful respect, dutiful courtesy, and I excuse myself when through mistake or ignorance I infringe some rule or superstition of theirs. And the images I’ve had before my eyes while writing this scream of pain and indignation haven’t always been those of the apocalyptic scenes I started with. Sometimes I see another image instead, a symbolic (and therefore infuriating) one: the huge tent with which the Somalian Muslims disfigured and befouled and profaned the Piazza del Duomo at Florence for three months last summer. My city.
A tent put up in order to beg-condemn-insult the Italian government that hosted them but wouldn’t give them the papers necessary to rove about Europe and wouldn’t let them bring the hordes of their relatives to Italy. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, pregnant sisters-in-law, and if they had their way, their relatives’ relatives as well. A tent situated next to the beautiful palazzo of the Archbishop on whose sidewalk they kept the shoes or sandals that are lined up outside the mosques in their countries. And along with the shoes or sandals, the empty bottles of water they’d used to wash their feet before praying. A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors. A tent, finally, furnished like a sleazy little apartment: seats, tables, chaise-lounges, mattresses for sleeping and for fucking, ovens for cooking food and plaguing the piazza with smoke and stench. And, thanks to the customary irresponsibility of ENEL, which cares about our works of art about as much as it cares about our landscape, furnished with electric light. Thanks to a radio tape player, enriched by the uncouth wailing of a muezzin who punctually exhorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells. Add to all this the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the marble of the Baptistry. (My, these sons of Allah sure have a long range! However did they manage to hit the target when they were held back by a protective railing that kept it nearly two whole meters away from their urinary equipment?) And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore al Vescovo: that exquisite Romanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a shithouse. You’re well aware of this.
Her vivid rage against the Muslim invaders is one part of the book; the other part describes her pride in Western, Italian, Tuscan civilization.. Hence the title: The Rage and the Pride.
Now she is regarded as “prescient” in her Cassandra-like warnings about Islam in Europe. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. No one would be more unhappy to learn that she was right all along about Islam than that marvelous phenomenon of intelligence, wit, humor, truth, and deep melancholy, Oriana Fallaci.
mortimer says
Oriana Fallaci should be the role model for all journalists: fearless, forthright, fanatical for facts and an anti-Fascist who fought for personal freedom and human rights … not for the mega-rich global elite.
gravenimage says
Hear, hear, Mortimer and BVC!
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Three-quarters of the art in the Western world is in Italy. Were Italy to become dominated by Muslims, what would happen to those paintings, or statues — Michlangelo’s Pieta, Donatello’s David — with human forms? You saw what happened to the Bamiyan Buddhas, to the contents of the Kabul Museum, to the temple complexes in India, to churches all over the Middle East and North Africa. Why expect a different outcome in an islamized Italy?u
mortimer says
Can you imagine St Peter’s as a mosque? Well, the jihadists ARE imagining it as a mosque. Wake up, Europe.
CRUSADER says
Constantinople had stores of art and treasure.
When the news of the Muslim attacks on the Christians in the East filtered through to Rome, and the political embarrassments of the Byzantine emperor increased, Pope Gregory VII conceived the project of a great military expedition and exhorted the faithful to participate in recovering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – foreshadowing the First Crusade. In his efforts to recruit for the expedition, he emphasized the suffering of eastern Christians, arguing western Christians had a moral obligation to go to their aid…
Vatican = future Islamic-Jihad Horse-Stables !!!
In 1600, sultan Mohamed III *** (Mehmed), bragged that he would “conquer Europe and use the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica as an animal trough” for Turkish horses.
http://www.traditionalcatholicpriest.com/2014/07/21/saint-lawrence-of-brindisi-led-crusade-against-muslims-in-hungry-1601/
Saint Lawrence Of Brindisi Led Crusade Against Muslims In Hungry 1601 ~
In 1600, the sultan of Constantinople, Mohamed III (Mehmed), bragged that he would conquer Europe and use the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica as an animal trough for Turkish horses. This sultan was already famous for having had his 19 brothers and half brothers executed to secure his power. Over and over again, the Ottoman sultans kept attempting to conquer Catholic Europe.
