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June 13, 2006

Italy: The Cost Of Defaming Islam

Oriana Fallaci, aged 77, has had a long career in journalism, working mainly as a war correspondent. No longer writing for newspapers, her words are now employed as weapons against the onslaught of radical Islam. As we wrote on November 30, Oriana was indicted by an Italian judge in June of 2005, for comments she made in her book "The Force of Reason". She was charged for "defaming Islam".

We reported on June 9 that she may also be accused of inciting religious hatred for a statement she made in which he spoke of blowing up a mosque.

Fallaci is living in New York, fighting another battle, that against cancer, but yesterday in Bergamo in Italy, her trial began while she was in absentia. The news coverage of this trial and its reasons, are found in The Guardian, Associated Press via the National Post, and the BBC, with opinion articles from the Boston Globe and the Australian.

The news is also covered by the state-owned Iranian press outlet, IRNA. As Iran is breaking international law regarding its uranium enrichment, we deliberately flout their copyright as a matter of house policy. This is their take on the trial, written :

Complaint filed against Oriana Fallaci for insulting Islam

Renowned Italian reporter and writer Oriana Fallaci is summoned to attend a court hearing on upcoming Monday in Bergamo, a city in north of Italy, for having made discriminatory and insulting comments against Islam publicly.

According to Italy's official news agency, ANSA, Fallaci has in her book "Power of Wisdom" insulted Islam openly in at least eighteen sentences.

Head of Italian Muslims Union Adel Smith who has filed the complaint against Fallaci has with his move created the background for controversial debate among supporters and opponents of Fallaci's racist ideas at Italy's political, judiciary, and journalist circles.

The Prosecutor General of Bergamo, Maria Christiania Rota, had for instance initially asked for filing Smith's complaint among the judiciary system's rejected files, but the city's Judge Armando Grasso has not yielded to her request based on articles of the Italian Constitution, and summoned Fallaci to court.

Adel Smith's previous move was launching a campaign against putting up crosses at public schools in Italy.

Fallaci has been adopting a strong anti-Islamic stand during the course of the past few decades, and had openly declared recently that if she would see the minaret of the newly constructed mosque in her neighborhood is completed she would blow it up relying on assistance of her friends.

The minaret she referred to is a minaret in a rural region of Italy, Colle di Val d'Elsa, near Siena. She had said: "I do not want to see a 24-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto when I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their country, so I blow it up!"

She had made these comments last week in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, states the Telegraph. For the charge of vilifying Islam, the maximum sentence she could receive in Italy is a fine of $6,329. For inciting religious hatred, she could face a maximum of three years' jail, if Adel Smith gets his way.

In an article published in the UK in September 4 (originally from June) last year, Fallaci spoke of her reaction to being told she would be prosecuted: "When I was given the news, I laughed. itterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true."

Her nemesis, Adel Smith, is reputed to have published a pamphlet in Italy, entitled Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci which calls upon Muslims to "eliminate" her.

Adel Smith himself is being charged with "vilipendio" against religion for calling the Roman Catholic church a "criminal organisation" on Italian television. While campaigning to remove crosses from public schools in Abruzzo, which his sons attended, in 2003 he threw a crucifix out of the window of a hospital where his mother was being treated. Hospital officials claimed that Smith had said: "My mother will not die in a room where there is a crucifix".

When Fallaci was asked last year about a possible solution to prevent the impending collapse of Europe under the Islamist threat, she retorted "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" and made gesture across her wrists. "What could Seneca do? He knew it would end that way - with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing."

She also stated: "The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilisation is dead. Period. I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict). I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

She spoke then of the future: "I don't even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live, not only because I love life so much but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty."

Yesterday, Judge Armando Grasso presided over the court case, which was merely a matter of legal formalities. The trial commenced, and then it was adjourned. He ordered the case to be adjourned until June 26. Not only was Fallaci not present, but Adel Smith was not in court.

So what has Oriana Fallaci said which "vilifies Islam" in 18 sentences?

In a previous book, entitled "The Rage and the Pride", which was published shortly after 9/11, she claimed that Muslim immigrants in the West had "multiplied like rats". In 2002, there was a movement to have this book banned in France, but the legal case fell through.

The current book, "The Force of Reason" apparently went onto presses within 24 hours of the explosions of March 11, 2004 in Spain, which killed 191 people, and injured 1,755 people

It contains the following comments. It claims that Islam is turning Europe into "an Islamic province, an Islamic colony". It says: "To be under the illusion that there is a good Islam and a bad Islam or not to understand that Islam is only one....is against reason."

She writes: "If I am invaded by weeds, suffocated by ivy, poisoned by an insect, bitten by a dog, attacked by a human being, I fight. I make war, I fight ... no jester bawling at me in a square, no jackass smearing my photo on TV, no vicious comedienne deriding my deadly illness is going to stop me ... because my war is right. Legitimate, dutiful, right."

She blames cultural pluralism as the "most squalid plot that through ideological fraud, cultural indecency, moral prostitution, deception, our time has produced. By the hypocrites who invented the fraud of Humanitarianism."

She writes of how, in 827AD, Muslims raped Sicily - "another target of their voraciousness. Massacring, beheading, impaling, crucifying as usual." She follows with: "Do you know who was Mehmet II?" and goes on to describe how Ottoman Muslims would "hack...on to death with scimitars, then burst into the cathedral and behead even newborn babies. They amuse themselves by snuffing out the candles with their little severed heads."

"Islam has always persecuted and silenced its intelligent men."

Islam has a policy of "gradual penetration rather than brutal and sudden aggression against the infidel dogs and infidel bitches."

And: "the Arabs started coming to Europe for their shopping.... Gaddafi bought 10 per cent of Fiat.... Al Fayed started eyeing Harrods of London....They bought up everything. Everything!"

"Nobody calls you a crap when you vacuously declaim."

Personally I can find nothing wrong with the above statements. But then I am not a crazed anti-Catholic Muslim on a mission to attack an intelligent woman with more guts than I could ever have, who calls the truth as she she sees it. I think Oriana Fallaci is perhaps too diplomatic, considering the extent of the menace facing Europe.

If you write or speak of Islam honestly, including its inherent violence and its appalling subjugation of women, and the pedophilia of its founder, the so-called Prophet Mohammed, you will vilify nothing. You will offend humane sensibilities, you will shock, even. But you can not vilify Islam any more than the way that its "sacred" book, the Koran vilifies us, the infidels. If you speak the truth, you cannot vilify Islam, for it is a vilification of everything the West was built upon.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 13, 2006 8:47 PM

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