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The Fallaci Code
Written by BRENDAN BERNHARD
Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim immigration to Europe a conspiracy?
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Oriana Fallaci Photo by Francesco Scavullo
In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and
novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our
time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in
a mere three decades?
How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that
threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could
the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed?
Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London
that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and
Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which
was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim
Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed
into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, "if I hate Americans I go
to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?"
In attempting to answer these questions, the author, who is stricken
with cancer and has been hounded by death threats and charges of
"Islamophobia" (she is due to go on trial in France this June), has
combined history with episodes of riveting firsthand reportage into a
form that reads like a real-life conspiracy thriller.
If The Force of Reason sells a lot of copies, which it almost
certainly will (800,000 were sold in Italy alone, and the book is in
the top 100 on Amazon ), it will be not only because of the heat
generated by her topic, but also because Fallaci speaks for the
ordinary reader. There is no one she despises more than the
intellectual "cicadas," as she calls them - "You see them every day on
television; you read them every day in the newspapers" - who deny they
are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with
Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least
important component. Nonetheless, to give the reader a taste of what
Muslim conquest can be like, in her first chapter, Fallaci provides a
brief tour of the religion’s bloodiest imperial episodes and later
does an amusing job of debunking some of its more exaggerated claims
to cultural and scientific greatness.
The book is also animated by a world-class journalist’s dismay that
she could have missed the story of her lifetime for as long as she
did. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she was a Vietnam War correspondent
and a legendarily ferocious interviewer going mano a mano with the
likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, Fallaci was simply too
preoccupied with the events of the moment to notice that an entirely
different narrative was rapidly taking shape - namely, the
transformation of the West. There were clues, certainly. As when, in
1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who
told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that
the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal,
Habash declared, was to wage war "against Europe and America" and to
ensure that henceforth "there would be no peace for the West." The
Arabs, he informed her, would "advance step by step. Millimeter by
millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined,
stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall
expand throughout the whole planet."
Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did
she realize that he "also meant the cultural war, the demographic war,
the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens .. In
short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed
pluriculturalism." It is a low-level but deadly war that extends
across the planet, as any newspaper reader can see.
Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing
Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan
Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the
mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. "One day
Arabs were a remote people .. camping out in tents with camels .. the
next, they were neighbors." On the streets of West London appeared
black-clad women adorned with beaked masks that made them look "like
hooded falcons." Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four
steps ahead of the women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks "like a
crew of escaped film extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of
exhaust fumes."
Writers far better acquainted with the Muslim world than Raban have
been equally perplexed. In 1995, the late American novelist Paul
Bowles, a longtime resident of Tangier, told me that he could not
understand why the French had allowed millions of North African
Muslims into their country. Bowles had chosen to live among Muslims
for most of his life, yet he obviously considered it highly unlikely
that so many of them could be successfully integrated into a modern,
secular European state.
Perhaps Bowles would have been interested in this passage from
Fallaci’s book: "In 1974 [Algerian President] Houari Boumedienne, the
man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence,
spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without
circumlocutions he said: ‘One day millions of men will leave the
southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But
not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will
conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us
from the wombs of our women.’"
Such a bald statement of purpose by a nation’s president before an
international forum seems incredible. Yet even in British journalist
Adam LeBor’s A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost
supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a
London-based mullah is quoted as saying, "We cannot conquer these
people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force
of numbers." In fact, such remarks are commonplace. Just this week,
Mullah Krekar, a Muslim supremacist living in Oslo, informed the
Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Muslims would change Norway, not
the other way around. "Just look at the development within Europe,
where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes," he said.
"By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim."
In other words, Europe will be conquered by being turned into
"Eurabia," which is what Fallaci believes it is well on the way to
becoming. Leaning heavily on the researches of Bat Ye’or, author of
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Fallaci recounts in fascinating detail
the actual origin of the word "Eurabia," which has now entered the
popular lexicon. Its first known use, it turns out, was in the
mid-1970s, when a journal of that name was printed in Paris
(naturally), written in French (naturally), and edited by one Lucien
Bitterlin, then president of the Association of Franco-Arab Solidarity
and currently the Chairman of the French-Syrian Friendship
Association. Eurabia (price, five francs) was jointly published by
Middle East International (London), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), the
Groupe d’Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva) and the European
Coordinating Committee of the Associations for Friendship with the
Arab World, which Fallaci describes as an arm of what was then the
European Economic Community, now the European Union. These entities,
Fallaci says, not mincing her words, were the official perpetrators
"of the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created," and
Eurabia was their house organ.