A few years before this, in 1571, Don Juan of Austria, with the help of God, Mary (The 15 decade Holy Rosary), the Catholic league and St. Pope Pius V, defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto.217-Lepanto5
30 years later, Pope Clement VIII asked St. Lawrence of Brindisi, a Capuchin friar, to go to Germany to organize their princes into a crusade against the muslim attacks going on in Hungry. He was very successful and organized the crucial resistance needed to save Europe.
At this same time, Protestant Queen Elizabeth I, was courting the Ottoman turks to make an alliance with England. She sent a jeweled musical organ to the sultan that had mechanical birds that sang as the organ was played. It arrived on a large English gunship that the sultan studied and copied to use in his future battles to conquer more European Catholic territory.
The Battle of Stuhlweissenburg Hungry took place on October 11, 1601. St. Lawrence led the battle on a horse carrying a large cross in front of the troops. Again on October 14th of that same month, these Catholic forces, with St. Lawrence leading, had to fight the muslims in another battle and won.
St. Lawrence, when leading the troops in front into battle, was miraculously saved from all injury and claimed that all the success came from God and Mary. The Catholic troops, numbering 18,000 men, way out numbered by 80,000 muslims. The Turks, after suffering the loss of 30,000 men, withdrew their army behind the Danube.
Many of the great saints, like St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. King Louis the IX of France, organized and participated in the crusades. St. Louis died on a crusade at Tunis North Africa on the 25th of August, 1270.
Whenever the crusades were led by holy people and all those involved prayed and fasted, they had success. Whenever they were unjust or doing evil sins, they lost.
Let us pray to St. Lawrence of Brindisi, and all the other saints, to help all the Catholics (and others), who are at this very moment, suffering terribly under muslims all over the world.
??
*** Mehmed was born at the Manisa Palace in 1566, during the reign of his great-grandfather, Suleiman the “Magnificent”. His grandfather Selim II died when Mehmed was eight, and Mehmed’s father, Murad III, became Sultan in 1574. Mehmed thus became the Crown Prince until his father’s death in 1595, when he was 28 years old.
SAFI says
Crusader, thanks for this history lesson / Call to Arms.
the sultan of Constantinople, Mohamed III (Mehmed), bragged that he would conquer Europe and use the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica as an animal trough for Turkish horses. This sultan was already famous for having had his 19 brothers and half brothers executed to secure his power. Over and over again, the Ottoman sultans kept attempting to conquer Catholic Europe.
A few years before this, in 1571, Don Juan of Austria, with the help of God, Mary (The 15 decade Holy Rosary), the Catholic league and St. Pope Pius V, defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto
Can’t help but think that had this been Francis instead of Pius V that sat on the Papal Throne he’d now be remembered not for how he assembled a Mighty Christian Armada, but for how eager he was to wash the Sultan’s feet and be appointed as his imperial stableboy at the famous ottoman St Peters Stables. Luckily for this Civilization it wasn’t Francis.
…Even though the present Sultan of Turkey says he’s not impressed with the kafir victory at Lepanto. About a couple of years ago, during an anti-western tirade in parliament he likened the Ottoman defeat there with a mere “shaving” of one’s beard.
by defeating our navy you have only shaved off our beard
https://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/11/08/recep-tayyip-erdogan-by-conquering-cyprus-we-have-cut-off-one-of-your-arms/
Perhaps that as$hole needs a reminder, but alas, Frankie is only good for washing his feet, we’ll need a Pius if we wish to “shave” his mustache…
gravenimage says
Yes, Hugh–I fear for the great treasures of art in Italy. We have seen many times what Muslims do to such treasures.
mortimer says
A resistance to Islamization has awakened in Italy. Historically, Italians have much to fear from Islam. Islam targeted Christian Italy for destruction right since the time of Mohammed. Italy has been hammered for 14 centuries by invading Muslims. The goal of Islamizing Italy has never been abrogated, since it comes directly from the words of Mohammed and the Koran contains a chapter called ‘Roum’ that reminds Muslims of their duty to conquer all formerly Roman territories. The raiding of the Vatican by Muslim terrorists led to the building of huge defensive walls around the Vatican and defense towers on the Tiber River.
