Oriana Fallaci RIP

An excellent biographical web page dedicated to Oriana Fallaci the controversial Italian contrarian author and journalist, who passed away this month. A contrarian before little Christopher Hitchens was, and whom he modeled himself after as he swung right. Imagine that. She was the liberal darling of the right. Like Hitchens is today. Scratch a liberal and you find a conservative in a hurry.

THE AGITATOR

Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam.

by MARGARET TALBOT

Issue of 2006-06-05
Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has written three short, angry books advancing this argument. Two of them, “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason,” have been translated into idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself. (She has had difficult relationships with translators in the past.) A third, “The Apocalypse,” was recently published in Europe, in a volume that also includes a lengthy self-interview. She writes that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into “a colony of Islam,” an abject place that she calls “Eurabia,” which will soon “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.” Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing—invasion—only this time with “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” And, as Fallaci sees it, the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Italy, unlike America, has never been a melting pot, or a “mosaic of diversities glued together by a citizenship. Because our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us . . . who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us.” Muslim immigrants—with their burkas, their chadors, their separate schools—have no desire to assimilate, she believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism, have made absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds. (European governments are, in fact, hardening on these matters: France recently deported a Muslim cleric in Lyons who advocated wife-beating and the stoning of adulterous women.)

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