A man of prodigious fortune, coming to add his opinion to some light discussion that was going on casually at his table, began precisely thus: "It can only be a liar or an ignoramus who will say otherwise than," and so on. Pursue that philosophical point, dagger in hand.

--Michel de Montaigne, Of the art of discussion.



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The 18 things you can't say about Muslims in Italy.
Thanks to Ilario Vige, my indefatigable source of Oriana intel, I now have a pdf copy of an article from the Italian newspaper Libero, which reproduces the text of the complaint filed against Fallaci. How’s that for social capital in the internet age? (Ah, Prof. Putnam, there are more things in heaven and earth…) I don’t have time now to try to translate all of it, but eventually I hope to obtain copies of the cited code provisions so as to be in a position to understand the way the legal issues are being framed. What I can do for now is list the 18 “incriminating sentences.” As I had guessed, a few of the offending passages are from the section I translated earlier. Many of them are mere snippets taken from longer contexts. For now I will present them only as they appear in the complaint (at least as cited in the article), ellipses and all. If there is reason to do so later I can provide more of the context for each.

1) during the occupation of Montecassino in the 9th century “the Muslims amused themselves by sacrificing each night the virginity of a nun. Do you know where? On the altar of the cathedral.”

2) while occupying Constantinople in 1453, the Turks led by Mohammed II “decapitated even newborns. And extinguished candles with their little heads.”

3) “In a woman the Koran sees above all a womb to give birth.”

4) “In the dream that the sons of Allah have been nurturing for years, the dream of blowing up Giotto’s Tower or the Tower of Pisa or the cupola of St. Peter’s or the Eiffel Tower or Westminster Abbey or the cathedral of Cologne and so on . . .”

5) “…halal butchery is barbarous” just as “shechita butchery is barbarous. That is, the Jewish version which is carried out in the same way and consists of slitting the animals’ throats without dazing them.”

6) France is a country “where Islamic racism, that is the hatred of the infidel-dogs, reigns supreme and is never put on trial, never punished. Where the Muslims declare openly: “We must take advantage of the democratic space that France offers us, we must exploit democracy, that is, make use of it to occupy territory.” Where not a few of them add: “In Europe the Nazi position was not understood. Or not by all. It was judged a vehicle of homicidal folly, when actually Hitler was a great man.”

7) for Muslims “biology is a shameless science because it is occupied with the human body and sex.”

8) “ . . . we will have to resign ourselves to the yoke of a creed that . . . instead of love spreads hatred and instead of liberty slavery.”

9) “a Right and a Left . . . that (in Italy) are both on the side of the enemy (Islam).”

10) the demands of the Islamics with regard to school curricula mean that in literature classes “we will not be allowed to include for example The Divine Comedy . . .nor the Canticle of Creatures nor the Sacred Hymns of Alessandra Manzoni . . .” etc. etc.

11) “ . . . the uncouth wailing of the muezzin . . .”

12) the terrorist attacks of the last twenty years have caused six thousand deaths “to the glory of the Koran. In obedience to its verses.”

13) “Our Jesus of Nazareth . . . they put him in their Danna where he eats like Trimalchio, drinks like a drunkard, screws like a sexual maniac.”

14) “. . . the revolting, reactionary, obtuse, feudal Right is found today only in Islam. It is Islam.”

15) infibulation is “the mutilation that the Muslims force on little girls to prevent them, once they are grown . . . from enjoying the sexual act. It is a female castration that the Muslims practice in twenty-eight countries of Islamic Africa and because of which two million persons die each year from sepsis or loss of blood . . .”

16) the Italians afflicted by atavistic loss of pride “are not offended when Islamic immigrants urinate on their monuments or soil the sacristies of their churches or toss their crucifixes out the window of a hospital.”

17) “. . . Islam is a pond. And a pond is a trough of stagnant water. . . it is never purified . . . it is easily polluted, like a watering hole for livestock of little value. The pond does not love life: It loves death . . .”

18) “ . . .despite the massacres through which the sons of Allah have bloodied us and bloodied themselves for over thirty years, the war that Islam has declared against the West . . . is a cultural war. . .they kill us in order to bend us. To intimidate us . . . Their goal is not to fill cemeteries. Not to destroy our skyscrapers . . . It is to destroy our soul, our ideas. Our feelings and our dreams. It is to subjugate the West once again.”

UPDATE: As you can see, Oriana doesn't really live up to her claim that this time around she is appealing solely to the power of reason and putting aside her rage and pride. This was my main disappointment with the book when I read it. She does cite a lot of facts in support of her attacks on Islam, and as you can see several of the 18 sentences are simply historical assertions. She doesn't provide any footnotes or sources for any of her facts though (no doubt Muslim historians paint things differently), and it is undeniable that the overall tone of her book is one of visceral revulsion for Muslims, not just rationally alarmed criticism of certain political and cultural developments in Europe. This is unfortunate, because her book does raise a lot of genuinely alarming and important issues, and I think this time around her haranguing jeremiads, bracing and delightfully trenchant though they can be (particularly when directed at various politicians and organizations), actually wind up detracting from the message. They surely detract from the chances of persuading anyone not on her side already, or even of getting them to give her an open-minded hearing. They also make it easy to understand why a Muslim who does not wish to blow up the Eiffel Tower or conquer the West would rightly feel that he was being stereotyped and hatred being fomented against him. On the other hand, plenty of people like the ones Fallaci describes assuredly exist, and the gap will not be bridged by pretending it isn't there. None of my criticism, of course, changes my view that in a free society this sort of expression ought to be beyond the reach of legal sanctions.

UPDATE 2: David Harbottle has another translation of these items here, except that the source he was looking at lists a few of them differently. I have no idea why that is.
posted by CMN at 1:14 PM
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