-“We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians … will yet pay us the Jiziya, in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam…” (Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd Al-Rahman Al-’Arifi, Imam of the mosque of King Fahd Defense Academy, April 2005)
-“This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.” – Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
CRUSADER says
To All The Ends Of The Earth ?….
The Great Commission !
+++++++++++++++++++
Jesus came to them and said,
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them
in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
— Matthew 28:18-20 New International Version (NIV)
=========================================
Jesus gave this command to the apostles shortly before He ascended into heaven, and it essentially outlines what Jesus expected the apostles and those who followed them to do in His absence.
It is interesting that, in the original Greek, the only direct command in Matthew 28:19–20 is “make disciples.” The Great Commission instructs us to make disciples while we are going throughout the world. The instructions to “go,” “baptize,” and “teach” are indirect commands—participles in the original. How are we to make disciples? By baptizing them and teaching them all that Jesus commanded. “Make disciples” is the primary command of the Great Commission. “Going,” “baptizing,” and “teaching” are the means by which we fulfill the command to “make disciples.”
A disciple is someone who receives instruction from another person; a Christian disciple is a baptized follower of Christ, one who believes the teaching of Christ. A disciple of Christ imitates Jesus’ example, clings to His sacrifice, believes in His resurrection, possesses the Holy Spirit, and lives to do His work. The command in the Great Commission to “make disciples” means to teach or train people to follow and obey Christ.
Many understand Acts 1:8 as part of the Great Commission as well: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
The Great Commission is enabled by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are to be Christ’s witnesses, fulfilling the Great Commission in our cities (Jerusalem), in our states and countries (Judea and Samaria), and anywhere else God sends us (to the ends of the earth).
Throughout the book of Acts, we see how the apostles began to fulfill the Great Commission, as outlined in Acts 1:8. First, Jerusalem is evangelized (Acts 1 — 7); then the Spirit expands the church through Judea and Samaria (Acts 8 — 12); finally, the gospel reaches into “the ends of the earth” (Acts 13 — 28). Today, we continue to act as ambassadors for Christ, and “we plead on Christ’s behalf: ‘Be reconciled to God’” (2 Corinthians 5:20, CSB).
We have received a precious gift: “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 1:3). Jesus’ words in the Great Commission reveal the heart of God, who desires “all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). The Great Commission compels us to share the good news until everyone has heard. Like the servants in Jesus’ parable, we are to be about the business of the kingdom, making disciples of all nations: “He called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13, KJV).
gravenimage says
Yes–Muslims seized Sicily and parts of southern Italy, and raided her coasts for centuries, and also raided the Vatican itself.
Eric Jones says
I became aware of Fallici in the 1970’s. Its too bad that her warnings were not heeded. May she rest in heaven.
We in the USA should also be mindful of mass immigration. We need a moratorium on immigration. Its the door by which islamist come in.
Eric
Francine Anna Skronski says
I have quoted Oriana Fallaci many times where she had said: “ Europe lost its soul to the Muslims and they breed like rats.” All that she warned about Muslims is true. And so sad that we have 2 Radical Muslims in our government. Europe I believe is lost. I pray for the world to be safe from the Muslim invasions.
jarmanray says
You could also add that like rats, the cult spreads a black like plague wherever it exists and the consequences are far worse.
jewdog says
The Left in Italy may form a coalition and force out Lega Nord, since the government dissolved over Five Star. This is very worrisome.
gravenimage says
Yes–this is very concerning.
mortimer says
We need a journalist like Oriana Fallaci in every country. They would bring the world back on course. Her moral authority took everyone’s breath away.
There is no journalist of her calibre today.
Ole Pederson says
mortimer said
Have you considered that there may be many? If there is anyone like that today, he/she will be silenced and not published.
CRUSADER says
We here at JW can become what inspire us !
Why not ?
gravenimage says
Hear, hear, CRUSADER!
Ole Pederson says
Italians are wise enough to pass the human garba_e on to Germany.
Hail merkel!
Even so, in parts Italy has become an Islamic sh_t-hole, say, Castel Volturno.
roger standen says
Was the mosque in Colle Val D’Elsa eventually built?
