Oriana Fallaci, Islam and the West

Important warnings that were ignored:

With everything that is now happening in the Middle East, it is always useful to give things a bit of historical perspective. Sadly, even recent history is forgotten by most folks in the West. What happened in New York and Washington and in rural Pennsylvania just 24 short years ago is one case in point. Consider one writer who wrote passionately about those dark and diabolical events.

Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), an Italian journalist, writer and feminist, was one of the few to call out Islam at a time when so many were silent. She was one feminist who knew what Islam was really all about, and how it must be resisted fully and fearlessly.

Her two most famous books on Islam came out over 20 years ago, but they are still worth revisiting. They were first released in Italian, but were soon translated into English. They are:

The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, 2001, 2002)
The Force of Reason (Rizzoli, 2004, 2006)

Both books have much quotable material, so let me feature some key passages from each one.

The Rage and the Pride

Fallaci was living in New York at the time, and as the dates indicate, this book was written just after the Islamist attack of September 11. Early on she explains how she became so overwhelmed by emotion, and why she felt compelled to put pen to paper:

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape. Thus, eighteen days after the New York apocalypse, I broke my silence. . . And now I interrupt (I do not break, I interrupt) my exile with this small-book. . . . It was born all of a sudden. It burst like a bomb. Unexpectedly like the catastrophe that on September 11 disintegrated thousands of creatures and destroyed two of the most beautiful buildings of our time: the Towers of the World Trade Center. (pp. 17-18)

She continues:

Afterwards, I did not know what to do. In what way to make myself useful, to be of some service. And just while I was asking myself what do-I-do, what-can-I-do, the TV displayed the Pale­stinians who rejoiced and applauded over the mas­sacre. They cheered, they repeated Victory-Victory. Almost at the same time a friend came and told me that in Europe, Italy included, many imitated them sneering “Good. Americans got it good”. Therefore, like a soldier who jumps out of the trench and launches himself against the enemy, I jumped on my typewriter and started doing the only thing I could do: write. Twitch notes, at times. Disordered memos that I took for myself. Concepts, remem­brances, invectives that from America flew to Eu­rope. Or should I say to Italy. From Italy, to the Mo­slem countries. From the Moslem countries, back to America. Ideas that for years I had imprisoned inside my heart and my brain, saying to myself: “Why bother? What for? People are deaf. They don’t listen, don’t want to listen…”. Now they gu­shed out of me like a waterfall those ideas. They dropped on the paper as an unrestrainable cry. (pp. 19-20)

She speaks of how the volume first began as a newspaper article:

Then, (I had been crying like that for six days), the editor-in-chief of the major Italian news­paper came to New York. He came to ask me to break the silence I had already broken. And I told him so. I even showed him the twitch notes, the disordered memos, but immediately he caught fire. . . . All ablaze he asked me to go on, to sew the various pieces together with aste­risks, to build up a sort of letter addressed to him, to send it as soon as completed. And driven by the civic duty, the moral challenge, the categorical imperative, I accepted. . . . I returned to the typewriter where the unrestrainable cry became, rather than a letter, a scream of rage and pride. A J’accuse. A prosecution or a sermon addressed to the Europeans who, throwing me some flowers maybe, but certainly many rotten eggs, would li­sten to me from the stalls and the boxes and the gallery of his newspaper. I worked another twelve days or so… Without stopping, without eating, without sleeping. (pp. 22-23)

She does not hold back in discussing the real enemy: archaic, fundamentalist and bloodthirsty Islam. She writes:

Their yells Allah­-akbar, Allah-akbar. Jihad-Jihad… Extremist frin­ges?!? Fanatical minorities?!? They are millions and millions, the extremists. They are millions and millions, the fanatics. The millions and millions for whom, dead or alive, Ousama Bin Laden is a le­gend similar to the legend of Khomeini. The mil­lions and millions who after Khomeini’s death have chosen Bin Laden as their new leader, their new hero. Last night I saw those of Nairobi, a place about which we never talk. They filled the square more than in Gaza or in Islamabad or Djakar­ta, and a TV reporter interviewed an old man. He asked him: “Who is, for you, Ousama Bin Laden?” “A hero, our hero!” the old man joyfully answe­red. “And what happens if he dies?” the TV repor­ter added. “We find another one” the old man an­swered, still joyfully. In other words, the one who guides them is only the tip of the iceberg: the part of the mountain which emerges from the abyss. Thus, the real protagonist of this war is not Bin La­den. Even less it is the country that hosts him or the country that gave him birth. I mean Saudi Ara­bia and supporters like Iran or Iraq or Syria or Palestine. It is the Mountain. That Mountain which in one thousand and four hundred years has not moved, has not risen from the abyss of its blind­ness, has not opened its doors to the conquests of civilization, has never wanted to know about free­dom and democracy and progress. In short, has not changed. That Mountain which in spite of the sha­meful richness of its retrograde masters (kings and princes and sheiks and bankers) still lives in a scan­dalous poverty, still vegetates in the monstrous darkness of a religion which produces nothing but religion. That Mountain which drowns into illi­teracy (don’t forget that in almost every Moslem country the percentage of illiteracy surpasses sixty percent). That Mountain which gets information only through the backward Imams or the cartoon­ strips. (pp. 29-30)

The Force of Reason

Fallaci begins her follow-up volume by noting how much anger, enmity, opposition and denunciation she had received because of her first book. But she also notes that many ordinary people thanked her for it:

