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Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim immigration to Europe a conspiracy?
LA Weekly ^ | Wednesday, March 15, 2006 | BRENDAN BERNHARD

Posted on 03/16/2006 11:00:36 AM PST by Leisler

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 snatches 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] 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 tow 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.

Staff writer Brendan Bernhard is the author of White Muslim: From L.A. to New York to Jihad, a study of converts to Islam in the West (Melville House).


TOPICS: Australia/New Zealand; Canada; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Germany; Government; Israel; News/Current Events; Russia; United Kingdom; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: 911; bush; clashofcivilizations; commonsenseism; conspiracytheory; dhimmitude; eurabia; eurodhimmis; europe; europeanmuslims; fallaci; immigration; iraq; islam; italy; jihad; muslims; oriana; orianafallaci; ropma
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To: Leisler
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,

We call them "pundits!" LOL.

41 posted on 03/16/2006 12:50:55 PM PST by La Enchiladita (United we stand, divided we fall.)
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To: Acts 2:38

I thought that made no sense as well.

This has more with the EU elitists wanting cheap labor to keep their socialist utopia alive.






42 posted on 03/16/2006 12:52:46 PM PST by Proud_USA_Republican (We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. - Hillary Clinton)
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To: Leisler
Must reading for everyone who doesn't want to be a dhimmi:

"Jihad In The West" by Paul Fregosi


Not an easy read, but makes it clear what is down the road for
those who don't fight back and win.
43 posted on 03/16/2006 12:59:41 PM PST by VOA
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To: La Enchiladita
Don't be too suprised - judging from a few articles that I've read this month, it looks like gays in America, of all people, are starting to get really nervous about this.

They know that under sharia, the jig is up. When we see an episode of "Will and Grace" dealing with a gay in a mosque, then we'll know that the battle has been joined . . .
44 posted on 03/16/2006 1:07:01 PM PST by horse_doc
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To: ConservativeDude

Agreed. I just read Dick Morris' latest article and he says the same thing.

Please see: http://www.vote.com/magazine/columns/dickmorris/column60382794.phtml


45 posted on 03/16/2006 1:09:36 PM PST by nikos1121
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To: Peach; Calpernia; ConservativeDude
Kind of.

I actually think Sunnunu is much closer to being a Muslim than his colleague from Illinois.

Obama kind of reminds me of Roger Green, who'll deny to his dying day that he's a practicing Muslim, at least, in public.

Considering that this is New York City, I can't say I blame him.

46 posted on 03/16/2006 1:11:57 PM PST by Do not dub me shapka broham ("The moment that someone wants to forbid caricatures, that is the moment we publish them.")
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To: Leisler

This guy is a prime example of why europe will become Eurabia.

The muslim hordes have learned to use the european human rights laws and take full advantage of its justice system to protect them. The socialists & multiculturists help them every step of the way. The same self-rightous socailists who bashed Schwartzenegger because he didn't stop the execution of murder and gang leader, Tookie Williams. Its these morons who are giving the muslims the keys to the city.

All they have to do is claim they will be tortured and killed if deported back to their home countries. Have the europeans ever stopped to say, "Why would you be killed if you went back there?"
Europeans human rights laws protect them while at the same time, they seek out the destruction of europe.

Europe has become a dumping ground for the worst psychotic muslim criminals and terrorists. People so foul, they are kicked out of hellholes like Libya and Sudan. But when they arrive, the europeans treat them as "refugees" looking for a better life.

What a mess.


47 posted on 03/16/2006 1:15:46 PM PST by Proud_USA_Republican (We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. - Hillary Clinton)
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To: horse_doc

Good point!


48 posted on 03/16/2006 1:24:10 PM PST by La Enchiladita (United we stand, divided we fall.)
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To: Leisler
Question: Is Muslim Immigration to Europe a Conspiracy?

Answer: YES!

49 posted on 03/16/2006 1:27:15 PM PST by Tokra (I think I'll retire to Bedlam.)
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To: Acts 2:38
And the Mexis will turn off the spigot if we build a fence?

That's no joke. We get most of our imported oil from Canada - 1.768 million barrels a day. Our second biggest oil supplier is Mexico with 1.701 million barrels a day. We get much more oil from Canada & Mexico than we do from the Arab countries.

I'd be willing to bet most Americans are not aware of this.

50 posted on 03/16/2006 1:40:11 PM PST by Tokra (I think I'll retire to Bedlam.)
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To: Rytwyng; Altair333
What if they're mostly anti-white racists who feel a nationalistic imperative to kill us? Just asking.

Laughable claim. Considering that 1. Mexicans are racially mixed, with "white" among their gene pool 2. Generally hate blacks more than whites when the come here and 3. 1/3 of all Mexican American females, of ANY generation, intermarry with us gringos. Doesn't sound like the "anti-white nationalist" fantasy of yours.