Briefly put, the alleged plot was an arrangement between European and
Arab governments according to which the Europeans, still reeling from
the first acts of PLO terrorism and eager for precious Arabian oil
made significantly more precious by the 1973 OPEC crisis, agreed to
accept Arab "manpower" (i.e., immigrants) along with the oil. They
also agreed to disseminate propaganda about the glories of Islamic
civilization, provide Arab states with weaponry, side with them
against Israel and generally toe the Arab line on all matters
political and cultural. Hundreds of meetings and seminars were held as
part of the "Euro-Arab Dialogue," and all, according to the author,
were marked by European acquiescence to Arab requests. Fallaci
recounts a 1977 seminar in Venice, attended by delegates from 10 Arab
nations and eight European ones, concluding with a unanimous
resolution calling for "the diffusion of the Arabic language" and
affirming "the superiority of Arab culture."
While the Arabs demanded that Europeans respect the religious,
political and human rights of Arabs in the West, not a peep came from
the Europeans about the absence of freedom in the Arab world, not to
mention the abhorrent treatment of women and other minorities in
countries like Saudi Arabia. No demand was made that Muslims should
learn about the glories of western civilization as Europeans were and
are expected to learn about the greatness of Islamic civilization. In
other words, according to Fallaci, a substantial portion of Europe’s
cultural and political independence was sold off by a coalition of
ex-communists and socialist politicians. Are we surprised? Fallaci
isn’t. In 1979, she notes, "the Italian or rather European Left had
fallen in love with Khomeini just as now it has fallen in love with
Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Arafat."
Considerably less intemperate than her last book on the topic of
radical Islam, the volcanically angry The Rage and the Pride, The
Force of Reason is despairing, but often surprisingly funny. ("The
rage and the pride have married and produced a sturdy son: the
disdain," she writes with characteristic wit.) And, Fallaci being
Fallaci, it
is occasionally over the top and will no doubt be deeply offensive to
many, particularly when, in a postscript the book might have been
better off without, she claims that there is no such thing as moderate
Islam. Nonetheless, the voice and warmth and humor of the author light
up its pages, particularly when she takes a leaf out of Saul Bellow’s
Herzog by firing off impassioned letters to the famous both living and
dead. She is savage about the Left, the "Peace" movement (war is a
fundamental, if regrettable, condition of life, she states), the
Catholic Church, the media and, of course, Islam itself, which she
considers theological totalitarianism and a deadly threat to the
world. She is much more optimistic about America than Europe, citing
the bravery of New Yorkers who celebrated New Year’s Eve in Times
Square despite widely publicized terrorism threats, but here one feels
that she is clutching at straws. Though Fallaci now lives in New York,
little amity has been extended to her by her peers since the post-9/11
publication of The Rage and the Pride, and she remains almost as much
of a media pariah here as she does in Europe. The major difference is
that we’re not putting her on trial.
As that Norwegian Mullah told Aftenposten, "Our way of thinking ..
will
prove more powerful than yours." One hopes he’s wrong, but if he is,
it will be ordinary Americans and Europeans, including courageous
Arab-Americans like L.A. resident Wafa Sultan and the Somali-born
Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali (two women openly challenging
Islamist supremacism), who prove him so, and not our intellectual
classes (artists, pundits, filmmakers, actors, writers ..). Many of
the
latter, consumed by Bush-hatred and cultural self-loathing, are
perilously close to becoming today’s equivalent of the great Norwegian
novelist Knut Hamsun, who so hated the British Empire that he sided
with the Nazis in World War II, to his everlasting shame. The Force of
Reason, at the very least, is a welcome and necessary antidote to the
prevailing intellectual atmosphere.
--
"No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."
- Winston Churchill on Islam
"Islam is now the number one enemy not only of Europe, but of the
entire free world.. it is an illusion to think that a moderate Islam
exists in Europe." - Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium's most popular
political party.