Islamism - 5

[Naresh]

<b>West being engulfed by radical Islam: Oriana - Khalid Hasan</b>

WASHINGTON: Controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who has been on a crusade against Islam for the last several years, has said in an interview published this week that the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam.

A profile of the ailing journalist, which appears in the current issued of New Yorker, quotes from one of her more recent pieces of writing in which she said that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into “a colony of Islam”, or a “Eurabia”, which will soon “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt”.

Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the incursions by the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing “invasion - only this time with children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons”. She writes that the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled”.

Muslim immigrants, she maintains, have no desire to assimilate, while European leaders, in their “muddleheaded multiculturalism”, have made “absurd accommodations” to them, allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds.

According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticise Muslim customs to a double standard. “If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your right of thought and expression. But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination.”

The rhetoric of Fallaci’s three books on Islam, the New Yorker writer Margret Talbot notes, is “intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive”. In the first volume, she wrote that Muslims “breed like rats”; in the second, she conceded that while that statement was “a little brutal”, it was “indisputably accurate”. Spain, she wrote, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”. Much of the Italian intelligentsia, Talbot adds, now shuns her. The German press has been highly critical, too. Fallaci has repeatedly fallen afoul of some of Europe’s strict laws against vilifying religions or inciting racial hatred. She currently faces trial in Italy, on charges that amount to blasphemy. Last year, Adel Smith, a convert to Islam who heads a group called the Muslim Union of Italy, and who had previously sued the government to have a crucifix removed from his sons’ classroom, persuaded a judge in Bergamo to allow him to charge Fallaci with defaming Islam. Fallaci told the New Yorker writer, “I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing.” Elaborating, she said, “Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They … go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. ... I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilisation. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots … Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

Talbot writes, “Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices of Islamic fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims … Many of Fallaci’s objections, however, have more to do with her aesthetic sensibilities. For her, hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany is a form of oppression. Yet such examples do not rise to the level of argument that she wants to make, which is that the native culture of Italy will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating. ‘They live at our expense, because they’ve got schools, hospitals, everything,’ she said at one point, beginning to shout. ‘And they want to build damn mosques everywhere.’”

<b>She hates Yassir Araft, Gaddafi and Muhammad Ali. She told her interviewer, “I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says. Whatever its version.</b> Of course there are exceptions. Also, considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good Muslims must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and secularism.”

Cheers <!--emo&:beer--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='cheers.gif' /><!--endemo-->