"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." Houari Boumedienne, President of Algeria. 1974 Speech before the United Nations
In her book, The Force of Reason, Oriana Fallaci describes the West's spiritual decline. In the West, she says, our corrupt culture does not punish the body. It does not confiscate your assets or violate your political rights. It kills the soul by eliminating the possibility that anyone will acknowledge you. The thinker who steps out-of-bounds is quickly isolated, diagnosed, dismissed, being neither followed nor respected. The culture denounces what remains of a "wretch, a lunatic, a liar, a dissolute, a sinner." Today's democracy condemns the lone voice, the voice in the wilderness, "to civic death." According to Fallaci, "Everything can be expressed, everything can be spread, except the freedom of revealing the truth. Because the truth leaves no way out, and inspires fear."
Fear is the determining factor in the decline of democracy, Fallaci claims. And therefore courage is the antidote. Tried in Paris for writing that Muslims "breed like rats" ("Ils se multiplient comme les rats"), Fallaci denounces Europe's intellectuals as "the oblivious ones." Her analysis is precise. She identifies a mortal threat to Western Civilization. It is the mortal threat of our own cowardice before the truth. The Muslims are flooding into Europe, building mosques and having babies. Europe is being inundated by this invasion, and soon it will cease to exist as Europe. Already, she explains, it is too late because Europe has been poisoned by socialism and enslaved by a comfortable and false conservatism. Caught between the two there is no manhood left, no freedom for reason, and no chance for reemergence. Europe has fallen to the "gurus of Political Correctness and the agitprops of victimism ... wailing in the name of Human-Rights."
Fallaci is unique in recognizing what few others have understood: that pacifism is a corrupting lie, humanitarianism a fraud, and therefore our statesmen "do not even comprehend the concept of the state." She tells us what few have dared to say before now: that our politicians do not understand politics and our intellectuals have no intellect. According to Fallaci, "There is a lack of honor and dignity and conscience which characterizes a society ill with lack of courage." The Church, she adds, seems incapable of defending Christianity. "And above all," she explains, "there is a Europe which does not know where it goes. Which has lost its identity and sold itself to the sultans, the caliphs, the viziers, the mercenaries, of the new Ottoman Empire."
For writing these words, Fallaci faced up to two years imprisonment in her home country (Italy). Indicted under the Italian Penal Code for the "vilification of Islam," Fallaci avoided prison by living in New York and later returning home to die of cancer. On learning of her indictment in Italy, Fallaci commented that her trial "is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." What more can be said? If a writer claims that "Europe is threatened by Islam," and this same Europe indicts the writer as a vilifier of Islam, then Europe has already been overcome.
Decades ago Europe bought into the nonsense that "peace" is a choice if only we set aside our belligerent instincts. And so, Europe sees no enemy in Islam. Instead, Europe protects and incubates the Islamic serpent's egg held fast to its bosom. Any other course is viewed as "racism." The very act of protecting one's culture, of defending the boundary that separates "them" from "us," is considered illegitimate. The Muslim response to European tolerance is simple: They defend their cultural identity, threatening death to anyone who criticizes the Prophet Mohammed. At the same time, Western Europe sacrifices freedom of speech in order to placate Muslim immigrants. Islam can defend its "rights" while European culture must give way.
Muslims in France have demanded the confiscation and burning of Fallaci's book. They have also demanded a one-year prison sentence for Fallaci. And the situation is no different in Switzerland, where the government attempted to extradite Fallaci for anti-Islamic statements. Writers against Islam must be careful about visiting Europe. Under present conditions, the author of this column might be arrested, tried and imprisoned in France, Switzerland or Italy. It is safe, of course, to write against the Pope or the Catholic Church. One might attack Christianity or Western culture in general. But say something remotely insulting about Islam and a prison sentence is possible. Even Brigitte Bardot was convicted by a French court on 10 June 2004 for "inciting racial hatred" after she wrote that Muslims had stolen her homeland.
Here is the problem with a "world without borders." We forget that the boundary of our collective self was established through centuries of bloodshed. Do we imagine our ancestors were so stupid that they would risk life and limb sacrificing for something that need not exist? The geographical separation of peoples is a necessary precondition for preserving national identity and culture. Without boundaries there can be no people, no culture and no context for peace. And today, as the boundary between Christendom and Islam is erased, we find what Fallaci calls "the most terrible thing of all." A community based on intolerance and terror begins to integrate with a community based on tolerance and freedom with the result that our journalists, teachers and intellectuals are turning against freedom because they are afraid to oppose the oppression and intolerance of Islam. And therefore they announce that Islam is a "religion of peace."
Fallaci says that the Muslims hope to install a Muslim state in the U.S. and Britain. She quotes Islamic authorities and community leaders who charge Muslim women with the duty of bearing at least five children. This is what she calls "the subtle and crawling way with which the Islamic community tries to penetrate the European society, to take possession of it." It is a case of foreigners acquiring rights "which deny the rights of citizens." The European left, above all, welcomes the Muslims into Europe. It is the old belief in revolutionary destruction that now identifies with Muslims as representatives of the "oppressed Third World," upholding them as the new proletariat, as the new rising class. Instinctively the leftist still seeks to harm the established order, and Islam is the greatest expedient to that end.
Oriana Fallaci's book is a warlike call to arms. She writes with the authority of a "conscript father" of the old Roman Republic. She says that the West has no leaders. How does one trust a Europe that "sells itself like a whore, a Europe which is no longer capable of reasoning?" By refusing to admit that Islam is a pond inside which "we are all drowning," Fallaci says that we fail to defend "our territory, our homes, our children, our dignity, our essence...." She does not write for fun or money. She writes "out of duty." She writes to become an indicted criminal in her own homeland. She says the West is in a war. But the West isn't fighting because the West has lost its passion. Instead, Europe cowardly waves "the white flag of servitude and resignation which is suicide itself."
Is any counterargument possible? Or must we concede Fallaci's point?
