Translated from the Italian by blogger someguy. Oriana Fallaci in full flow -- one could get drunk on the words alone, even if she weren't so sensible. Here is a taste; the whole thing is in four parts. Nobody can say that Ms. Fallaci is anything less than thorough in her writings!
Rather than try to keep up with the body counts from the latest love offerings by the Religion of Peace or, more painfully, to listen to the latest outrages against human decency pouring forth from the lips of their apologists--pale of skin and heart--I've decided to give the floor to one of the very few people who has been consistently making sense ever since the Muslim war against our civilization came to New York on a September morning four years ago.
From the Italian blog Eddyburg (via Romanwanderer) comes the latest column by Oriana Fallaci. Published exactly one week ago today in Corriere Della Sera, it is entitled, "Il nemico che trattiamo da amico" ("The Enemy We Treat As A Friend"). Hopefully, I'll have Part II translated and posted by tomorrow.*********
Now, I ask myself: âWhat do you say, what do you have to say, about what happened in London?â They ask me face-to-face, via fax and email; often scolding me because up until now I have remained silent. Almost as if my silence were a betrayal. And each time I shake my head and murmur to myself: what else should I say?!? Iâve been saying it for four years--that I fight against the Monster that has decided to eliminate us physically and, along with our bodies, to destroy our principles and values. Our civilization. For four years Iâve been talking about Islamic Nazism; about the war against the West; about the death cult; about European suicide. About a Europe that is no longer Europe, but Eurabia, and that with its feebleness, its inertia, its blindness, its servitude to the enemy is digging its own grave. For four years, like another Cassandra, Iâve been shouting until Iâm hoarse âTroy is burning! Troy is burning!â and I despair of the Danaids for whom, like Virgil in the Aeneid I weep for a city entombed in its torpor. [A city] that, through its wide-open doors receives fresh troops and joins complicit parties [inside]. For four years Iâve been repeating to the wind the truth about the Monster and its accomplices; that is, the accomplices of the Monster who, in good or bad faith, open wide the doors--who, like [those] in the Apocalypse of John the Evangelist, throw themselves at his feet and allow themselves to be stamped with the mark of shame.
I began with âThe Rage and the Pride.â I continued with âThe Force of Reason.â I followed [those] with âOriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci,â and âThe Apocalypse.â And in each one I preached, âWake up, West! Wake up!â The books, the ideas, for which in France they tried me in 2002, accusing me of religious racism and xenophobia. For which Switzerland asked our Minister of Justice to extradite me in handcuffs. For which in Italy I will be tried for vilifying Islam; that is, for an offense of opinion. (An offense that carries a sentence of three years in prison; none of which will be served by the Islamist caught with explosives in his cantina). Books, ideas, for which the âCaviarâ left, the âFois Grasâ right, and even the âProsciuttoâ Center have denigrated and vilified me, putting me in the stocks together with all who think as I do. That is, together with the sensible and unprotected people who are defined by the radical-chic in their frivolous talk as âthe riff-raff of the Right."
See link for sources.
James DeMeo, Ph.D. - 7/30/2005
For awhile, it seemed the European intellectual scene would be completely flooded by the conspiracy materials, without any counter-critique whatsoever, when Der Spiegel waded in 2003 into the quagmire with the article "Panoply of the Absurd" (1) revealing the most obvious distortions and fabrications, and in so doing, considerably drained the swamp. However, Der Spiegel (a liberal-left publication with anti-American sentiments) avoided discussion of two of the larger and probably more radically "serious" but willfully deceptive critics of the USA, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, whose influence and book sales have soared in inverse proportion to their factual content. Fans of these two fiction-writers certainly will protest to hear them described as having abandoned factual emphasis, so I shall give a few of the essentials, with web links for access to the full load of devastating, though "struggling to catch-up" truth. Like the 9-11 conspiracy-theory books, these two authors appear to have a much larger audience in Europe than in America.