51 posted on 03/16/2006 1:44:08 PM PST by Clemenza (Seattle: The Pesto of Cities --- George Costanza)
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To: Leisler

Europe depends on the Mohammedans and cannot do without them unless they begin wholesale importing of Mexicans or Chinese.The Europeans have chosen not to propagate and must have the immigrants to provide the wealth that will support the Europeans in their old age. The Saracen, however, will not do that. When Islam reaches some critical point, a "tipping point," then Mohammedans will make the rules and the rules will exclude the infidels from care and benefits.When Islam becomes ascendant and makes the rules not only will the infidels be cut off but the advent of sharia will signal a serious and irreversible economic decline. The old folks will have to rely on their progeny for care and survival and they foreswore progeny in their youth.


52 posted on 03/16/2006 1:44:21 PM PST by arthurus (Better to fight them OVER THERE than over here.)
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To: Leisler
How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?

====================================================

Because satan never sleeps.

53 posted on 03/16/2006 1:44:37 PM PST by wtc911 (You can't get there from here)
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To: Sax
Europe is always surprised by creeping incrementalism. WWI & WWII. They notice things happening, but let them slide until it's too late

And America is not going to pull their chestnuts out of the fire this time.

54 posted on 03/16/2006 1:46:10 PM PST by arthurus (Better to fight them OVER THERE than over here.)
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To: satchmodog9
Europe takes in Muslims so they can keep getting Arab oil and we do the same with Mexico.

Yep, and I would never trade with them.

As birthrates continue to decline among Americans of European decent, it may well be that the final battle for the west will be fought primarily by Americans of Mexican decent. Hispanics are the fastest growing members of our armed forces. Tough as nails in a fight, macho and proud Americans.

We are going to have to re-open Ells Island to accommodate the next mass exodus of fleeing Europeans.

Europe is toast but the US has plenty of fight left in her.

To poorly paraphrase something President Lincoln said, “All the armies of the world could not step one foot on the Blue Ridge Mountains or take a drink from the Ohio River. If our end is to come it will be from within”.

I could not agree with Lincoln more and we all know who I am talking about.

55 posted on 03/16/2006 2:06:55 PM PST by usurper (Spelling or grammatical errors in this post can be attributed to the LA City School System)
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To: usurper

It could be any number of RATs or RINOs.


56 posted on 03/16/2006 2:18:04 PM PST by satchmodog9 (Most people stand on the tracks and never even hear the train coming)
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To: an italian

ping


57 posted on 03/16/2006 2:19:20 PM PST by Do not dub me shapka broham ("The moment that someone wants to forbid caricatures, that is the moment we publish them.")
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To: satchmodog9; don-o; Acts 2:38; Mordacious; usurper

I don't think it's "hypocritical" to take a different attitude towards Muslim immigration than toward Mexican immigration. They are quite different. Compared with Muslims, Mexicans are, in my opinion, much to be preferred.

Mexicans are culturally Western (if not Northern): Spain being Western Europe, and Spanish and Portuguese being closely derived from Latin, the classical language of the West; and Central America being Western Hemisphere, and Christian for the past 400+ years.

Unlike Muslims, Mexicans are not culturally committed to polygamy; genital mutilation; the whipping of women who show their bare elbows and knees; the physical destruction of most of the art, music, and literature of the West; the sawing-off of the heads of apostates; and other ugly domestic and judicial behaviors based on the Hadiths and the Qu'ran.

Despite a tiny number of sillies-on-stilts who talk about "Aztlan" (mostly at a University near you), the vast majority of Mexican-Americans don't want anything even remotely resembling a worldwide racial or religious caliphate.

Suppose (and this is not theology, not prophecy, and certainly not politics, just a "supposal") suppose, --- since demography abhors a vacuum--- God is allowing us to experience the logical consequences of aborting 50,000,000 American babies, by replacing them one-for-one with Mexicans.

If that's the case, I'd say thank God that what we face, mostly, is more taxes, more crowded ER's, higher fertility, more day-laborers, more kindergarten kids, more salsa, more ai Chihuahua!, higher GNP, more fiestas, more Nuestra Senora and more Jesucristo--- and not jihad, dhimmitude, and Shari'a law.


58 posted on 03/16/2006 2:32:31 PM PST by Mrs. Don-o (Divine Mercy)
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To: Tokra

Yeah, the white Mexican elite will shoot themselves in the foot just because we're going to build a fence.

They need our dollars far more than we need their oil.

They are not going to take a multi-billion dollar loss because we build a fence.


59 posted on 03/16/2006 2:34:41 PM PST by Sometimes A River (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46031)
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To: DumpsterDiver

bookmark


60 posted on 03/16/2006 2:37:17 PM PST by DumpsterDiver
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