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Yes. You can see pictures of it on line.
gravenimage says
Yes–it’s a big supremacist pile.
CogitoErgoSum says
“The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.”
Yes, yes, yes, a thousands times yes. I love this woman. I wish that she were still with us. Oh, that there were more like her today.
CRUSADER says
Who (which actress) would portray her in a movie ? ?
CogitoErgoSum says
Rachel Weisz was always quite impressive to me.
gravenimage says
Good choice! She also looks quite a bit like Oriana Fallaci, and she has played some intelligent kick-ass characters.
CRUSADER says
COUNTER – JIHAD *****
&
Jacques Ellul, essay “Les Trois Piliers du Conformisme” —-
https://www.newenglishreview.com/blog_direct_link.cfm?blog_id=58884&The%2DFrench%2DFight
“The French Fight”
————————-
The aftermath of the French terrorist attacks has, so far, confirmed the helpful resolve that was the general French response to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher-market murders in Paris. The realistic objective after these outrages and the great march was that the national and religious-Muslim leaders would be forced to abandon their infuriating collective ambivalence and denounce Islamist violence, or, by declining to do so, to effectively condone it.
This was the point President George W. Bush tried to make on the evening of September 11, 2001, when he said that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and regimes that supported terrorism, and that all countries would have to decide whether they supported or opposed the impending American counterattack on terrorism.
President Bush did not succeed in producing this Manichaean divide, and most of the Muslim world sank contentedly into pious demurrals from the antics of their belligerent coreligionists, while, within the community of Muslim states, avoiding a breach with Islamist militants and often tacitly commending them on their feisty assault on Islam’s ancient sectarian foes.
Most of the senior Muslim officials who attended the Paris march — the king and queen of Jordan, the presidents of Tunisia and the Palestinian Authority, the prime minister of Turkey, and the foreign ministers of Algeria, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates — have been criticized at home for truckling to the West.
This is the root of the problem: the incompetence of the Muslim world west of Malaysia at self-government and the tendency to blame the West for its own failures as mature political societies. This has created a division in technique between the Muslim states that have openly sympathized with the cutting edge of militant Islam, and those who have done the necessary to remain officially cordial with the West, although most of the latter were effectively emulating the sleazy ambivalence of the Chinese toward the demented regime in the hermit-despotism of North Korea: Beijing purported to join with Japan and the Western powers in disapproval of the un-housetrained Kimist regime, which could not, in fact, discharge a sidearm without the complicity of the Chinese; and many Muslim regimes mouthed civilities at the West but furtively played footsie with the jihadists.
Any process of inciting better, or at least more consistent, behavior from the Arab powers would have to allow for the special status of Saudi Arabia, the feudal, misogynistic paymaster of the Wahhabi Islamist extremists, which is also the temporary light of the West for using the reduction in the world oil price it has generated by increasing production to discourage Iran from its nuclear ambitions, to deter Iranian and Russian meddling in Syria, and, by a fortunate accident, to evict Putin from Ukraine.
The West had no right to expect its own irresolution to be redeemed by deliverance from so improbable a benefactor, but in our present state of threadbare Western leadership, we must take success where and how we get it. The cross-currents of Middle Eastern ambitions and loyalties are so treacherous and complicated they are almost impossible to plan for durably. But presumably the Saudis will eventually, if they haven’t already, circumscribe Wahhabi subversion.
The second post-Paris objective, after forcing the Muslim governments to stop trying to suck and blow at the same time, is to evoke this problem from the mists of the evasive pretension in the West that all is well with the Muslim world apart from a few unrepresentative psychotics, the inevitable rogues and strays that pop up in such a robust religious culture as Islam. (It was pitiful and distressing to listen to a five-minute official explanation last week of the U.S. Obama administration’s reluctance to use the phrase “Islamic extremism.” Who do they think knocked down the World Trade Center — a group of angry shareholder activists? The flipside of this see-no-evil approach was the bunk about hot buttons and sensitive people, implying that insulting Islam or the Prophet invited and made explicable, if it did not justify, the murder of the authors of the disrespectful comments.)