Noam Chomsky is best known for his missives against the USA and Israel, who are misportrayed as the cause of all the world's problems.(2) In this, he echoes the Islamo-fascists who rail against the "Great Satan" and "Little Satan", an idee fixe so intellectually nailed to the floor that he successfully avoids any mention of the genocidal butchery and crimes committed by the "Saharasian" Soviet Union, Red China and the multiple branches of the COMINTERN (100 million dead from that nasty bunch)(3) -- except perhaps to either blame their crimes on the USA and Israel, or deny that they occurred at all. But most people reading Chomsky won't know about his friendly relations with the Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, except perhaps in France where those relationships have been more widely exposed. Chomsky wrote a glowing endorsement-foreword to a 1980 French-language autobiography by Robert Faurisson, who is best known for his many writings which claim the Holocaust never happened and the Nazi gas chambers did not exist.(4) In 1984 Chomsky gave the publishing rights to one of his books to a French neo-Nazi publisher, rescuing it from bankruptcy,(5) and he co-authored another book with a radical terrorist apologist, Edward Said, published in 1983 by a notorious neo-Nazi publishing house in the USA.(6) His books and audiotapes are openly sold and/or indexed on neo-Nazi websites, along with the writings of Adolf Hitler and nearly every historical revisionist and Holocaust denier imaginable, with no apparent embarrasment or objections by Chomsky.(7) And as late as 1986 he allowed one of his articles to appear in the Journal of Historical Review, mouthpiece for the anti-Semitic neo-Nazi Institute for Historical Review, which gives favorable attention to most all his other writings.(8) There is more.
Until most recently I had no idea about the extent of Chomsky's anti-Semitic activities, as in the USA and probably in most of Europe as well, he successfully passes himself as a "radical anti-capitalist" and "rational social critic" from the political Left. Full documentation on this matter is presented in the well-researched book by Werner Cohn, "Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers."(9) The book also is posted on-line by the author, who is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Deborah Lipstadt, a powerful anti-fascist scholar who had done battle with the neo-Nazis on many occasions, also addressed the sordid Chomsky-Faurisson matter,(10) and most books factually discussing modern anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial will include a discussion on Chomsky. His die-hard supporters, however, either claim Chomsky's actions are a "defense of free-speech rights for Holocaust-deniers" (certainly it is much more than that), or they don't want to know about it at all. His distortions both in supporting the Holocaust deniers, and then trying to misrepresent his support as merely "defending free speech" is part of a larger pattern of misrepresentations which permeate his entire body of writings.
Many legitimate and respectable internet sites and books provide a veritable index-list of specific rebuttals to Chomsky's claims and writings, correcting his multiple distortions of historical and recent events.(11) A particularly good book is "The Anti-Chomsky Reader" Edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, published in late 2004. (12)
Among the revelations are his flirtations and embrace of Stalinism and Holocaust-denial, as well as justification of Islamist terrorism. The above revelations, and a good examination of the specific critical materials cited, should discredit Chomsky for anyone with genuinely liberal sentiments, a.k.a. someone concerned about genocide, justice, human rights, freedom, honesty, genuine scholarship, totalitarianism, etc.
But people who drink from the revisionist's poisoned well spew hate at Americans, "The Jews" (or euphemisms for Jews, such as Zionists, international bankers, gold traders, money lenders, etc.) and Western democracy in general. In fact, Western democracy has become the new scapegoat among those who enjoy all the benefits the West can offer, while simultaneously openly supporting the most blood-soaked dictators and totalitarian fanatics one could imagine. The strange phenomenon of Western intellectuals, movie-stars and the so-called anti-war activists, throwing hate at Bush only to give big friendly hugs to mass-murderers like Saddam Hussein or Kim Jung Il.
They would have us believe, the world would be a better place if only the West, in general, and the US and Israel, in particular, would cease to exist. Chomsky's widespread network of imitators and supporters, who uncritically parrot his distortions (13) don't seem bothered by his helpful support for the crass Jew-hatred and historical revisionism of the Holocaust deniers, nor about the falsehoods discovered in his citations. (11, 12)
#2
Noam Chomsky is a vile little peckerwood. A Silver tounged snake to many young leftists. Even mentioning him in a critical light will get you modded down on sites that allow that, such is his flock of adoring little leftist gits. He is one of the few people in the west I wish would hurry up and die.
