ZGram - 6/11/2002 - "Bible of the Muslim haters"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

June 11, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

It seems like at least two decades ago that I read a biography titled 
"A Man" by Oriana Fallaci - in the article below this book is 
described as "a novel" - and while I was impressed by the stylistic 
finesse, I thought the book was somehow disturbingly "off".  At the 
time I was not interested in politics and did not understand what 
struck me as so blatantly "off key".  I believe now that it was 
simply that I detected a chameleon-like persona in the author that 
caused a discord in my psyche.  This feeling slid into focus as I was 
reading the article below, for the politically correct line these 
days seems to be that, at all costs, we must now "hate" the Muslims. 

The only other thing I want to mention is that Euroepans might take 
issue with the skewed statement about supposed lack of criminality by 
Muslim youth -but then, that is no different from Jews seeing 
"anti-semites" under every rug.

England's press - this time the Guardian - has far more balance in 
the current hysteria, it seems, than Germany, France, Canada or 
America, as the article below once again shows. 

[START]

Bible of the Muslim haters

The popularity of a virulent new book shows how deeply Islamophobia 
has taken root in western Europe

Rana Kabbani
Tuesday June 11, 2002
The Guardian

A controversy has convulsed Italy and France with the publication of 
a rabidly Islamophobic book, La rabbia e l'orgoglio, by leading 
Italian publisher Rizzoli and the mainstream French publisher Plon, 
which has just brought out a translation.

Its author, Oriana Fallaci, made a name for herself in the 70s with 
her vicious interviews with heads of state. Veering violently from 
left to right, as many Europeans have in recent years, she now pens 
this diatribe against Muslims, perhaps to cash in on Europe's newest 
xenophobia: "They breed like rats, and they piss in baptismal fonts."

On first reading this, I thought it some choice medieval fulmination 
about "evil-doers" - Jews, Muslims, heretics, women and other vermin 
that Christendom wanted annihilated. But it was written in the 21st 
century by a secular European woman, selling a million copies in her 
and Berlusconi's ("We are more civilised than they are") Italy. It 
has found a respectable publisher in France, and the leading daily Le 
Figaro did not think twice about allowing its hate-exciting author to 
grace its front page last week.

Had this book's victims been anyone other than Muslims, it would not 
have been published, and certainly not by any self-respecting house. 
But Muslims are fair game now and to defame them en masse has become 
not only respectable, but highly profitable. The defamer has nothing 
to fear, as there are no laws to check such vitriolic prejudice, nor 
do Muslims have the organised self-defence groups that Jews have 
formed so successfully to silence would be anti-semites.

One can dismiss Fallaci's rantings as those of an enraged has-been 
who, even in her heyday, communicated her ego in her writing. Like 
that other ageing beauty, Brigitte Bardot, now the sun-wizened pin-up 
of the south of France's National Front, Fallaci's hatred and fear of 
Muslims is both visceral and hysterical - no doubt exacerbated by the 
fact that she lives in New York and seems to have swallowed wholesale 
the US government's denomination of Arabs and Muslims as synonymous 
with "terrorists".

In contrast to her anti-Muslim hysteria is her equally hysterical 
fervour for Jews, as though to damn the former were somehow to help 
the latter. It is interesting that in France, high-profile Jews like 
Bernard-Henri Levy have been among the few to send her packing. If I 
were Jewish, I would run screaming from such an exploitative and 
ultimately demeaning espousal of my people's suffering.

Fallaci's accolade of Ariel Sharon as a "Shakespearean figure" would 
have left the bard himself cursing in quatrains. Our great modern-day 
dramatists - Harold Pinter most notably, or Ronald Harwood, both 
Jewish - would cringe at such a comparison and at the sinister 
political sentiments lurking behind it. They would instantly see a 
betrayal of humanity in taking sides so cheaply.

One cannot help but suspect that, having veered so violently from 
left to right, Fallaci must hate having once been in love with 
Alexander Panagoulis, the Greek "terrorist" who, in 1967, tried to 
blow up his country's dictator and was captured, imprisoned, tortured 
and finally freed in a general amnesty in 1973, only to be murdered 
by the colonels' henchmen. His life story (as recounted in Fallaci's 
novel, A Man, in which she glamorised herself as Bonnie to his 
revolutionary Clyde) is identical to that of thousands of 
Palestinians, whose attempts to liberate their country have now met 
with an outpouring of Fallaci's most virulent, pro-military bile.

My intention, however, is not to attempt a deep psychoanalysis of Ms 
Fallaci, nor to give extra oxygen to a rant that would have 
embarrassed Benito Mussolini. It is to expose this drivel as an 
example of the now fashionable polemic - another weapon in the 
western arsenal, along with cluster bombs and missiles, with which to 
do battle against Muslims of every nationality and political belief.

White western Europe sees itself - wrongly, as research illustrates - 
as besieged by "hooded hordes" in the guise of thieving immigrants or 
asylum seekers. The recent, well-orchestrated campaign alerting 
opinion to the rise of anti-semitism in Europe camouflages the fact 
that Jews are not the foremost victims in the carnival of hatred. 
That dubious honour goes to Muslims, Europe's largest religious 
minority, numbering over 20 million.

They are the continent's poorest and most badly housed citizens. 
Their unemployment rate - double, often treble, the average - is the 
direct result of the increasing prejudice of employers, unchecked by 
any legal constraints. It is also the result of neglect, over a long 
period, by governments that did nothing to redress the festering 
sense of injustice among the young in Muslim ghettos.

Though it is hardly ever reported in a media that has few Muslim 
writers, the vast majority of racially motivated maimings and 
killings across Europe over the past decade have been directed at 
Muslims - not at the asylum-seeking "aliens" shoved into insalubrious 
camps, but against second and third-generation Europeans such as my 
own children, whose continent this is, at least as surely as it is 
Oriana Fallaci's.


Rana Kabbani is a writer who lives in Paris.

[END]