In America some newspapers have dedicated to that book praises which almost sound embarrassing. The New York Post, for example, has called me “the exception in a time where honesty and moral clarity are no longer considered precious virtues.” It has also published the letter of a Miami reader who says: “Fallaci’s book reminds me of Winston Churchill’s Step by Step, the appeal with which Churchill reprimanded Europe for its inertia before Hitler and Mussolini.” (Also the appeal, I underline, for which the “pacifists” of the Forties called him a warmonger.)  And a New York reader has added: “It seems that the only articulate intellectual produced by Europe since Winston Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain-speech is Oriana Fallaci. Her judgment of radical Islam is unimpeachable.” (pp. 15-16)

Much of this volume is a rebuke of Europe. It has allowed massive migration of peoples who by and large do not respect the values and beliefs of Europe, and want to take it back to an Islamist stone age. Of course she was sounding these warnings two decades ago, and today things are much worse than when she was writing.

She says that Europe is turning into a “colony of Islam” and that it should now be called “Eurabia”. She says this:

I don’t like to say that Troy is burning. That Europe is by now a province of Islam or rather a colony of Islam and Italy an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony. Saying this amounts to admitting that the Cassandras really do talk to the wind, that in spite of their screams of pain the blind remain blind, the deaf remain deaf, consciences reawoken soon relapse into sleep, and the Mastros Cecco die for nothing. But the truth is just this. From the Strait of Gibraltar to the fjords of Soroy, from the cliffs of Dover to the beaches of Lampedusa, from the steppes of Volgograd to the valleys of the Loire and the hills of Tuscany, the fire is spreading. In each one of our cities there is a second city. A city superimposed and equal to the one that in the Seventies thousands and thousands of Palestinians set up in Beirut installing a State within a State. A government within the government. A Muslim city, a city ruled by the Koran. (p. 35)

Examples of this are endless. For example, she speaks of how all these newcomers to her home country of Italy rarely can speak Italian, and have no understanding at all of its rich culture and heritage. How can they even be taught about this? Fallaci, an atheist, worries about this:

“In Europe so deeply connected with the Christian culture. How to make them understand Dante Alighieri and Alessandro Manzoni? How to explain to them our works of art, the paintings that portray Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary and Saints…” (p. 55)

And even back then a two-tiered justice system was happening in Europe. She says if an Italian or a Brit or a German was a bigamist, he would go to jail. But not so the Muslims:

If you are an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Pakistani or a Sudanese or a Senegalese polygamist, no-one touches a hair of your head. In 1993 France passed a law banning the immigration of polygamists and authorizing the expulsion of those who already lived in the country with more than one wife. But the gurus of Political Correctness and the agitprops of victimism started wailing in the name of Human-Rights and Ethnic-Religious-Plurality. They addressed the lawmakers with the same allegations they now addressed to me, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, and today in France you find polygamous immigrants all over the place. In the rest of Europe, ditto. Including Italy where Article 556 of the Criminal Code punishes the culprits with up to five years in prison, and where there has never been one single trial or expulsion for polygamy. Not far from my home in Tuscany a Maghrebin lives with two or three wives and a dozen children. (The number of the children is uncertain because every few months another one is born. The number of the wives, because they never go out together and in addition to the chador or they wear the nikab. I mean the mask which covers the face to the bridge of the nose. So they all look the same). One day I asked the village police-inspector why his men permitted the Maghrebin to violate Article 556. And the answer was: “For reasons of public order”. An euphemism which, translated into simple words, signified: “Not to make out of him an enemy, not to irritate his abettors”. In other words, “Because we are afraid”. (pp. 58-59)

Hmm, why does all this sound so very familiar today all throughout the West? Says Fallaci:

Freedom and democracy have to be wanted. And in order to want them you have to know what they are. You have to understand their concepts. Ninety-five percent of Muslims reject freedom and democracy not only because they don’t know what they are but because they don’t understand their concepts. Because their concepts are too strongly opposed to those on which theocratic totalitarianism is based. Too opposite, antithetical, to Islamic ideology. In that ideology, it’s God who commands. Not men. (p. 69)

She closes her book this way:

The decline of intelligence is the decline of Reason. And everything which now happens in Europe, in Eurabia, is also a decline of Reason. A decline which, before being morally wrong, is intellectually wrong. Refusing to admit that all Islam is a pond inside which we are drowning, in fact, is against Reason. Not defending our territory, our homes, our children, our dignity, our essence, is against Reason….

 

In my lecture “Wake up, West, Wake up” I said that the West has lost passion. That we must regain passion, the force of passion. And God knows if this is true. Living takes passion. Refusing to submit, to comply, to surrender, means living with passion. But Europe does not refuse at all to submit, to comply, to surrender. On the contrary, it cowardly waves the white flag of servitude and resignation which is suicide itself. The fact is that, at the point we have reached, it isn’t only a matter of living, it is a matter of surviving. And more than passion, surviving needs reason. Ratiocination, reason. So this time I do not appeal to rage, to pride. I did not even appeal to passion. I appeal to Reason. . . I say: we need to rediscover the Force of Reason. (pp. 267-269)

Stirring and prophetic words. Yes, as a Christian, I believe that reason alone will not save us. Only a return to what made Europe and the West great can do that. And that is a return to Christ and the gospel. But her important volumes still deserve a wide reading, or rereading.

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