The Fallaci Code

March 17, 2006 -- Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim immigration to Europe a conspiracy? 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 episodes 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 Š 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 Š camping out in tents with camels Š 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] Houari 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 toe 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 Š 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 Š). 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.

The writer 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).

Excerpt from her latest "Force of Reason"
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-fallaci.html

I don't like to say that Troy is burning. That Europe is by now a province of Islam or rather a colony of Islam and Italy an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony. Saying this amounts to admitting that the Cassandras really do talk to the wind, that in spite of their screams of pain the blind remain blind, the deaf remain deaf, consciences reawoken soon relapse into sleep, and the Mastros Cecco die for nothing. But the truth is just this. From the Strait of Gibraltar to the fjords of Soroy, from the cliffs of Dover to the beaches of Lampedusa, from the steppes of Volgograd to the valleys of the Loire and the hills of Tuscany, the fire is spreading. In each one of our cities there is a second city. A city superimposed and equal to the one that in the Seventies thousands and thousands of Palestinians set up in Beirut installing a State within a State. A government within the goverrnment. A Muslim city, a city ruled by the Koran. An Islamic expansion's stage. The expansionism that no-one has ever managed to overcome. No-one. Not even the armies of Napoleon. Because it is the only art in which the sons of Allah have always excelled, the art of invading and conquering and subjugating. Their most coveted prey has always been Europe, the Christian world, and shall we run a rapid eye over the History that Mr. Doudou would like to control or rather cancel?

It was in 635 AD, that is three years after Mohammed's death, that the armies of the Crescent Moon invaded Christian Syria and Christian Palestine. It was in 638 that they took Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchure. It was in 640 that after conquering Persia and Armenia and Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, they invaded Christian Egypt and overran Christian Maghreb. That is, the present Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco. It was in 668 that for the first time they attacked Constantinople and laid a siege that would last five years. It was in 711 that after crossing the Strait of Gibralter they landed in the most Catholic Iberian Peninsula, took possession of Portugal and Spain where despite the Pelayos and the Cid Campeadors and the other warriors engaged in the Reconquest they remained for noless than eight centuries. And whoever believes in the myth of *peaceful coexistence that marked the relationships between the conquered and the conquerors* should reread the stories of the burned convents and monestaries, of the profaned churches, of the raped nuns, of the Christian or Jewish women abducted to be locked away in their harems. He should ponder on the crucifixioins of Cordoba, the hangings of Grenada, the beheadings of Toledo and Barcelona, of Seville and Zamora. (The beheadings of Seville, ordered by Mutamid: the king who used those severed heads, heads of Jews and Christians, to adorn his palace. The beheadings of Zamora, ordered by Almanzor: the vizier who was called the-patron-of-the-philosophers, the greatest leader Islamic Spain has ever produced). Christ! Invoking the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation or hanging or impalement. Ringing a bell, the same. Wearing green, the colour exclusive to Islam, also. And when a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside. To bow. And mind to the Jew or the Christian who dared react to the insults of a Muslim. As for the much-flaunted detail that the infidel-dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam, not even encouraged to do so, do you know why they were not? Because those who converted to Islam did not pay taxes. Those who refused, on the contrary, did.

From Spain, in 721 AD, they passed into the no less Catholic France. Led by Abd al-Rahman, the Governor of Andalusia, they crossed the Pyrenees and took Narbonne. There they massacred the entire male population, enslaved all the women and children, then proceeded towards Carcassonne. From Carcassonne they were to Nimes where they slaughtered nuns and friars. From Nimes they went to Lyons and Dijon where they pillaged every single church... And do you know how long their advance in France lasted? Eleven years. In waves. In 731 a wave of three hundred and eighty thousand infantry and sixteen thousand cavalry reached Bordeaux which surrendered at once. Then from Bordeaux it moved to Poitiers, from Poitiers it moved to Tours and, if in 732 Charles Martel had not won the battle of Poitiers-Tours, today the French too would dance the flamenco. In 827 they landed in Sicily, another target of their voraciousness. Massacring, beheading, impaling, crucifying as usual, they conquered Syracuse and Taormina the Messina and Palermo, and in three-quarters of a century (which is what it took to break the proud resistance of the Sicilians) they Islamized the island. They stayed for over two centuries, in Sicily: until they werre cleared out by the Normans. But in 836 they landed at Brindisi. In 840, at Bari. And they Islamized Puglia too. In 841 they landed at Ancona. Then from the Adriatic they moved back to the Tyrrhenian Sea and in the summer of 846 landed at Ostia. They sacked it, they burned it, and moving upriver from the mouth of the Tiber they reached Rome. They laid siege to it and one night they burst in. They plundered the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, sacked both, and to get rid of them Pope Sergius II had to stipulate an annual tribute of twenty-five thousand pieces of silver. To prevent further attacks, his successor Leon IV had to erect the Leonine Walls.

Having left Rome, though, they descended on Campania. They stayed there for seventy years destroying Montecassino and tormenting Salerno. A city where, at one time, they amused themselves by sacrificing a nun's virginity every night. Do you know where? On the cathedral's altar. In 898 they landed in Provence. To be precise, in present-day St. Tropez. They settled there, and in 911 crossed the Alps to enter Piedmont. They occupied Turin and Casale, set fire to all the churches and libraries, killed thousands of Christians, then went to Switzerland. Here they reached the Graubunden valley and the lake of Geneva. Then, put off by the snow, did an about-turn and returned to the warm climate of Provence. In 940 they occupied Toulon where they settled and... Today it's fashionable to beat our breast over the Crusades. To blame the West for the Crusades. To see the Crusales as an injustice committed to the detriment of the poor-innocent-Muslims. But before being a series of expeditions to regain possession of the Holy Sepulchure that is of Jerusalem (which had been taken by the Muslims, remember, not by my aunt), the Crusades were the response to four centuries of invasions and occupations. They were a counter-offensive to stem Islamic expansionism in Europe. To deflect it, mors tua vita mea, towards the Orient (meaning India and Indonesia and China) then towards the whole African continent and towards Russia and Siberia where the Tartars converted to Islam were already crushing the followers of Christ. At the conclusion of the Crusades, in fact, the sons of Allah resumed their persecutions as before and more than before.

By the hand of the Turks, this time. The Turks who were about the prepare the birth to the Ottoman Empire. An empire that until 1700 would concentrate on the West all of its greed: turn Europe into its favourite battlefield. Interpreters and bearers of that greed, the famous Janissaries who still today enrich our language with the synonym of killer fanatic assassin. And do you know who the Janissaries actually were? The chosen troops of the Empire, the super-soldiers as capable of self-immolation as of fighting and massacring and sacking. Do you know where they were recruited or rather pressed into service? In the countries subjugated by the Empire. In Greece, for example, or in Bulgaria, in Romania, in Hungary, in Albania, in Serbia. Often in Italy too, along the coasts plied by their pirates. Those coasts where still today you can see the remains of the watchtowers used for spotting their arrival and warning the towns and villages. And where still resounds the echo of the scream which today is used as a mockery but at that time was a cry of terror and despair: *Mamma, li turchi! Mother, the Turks!*. They abducted those killers to be at the age of eleven or twelve, together with even younger children to punt in the seraglios of the sultans and viziers given to paedophilia, and they chose them from the best-looking and strongest of the important families' firstborns. After the conversion they shut them in the military barracks and here, forbidding them to have any kind of amorous or affectionate relations, marriage included, they indoctrinated them as not even Hitler would indoctrinate his Waffen SS. They turned them into the most formidable fighting machine the world has seen since Roman times.

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The Fallaci Code

By Brendan Bernhard