-Caveat Lector- On 22 Mar 2003 at 4:43, Mike Schneider wrote:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/21/1047749914360.html Battle cry from a biased heart March 22 2003 Death threats don't faze best-selling author Oriana Fallaci, which is just as well now she's taken on the world's Muslims, writes George Gurley. On a recent afternoon, the telephone rang in Oriana Fallaci's Manhattan townhouse. The tiny, blue-eyed 72-year-old writer put down her cigarette and picked up the receiver. "Oh, it is you!" she said. She assured the caller she was all right, then thanked him and hung up. "He calls to see if I'm alive. To see if I need something." The caller was a police officer, who has been checking in on Fallaci since the publication of her most recent book, The Rage and the Pride, which she wrote in New York during the weeks following September 11. The book, a passionate cry in which she accuses the West of being blind to the true threat of Islam, caused a scandal when it was published in Europe last year, but has raised barely a murmur in the US. In her native country of Italy, the book has sold more than 1million copies and at least 500,000 in the rest of Europe. In America, it had sold just 40,000 copies by the beginning of this year. The relative silence with which Americans have greeted the book is puzzling: it is they who have the most evidence, in downtown New York, of the danger that Fallaci lays out. In The Rage and the Pride, she compares Islam to a "mountain which in 1400 years has not moved, has not risen from the abyss of its blindness, has not opened its doors to the conquests of civilisation, has never wanted to know about freedom and democracy and progress. In short, has not changed." In France, a group called the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People tried to have the book banned. A French court rejected the request. In Italy, a booklet titled Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci, written by the president of the Italian Islamic Party, called for Muslims to "go and die with Fallaci". Fallaci sued the author for slander and instigation to murder. "My life," Fallaci wrote in her book's preface, "is seriously in danger." And not only from terrorists. In 1992, she underwent surgery for breast cancer; she says she could die any day. But she still moves about like a spunky teenage girl, leaping up and down, making faces. She drinks fine wine and smokes two packets of cigarettes a day - her oncologist allows it, she says. Before her new book, "La Fallaci" had achieved international fame as a journalist and author. She covered the Vietnam War and conducted spirited interviews with celebrities as well as world leaders - Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, the Shah of Iran, Ariel Sharon, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat and Deng Xiaoping (or, as she called some of them, "those bastards who decide our lives"). Henry Kissinger said his interview with Fallaci was "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press". Her writing has made her life comfortable. In addition to her Manhattan townhouse, she owns a home in Florence and a 23-room house in the Tuscan countryside, though comfort has not dulled her edges. "I have been months and months and months of bestseller No.1," Fallaci says in her strong Florentine accent. "I do not say this to make self-congratulations. I say this to underline my thesis - that the moment was mature. That I have put the finger on the nerve of something: the Muslims' immigration, which grows and grows without inserting itself in our way of life, without accepting our way of life and, on the contrary, trying to impose on us its way of life ... "People in Europe are so exasperated by the arrogance of most of these 'invaders', and being blackmailed with the unfair term 'racist' when they protest, that there was a kind of thirst for a book like this ... There is no other explanation for the book's success. I have written better books. This is a scream rather than an essay - a book written in two weeks, come on. Why? It was not the book itself. It was the thirst, the hunger." The West, she says, is under assault and doesn't realise it. "If we stay inert, if we let ourselves be scared, then we become collaborationists. If we are passive ... then we lose the war that has been declared against us. "We can talk for centuries about the word 'racist'," Fallaci says. "'Racist' has to do with race and not with religion. Yes, I am against that religion, a religion that controls the life of people in every minute of their day, that puts the burqa on women, that treats women as camels, that preaches polygamy, that cuts the hands of the poor thieves ... I am not religious - all religions are difficult to accept for me - but the Islamic one is not even a religion, in my opinion. It is a tyranny, a dictatorship - the only religion on earth that has never committed a work of self-criticism ... It is immoveable." I ask about the death threats she receives. "You put the finger on the wound," she says - but not because she's afraid. "I can't bear the bodyguards," she explains. In Italy, she says, they are "imposed" on her. Her homes are closely guarded. If anything happened to her in Italy, she says, it would be a political scandal. In New York, however, she's fairly vulnerable and she likes it. "Thank God, the Americans don't care about me," she says, adding that the FBI has visited a few times. "I am not saying this because I want to look like I am like Rambo, or that I don't care. That's stupid. It's my temperament. "The point is not winning or losing. Of course, I want to win. The point is to fight well with dignity. The point is, if you die, to die on your feet, standing up. If you tell me, 'Fallaci, why do you fight so much? The Muslims are going to win and they're going to kill you,' I answer to you, 'Fuck you - I shall die on my feet."' When she gets phone calls threatening her life, she lets them talk. "Then I say, 'Do you know where it is your mother and your wife and your sister and your daughter are right in this moment? They are in a brothel of Beirut. And do you know what they're doing? They are giving away their' - I don't tell it to you, but I tell it to them - 'and you know to whom? To an American. Fuck you."' The secret of her journalistic success, Fallaci says, is that she has never tried to be objective. Objectivity is "a hypocrisy which has been invented in the West [and] which means nothing. We must take positions. Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called 'objectivity'. Objectivity does not exist - it cannot exist ... The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: sometimes truth stays on one side only." We decide to go out to dinner and I ask if it will be safe. "When you are with me, you're safe. I defend you," she says. "I promise you, nothing will happen to you if I am there." In her hallway hangs a framed advertisement for a speech against Hitler and Mussolini which the anti-Fascist writer Gaetano Salvemini gave at Irving Plaza in 1933. "They wouldn't listen," Fallaci says. "They wouldn't believe him; it was too early. I feel myself very like Salvemini, because he was shouting with the same despair, with the same arguments, and people did not believe him. When you say things a little too early, they don't believe you. Capito?" The New York Observer The Rage and The Pride, by Oriana Fallaci, is published by Universe, $35. -- Outgoing mail is certified virus free Scanned by Norton AntiVirus <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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