In company with this version of events, Pope Francis’s offhand comment, after unequivocally condemning the Paris outrages and sectarian violence generally, that insulting any religion was uncivilized and hazardous, was seized upon by Rome’s habitual critics as an attempted papal whitewash of the Paris murders. The Vatican reiterated Francis’s condemnation of those acts and his support for the anti-ISIS military alliance. No Muslim organization claimed the pope had endorsed violence; it was entirely the figment of the imagination of jumpy or anti-Catholic Westerners.
The French, who were pushed to the forefront of the Western response to Islamist terror by the Paris incidents, have manfully raised the bar for the rest of us.
The associate publisher of Le Figaro, with Le Monde one of France’s two most influential newspapers, issued a forceful “Declaration” last week in the splendid tradition of Emile Zola’s “J’Accuse” in the Dreyfus case, leaving no doubt of the scope of the contest now well underway.
***** He wrote:
“It is high time that we realized finally that a new religious war has been declared and this time on a planetary scale. Islamists massacre Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria; all over in fact. We have the strong impression that this century is going to see the pitiless unleashing of a renascent Islam, seeking to dominate the world and make Christian civilization pay for the centuries in which it ruled the world. This hatred of Christianity vastly exceeds all problems of faith. Attacking churches, priests, other religious personnel, and the faithful, Islamists wish to destroy Western civilization, democracy, capitalism, what they call ‘neo-colonialism,’ equality of the sexes, the Rights of Man, all progress as we conceive it. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin have been replaced (as threats to the West), by Allah and the Prophet. Bellicose imams have taken the places of the political commissars. The 21st century will be a war without mercy and the immense Islamized masses of the Third World and our great metropolises could be more dangerous than the tanks of the Warsaw Pact were. We weep with our usual crocodile tears for the Copts massacred at Alexandria and the Christians assassinated in Baghdad, but we passively sit with folded arms.”
….
CRUSADER says
….
The author wrote of the “Belle Époque” of Saddam Hussein, surely the ultimate debunking of the ill-considered war against him (though, like the Warsaw Pact comparison, this is an exaggeration), and he was particularly exercised by a spectacle familiar to all of us: “a useful imbecile who lengthily explained on television that Egyptian Islamists massacred Copts because these Nile Valley Christians were representatives of the West, ambassadors of European culture, living symbols of capitalism, neo-colonialism, the dollar, and Coca-Cola, and thus they had a perfect right to wish to eliminate these surviving relics of a detested past,” though the Copts antedated their Muslim oppressors in Egypt.
The Figaro associate publisher demanded an end to nauseating platitudes about “Islamo-Christian amity . . . and the harmonious cohabitation of our three monotheisms,” avoidance of “absurd and sometimes odious references to the most sober hours of our history,” and the cessation of “our repentances and cowardices.”
It was a magnificent polemical screed in the French manner, and showed again that France alone, of the great European powers, apart from the intermittent attendance of the British, has the instinct of a unitary national state united by principles of liberty and prepared to act like a warrior-people in defense of them.
The rest of Western Europe is retarded by Germany’s unending guilt and shame and anesthetized by the gelatinous Orwellian monster of the European Commission, where all is homogenized relativism.
The current Islamists are not a more serious threat than Soviet and international Communism was, not to mention the preceding mortal peril of Nazi Germany, whose hobnailed jackboot was on the throat of Paris itself from 1940 to 1944. Islam is not a totalitarian force (though it aspires to it) and does not govern a great power. While the Muslim world is better disposed to and more complicit in these attacks on Christian minorities and the West generally than their spokesmen and most Western governments and commentators admit, it remains a legitimate objective to separate the sane from the murderous Muslims.
But the determination to get to the bottom of this problem, in France and the world, and to use whatever degree of force is necessary for the defense of our civilization and interests, is correct and vastly exceeds anything heard or seen in comparably influential media outlets in the English-speaking countries (except, for special reasons, India).