#5
Holocaust deniers, eh? Go visit the Holocaust Museum in D.C. The smell of hundreds of pairs of shoes is still fresh in my nostrils.
Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/01/2005 15:19 Comments ||
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#6
I'm with SPoD, for many years I have reserved a special loathing for Chomsky. His one big idea, a universal grammar, turned out to be completely wrong. He has spent his entire life in denial about this and pretty much everything else.
It's not easy to make sense of President Bush's recent decision to share nuclear technology with India. Is this merely real politik? Or is it a careless slip in an already unstable world?
Unfortunately, the media didn't do a great job helping citizens sort through the mess when the story first broke and they certainly didn't lend the story as much meaning as they ought to have, for, in fact, the significance of this deal cannot be overstated.
This agreement - and the blossoming relationship between the United States and India - reflects not only the Bush administration's recognition of India's strategic importance in the global chess game, but also its growing frustration with India's historical foe, Pakistan. Although Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf faces enormous political obstacles at home, he still has not been the reliable ally that Bush had hoped he might become, only softly confronting Islamic fundamentalism in his own country. As a result, Pakistan remains a breeding ground for terrorists (most experts believe Osama bin Laden is in hiding somewhere in Pakistan and three of the four London suicide bombers spent time in Pakistan). The Bush administration's frustration with Pakistan was only compounded by the troubling news that Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan had shared nuclear technology with other countries.
The deal with India also reflects how much progress the two countries have made with each other since their years of mutual suspicion, thanks to India's Cold War alliance with the Soviet Union. To fend off China, If I remember correctly.
India has proven itself to be a strong and successful democracy and the administration's support of India through this agreement is a long-overdue recognition of its importance and stability. India is not only the world's largest democracy, but it is also a burgeoning superpower and one of the fastest growing economies. Many citizens speak English and their economy is closely tied to the U.S. market.
By helping India acquire nuclear power - which will help grow its economy - the United States secures a strong ally in a region that China threatens to upset. U.S. nuclear technology will help India be an effective deterrent to China should the communist nation ruffle her feathers too much as it gains power in the global community.
There are, however, some potential problems presented by this agreement. The deal seems reasonable unless India takes this as an excuse to begin throwing its weight around. Pakistan - clearly disturbed by the favoritism being shown toward India by the United States - may turn to China and Russia as allies. (Keep in mind: However imperfect Pakistan's efforts on the war on terror, it is an ally and India refused to support U.S. efforts in Iraq.)
The deal also scraps the decades-old approach toward international nonproliferation for an ad hoc approach. Previously, countries were only permitted to purchase nuclear technology if they promised not to develop nuclear bombs. But India has not signed a non-proliferation treaty, and under this agreement, India can still produce nuclear bombs in its military reactors. With an exception being made on the nonproliferation treaty for India, what's to stop others from violating the treaty as well? Changing the rules for one country could persuade China and Russia to make similar exceptions for such countries as Pakistan or Iran. India has the bomb, no? The problem is just more of them. Iran, on the other hand...
The deal also seems to solidify the troubling idea that global power requires nuclear weapons capabilities, a notion that may only encourage other nations to accelerate their own nuclear ambitions. It also may weaken the administration's position at the bargaining table for negotiations with both North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs. Or it could be seen as a carrot for good behavior!
Any agreement can backfire ,and only time will tell if India exhibits the appropriate restraint by not taking advantage of this American concession by exploiting its nuclear potential and becoming less - not more - accommodating to U.S. interests. In addition, the agreement - and India's nuclear facilities - will have to be carefully monitored by the international community. India realizes that its relationship with the U.S. is too valuable to tamper with, so it is unlikely that it will act inappropriately. Still, the relationship and this agreement will require constant assessment, oversight and tending. I guess there's no such thing as "Fire and Forget" in international relations. Or even personal relations, come to think of it.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/01/2005 10:06 ||
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CLEAR. ARTICULATE. RIGHT ON THE MONEY. NO OTHER COMMENTARY NEEDED
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Remember how shortly after September 11 Mohammed Atta's lawyer father sounded worried in his cozy apartment? He stammered that his son did not help engineer the deaths of 3,000 Americans. According to him, the videos of the falling towers were doctored. Or maybe the wily Jews did it. Why, in fact, he had only talked to dear Mohammed Junior that very day, September 11. Surely someone other than his son was the killer taped boarding his death plane.