The United States and Canada are made of sterner stuff, despite the moral paralysis of the Obama administration, reduced last week to recruiting the almost equally diffident British prime minister, David Cameron, to help President Obama plead to the Congress not to threaten Iran with re-escalated sanctions; and France, if it remains firm, is strong enough politically to propel the whole European Union forward. In addition to a protocol to prevent failed states from becoming terrorist sanctuaries and training grounds, and the will to enforce the protocol, obviously new counterterrorist techniques will have to be developed.
Just killing the leaders with drones, while useful, will not slay this hydra-headed monster. Massive infiltration will have to be implemented. The collaboration of Algeria, which has a battle-hardened army and has successfully fought a long civil war with Islamist extremists, could be helpful in this.
One dividend of this expanding problem is that the ability of the Israelophobes to keep the Arab powers focused on the Palestinian question is faltering. In the same measure, as the entire West slowly rises to the challenge, the isolation of Israel — as the premier target and doughtiest enemy of the jihadists — declines. While the venom of the Islamist fanatics is heightened against the Jewish state because of the fraudulent claim of geographic usurpation, we of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including the irreligious and the atheists, are increasingly all in this together. It will become less of a free shot for the petty despotisms of Africa voting at the United Nations in lock-step with the Arabs. The spirit of France, added to that of Israel, if contagious, as it should be, can conquer all.
————————————————
(First published in National Review.)
***** COUNTER – JIHAD :
G K Chesterton would not have been surprised. I think he understood and loved France, and the French, very well; all of France, both the old and the new (and more than many, he saw a certain continuity between the two). I am reminded of his poem “The Ballad of St Barbara”. In this hour, I think it would be good for many in the counter-jihad to reread Chesterton. “The Flying Inn”, for the English. For all: “The Ballad of the White Horse” and “The Battle of Lepanto”. And from his book, “The Everlasting Man”, two chapters – “The War of the Gods and the Demons” and “The Five Deaths of the Faith”.
And it might also be good to revisit Jacques Ellul, scholar and gadfly, “Righteous Among the Nations”, a man whom I place among the great teaching saints of the church in France. His books ‘Hope in Time of Abandonment” and “Prayer and Modern Man”; and what he had to say about Islam, in the forewords he wrote for his friend and protege Bat Yeor’s books “The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam” and “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under islam”; and his essay, in French, as yet untranslated into English, “Les Trois Piliers du Conformisme”; and his book in defence of Israel, “Un Chretien Pour Israel” (1983), also as yet untranslated.
—-
FIN
gravenimage says
What came after Saddam Hussein was even worse, but there was no “Belle Époque” under his vicious rule.
Angemon says
Saddam increasingly flirted with hardline jihadis. His (half) brother warned him that nothing good would come of it, but Saddam paid no heed and did what he could to increase his “religious credentials” as a leader. While he might not give a rat’s ass about islamic rhetoric, I doubt the sane could be said of all the kids who grew up seeing him adding the takbir to the flag and increase restrictions on Christians while being exposed to “extreme” islam in schools.
Angemon says
While Saddam might not care about islamic rhetoric and see it only as a tool to use to remain in power, actions like the “faith campaign” (which encouraged a religious revival) helped set the way for the islamic state decades later. It was no accident or coincidence that, while ISIS footsoldiers came from all over the world, ISIS leaders were, mostly, either Chechens or former Saddamites.
CRUSADER says
Wasn’t sure which phrase to cry over more:
“Western Europe is retarded by Germany’s unending guilt and shame and anesthetized by the gelatinous Orwellian monster of the European Commission, where all is homogenized relativism.”
Or
“Saddamites”
Angemon says
AJ possibly presented them hoping they’d be perceived as self-evidently wrong. Or what better way to claim no bias than presenting a token sympathetic view?
gravenimage says
Al Jazeera Bemoans the Celebration, in Italy, of Oriana Fallaci (Part 2)
…………………
Oriana Fallaci is a great heroine–*of course* Al Jazeera hates her and her influence.
UNCLE VLADDI says
“Sons of Allaharchy,” eh? Dang “Allohim!”
😉
Vicki Coghlan says
Its sad and pathetic that the latest pope is nothing but a moslem apologist dhimmi.
He is an absolute disgrace.
As a Catholic he doesnt represent me.