Apparently Mohammed el-Amir was worried of American retaliation â as if a cruise missile might shatter the very window of his upper-middle class Giza apartment on the premise that the father's hatred had been passed on to the son.
He sings a rather different tune now. Mohammed el-Amir recently boasts that he would like to see more attacks like the July 7 bombings of the London subway.
Indeed, he promised to use any future fees from his interviews to fund more of such terrorist killings of the type that his now admittedly deceased son mastered. Apparently in the years since 9/11, el-Amir has lost his worry about an angry America taking out its wrath on the former Muslim Brotherhood member who sired such a monster like Atta.
Yet one wonders at what he is saying now, after the worst terrorist attack in Egyptian history at the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Egypt finally is suffering from the same terror and mayhem that its radical sons like the pampered Atta and Dr. Zawahiri unleashed on so many poorer others. The Mubaracracy may not take kindly to Atta's father endorsing such carnage from his pleasant apartment that is incinerating those other than Jews and Westerners â and threatens to ruin the nation's entire tourist industry.
The father of Mohammed Atta is emblematic of this crazy war, and we can learn various lessons from his sad saga.
First, for all their braggadocio, the Islamists are cowardly, fickle, and attuned to the current political pulse.
When the West is angry and liable to expel Middle Eastern zealots from its shores, strike dictators and terrorists abroad, and seems unfathomable in its intentions, the Islamists retreat. Thus a shaky al-Amir once assured us after 9/11 that his son was not capable of such mass murder.
But when we seem complacent, they brag of more killing to come. Imagine an American father giving interviews from his apartment in New York, after his son had just blown up a shrine in Mecca, with impunity promising to subsidize further such terrorist attacks. If our government allowed him to rant and rave like that in such advocacy of mass murder, then we would be no better than he.
The other lesson is that the war the Arab autocracies thought was waged against the West by their own zealots has now turned on them. The old calculus of deflecting their failures onto us by entering in an unspoken unholy agreement with the Islamists is coming to an end. George Bush's "You are either with us or against us" is belatedly arriving to the Middle East's illegitimate regimes.
And the governments of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other autocracies are in worse shape than we are. At least we are promoting democratic alternatives to their dictatorships, in the hopes that when such strongmen fall, there is another choice besides the jihadists. But the autocrats themselves have nowhere to go. Since they never allowed a loyal democratic opposition, there is only the unsavory choice of either liberalizing while they are in the middle of a bombing war with extremists â or the fate of the shah.
Quite simply, Islam is not in need of a reformation, but of a civil war in the Middle East, since the jihadists cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. Only with their humiliation, will come a climate of tolerance and reform, when berated and beaten-down moderates can come out of the shadows.
The challenge for the Middle East is analogous to our own prior war with Hitler who sought to redefine Western culture along some racial notion of a pure Volk long ago unspoiled by Romanizing civilization. Proving the West was not about race or some notion of an ubermenschen ruling class did not require an "internal dialogue," much less another religious reformation, but the complete annihilation of Nazism.
So it must be with the latest fad of radical Islamicism. Contrary to popular opinion, there has not been a single standard doctrine of hatred in the Middle East. Radical Islam is just the most recent brand of many successive pathologies, not necessarily any more embraced by a billion people than Hitler's Nazism was characteristic of the entire West.
In the 1940s the raging -ism in the Middle East was anti-Semitic secular fascism, copycatting Hitler and Mussolini —who seemed by 1942 ascendant and victorious. Between the 1950s and 1970s Soviet-style atheistic Baathism and tribal Pan-Arabism were deemed the waves of the future and unstoppable. By the 1980s Islamism was the new antidote for the old bacillus of failure and inadequacy. Each time an -ism was defeated, it was only to be followed by another — as it always is in the absence of free markets and constitutional government.
Saddam started out as a pro-Soviet Communist puppet, then fancied himself a fascistic dictator and pan-Arabist nationalist, and ended up building mosques, always in search of the most resonant strain of hatred. Arafat was once a left-wing atheistic thug. When the Soviet Union waned, he dropped the boutique socialism, and became a South-American-style caudillo. At the end of his days, he too got religion as the Arab Street turned to fundamentalism and Hamas threatened to eat away his support.
The common theme is not the Koran, but the constant pathology of the Middle East —gender apartheid, polygamy, religious intolerance, tribalism, no freedom, a censored press, an educational system of brainwashing rather than free inquiry —that lends itself to the next cult to explain away failure and blame the West, which always looms as both whore and Madonna to the Arab Street.
Iraq has inadvertently become the battleground of a long overdue reckoning, a bellwether of the future of the Middle East. If the constitutionalists win, then the jihadists will be in retreat and there will be at last a third way between radical Islam and dictatorship.
We must now step up our efforts. At home we should no more tolerate the expression of Islamic fascism on the shores of the West than Churchill would have allowed Hitler Youth to teach Aryan global racial superiority in London while it was under the Blitz.
When the extremists are repatriated to the Middle East, and understand they are never again welcome in Europe and America, millions of others will know the reason why —and decide by their own attitudes to the killers in their midst whether they themselves wish ever again to visit, work, or be educated in the West.
If the terrorists are not isolated and ostracized at home, then any Western government would have to be suicidal to admit any more young males from the Islamic Middle East. Indeed, if the Iranian public or the Saudis, or Egyptian citizenry do not begin creating a climate hostile to radical Islam, then they de facto can only become the enemies of the United States in a war that they can only lose.
To fathom our success abroad, read what the Islamic websites —or Mohammed Atta's own father —now say about the evil Americans and George Bush, who, they lament, have set Muslim against Muslim in Lebanon, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine. The foreign contagion of democracy and reform, despite the best efforts of both the mullah and the strongman, now infects the Arab Street and it seems to be driving bin Laden and Bashar Assad alike crazy.
Iraqi guardsmen are fighting al Qaedists as Afghans die in firefights with Taliban remnants. Note well that at the loci of American democratizing presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are few local Iraqis and Afghans —as there are few Turkish or Indian Muslims ââ¬â who are eager for global jihad against the West. The killers instead flock from elsewhere to those new nations to stop the experiment before it spreads. Give dictatorial Pakistan or Egypt billions, and we get ever more terrorists; give the Iraqis and Afghans their freedom and their citizens are unlikely to show up in London and Madrid blowing up civilians, but rather busy at home killing jihadists.
In this Mexican standoff, the Islamists, dictators, and democratic reformers are waging a struggle for the hearts and minds of the Middle East. We have had our own similar three-way shootout in the West between fascists, Communists, and liberal republics. Backing Communists to stop fascists or helping autocrats fight Communists were stop-gap, wartime exigencies —never solutions in themselves.
The Middle East does not need a reformation in Islam as much as a war to eradicate a minority of religious fanatics who are empowered through their blackmail of dictatorships —and to do so in a way that leads to constitutional government rather than buttressing a police state. So far governments have chosen appeasement and bribery —if at times some torture when demands for investigations rise —and so time is running out for the entire region.
There are a million Muslims in Israel ââ¬â the mother of all evils in the radical Islamic mind. Yet very few have turned themselves into global jihadists, and hundreds are not blowing themselves up daily in Tel Aviv, much less in London or New York. Why? Perhaps the twofold knowledge that they have rights in Israel not found in the Arab world that they don't wish to forfeit, and they are surrounded by people who would not tolerate their terrorism.
For the first time, Afghans and Iraqis have a stake in their own future ââ¬â and know the United States is at last on the right side of history and intends to stay and win by their side.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
