Posted on 09/17/2006 8:35:35 AM PDT by Allan
Depressing Times
Oriana Fallaci, RIP, the Pope, and a Sad Age
Rarely has the death of a public intellectual affected me as much as the passing of Oriana Fallaci. I never met her, and only received a brief note once from her accompanying a copy of The Rage and the Pride. The story of her career is well known, but her death, at this pivotal time, was full of paradoxes and yet instruction as well.
Radical Islam is, among other things, a patriarchal movement, embedded particularly in the cult of the Middle-Eastern male, who occupies a privileged position in a society that can be fairly described as one of abject gender apartheid. Islamism is also at war with the religious infidel, not just the atheist—and, in its envy and victimhood, fueled by a renewal of the age-old hatred of the Christian.
But so far, with very few exceptions other than the lion, Christopher Hitchens, the courageous William Shawcross, and a few others, the Left has either been neutral or anti-American in this struggle. And few Christians in positions of influence and respect have publicly defended their faith and the civilization that birthed it.
Candor, after all, can get one killed, exiled, or ostracized—whether a Danish cartoonist, a Dutch filmmaker, a Wall Street Journal reporter, or a British-Indian novelist. So here, ill and in her seventies, returned Ms. Fallaci one last time to take up the hammer and tongs against radical Islam—a diminutive woman of the Left and self-proclaimed atheist who wrote more bravely on behalf of her civilization than have most who are hale, males, conservatives, or Christians.
Her fiery message was as timely as it was caricatured and slandered: Muslims who leave the Middle East to live under the free aegis of the West have a moral duty to support and protect the civilization that has welcomed them, rather than romanticize about what they have forsaken; Christianity is more than a religion, but also a powerful emblem of the force of reason, in that it seeks to spread belief by rational thought as well as faith; and that affluent and leisured Westerners, bargaining away their honor and traditions out of fear and for illusory security, have only emboldened radical Islam that seeks to liquidate them.
I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.
Bene dictum?
And what are we to make of poor Benedict XVI, the scholastic, who, in a disastrous display of public sensitivity, makes the telling point, that Christianity, in its long evolution to the present, has learned to forsake violence, and to defend its faith through appeals to reason—and thus can offer its own experience in the current crisis of Islam. And by quoting from the emperor rhetorician Manuel Paleologus—whose desperate efforts at strengthening the Morea and the Isthmus at Corinth a generation before that awful Tuesday, May 29, 1453 all came to naught—the Pope failed to grasp that under the tenets of radical Islam of the modern age, context means little, intent nothing, learning less than zero. If a sentence, indeed a mere phrase can be taken out of context, twisted, manipulated to show an absence of deference to Islam, furor ensues, death threats follow, assassins load their belts—even as the New York Times or the Guardian issues its sanctimonious apologies in the hope that the crocodile will eat them last.
We learned the now familiar rage with the Danish cartoons, Theo Van Gogh, the false flushed Koran story, the forced change of “Operation Infinite Justice” to “Enduring Freedom”, the constant charges of “Islamaphobia”, and a horde of other false grievances that so shook the West, traumatized in fear of having its skyscrapers, planes, trains, buses, nightclubs, and synagogues blown apart or its oil cut off.
So, yes, we know the asymmetrical rules: a state run-paper in Cairo or the West Bank, a lunatic Iranian mullah, a grand mufti from this or that mosque, can all rail about infidels, “pigs and apes”, in language reminiscent of the Third Reich—and meet with approval in the Middle East and silence in the West. But for a Westerner, a Tony Blair, George Bush, or Pope Benedict to even hint that something has gone terribly wrong with modern Islam, is to endure immediate furor and worse. In short, no modern ideology, no religious sect of the present age demands so much of others, so little of itself.
In matters of the present war, I have given up on most of the neoconservatives, many of whom, following the perceived pulse of the battlefield, have either renounced their decade-long, pre-September11 rants to remove Saddam (despite the 140,000 brave souls still on the field of battle who took them at their word), or turned on the President on grounds that he is not waging the perfect fight and thus is not pursuing the good war. The Paleo-right is as frightening as is the lunatic Left. My old Democratic party is long dead, their jackals trying to tear apart the solitary and stumbling noble stag Joe Liebermann, the old center taken over by the Kerry and Soros billionaires, and the guilt-ridden academic, celebrity and media cadres.
So we really are left with very little in these pivotal times—the will of George Bush, of course, the Old Breed unchanged since Okinawa and the Bulge that still anchors the US military, the courage and skill of a very few brave writers like a Hitchens, Krauthammer, and the tireless and brilliant Mark Stein, but very, very few others. No, this is an age in which we in the West make smug snuff movies about killing an American President, while the Taliban and the Islamists boast of assassinating the Pope.
So long may you run, Ms. Fallaci, you who by now have learned that, yes, there is a soul, and, yes, yours was indeed saved for eternity if only for its singular courage and honesty alone. And dear Pope: clarify, contextualize, express sorrow over the wrong interpretation of your remarks, but please don’t apologize for the Truth—not now, not ever.
I had to digest that statement for a while. I can't think of anyway more concise and powerful to describe her. We've really lost someone special, but we can take this as a call to arms of sorts to follow in her stead.
Why don't you have those opportunities?
Liberals have one virtue that conservatives lack: the courage of their convictions.
I think it is a mistake to confuse boorishness with courage. None of those liberals have the courage to risk loosing their lives in Iraq. They are simply loudmouths.
"Evil triumphs when good men do nothing."
Yes, I agree. So what do you do to fight evil?
"-- Muslims who leave the Middle East to live under the free aegis of the West have a moral duty to support and protect the civilization that has welcomed them, rather than romanticize about what they have forsaken; --"
Everyone in the USA has an actual legal duty to support, protect, & defend the US Constitution, not just a 'moral' duty.
"-- Christianity is more than a religion, but also a powerful emblem of the force of reason, in that it seeks to spread belief by rational thought as well as faith; --"
And those who defy the rational thought inherent in our Constitution should be treated as our enemies, foreign or domestic..
"-- and that affluent and leisured Westerners, bargaining away their honor and traditions out of fear and for illusory security, have only emboldened radical Islam that seeks to liquidate them. --"
And thus they have earned themselves the label of domestic enemy, and should be treated accordingly.
Thanks for the ping. VDH is always excellent.
More smoke and mirrors: the Pope didn't really insult modern Islam, but the modern Islamists chose to take it that way, and he didn't really apologize for what he said, but the media has made it seem that he did.
Extremely important date. The Fall of Constantinople just preceded Columbus' discovery of the New World in 1492. So, the Christian East fell at the same time that what would become the Christian Americas were opened to European settlement. And the Reformation that began in 1517 beget our modern Western civilization. The Muslim faith never underwent a reformation and many Muslims now seek to destroy Western civilization, which, unfortunately, is in such a state of decline at present relatively few wish to fight for its survival.
I loved this woman. Such courage. Her photo should accompany the word indomitable in the dictionary. Alas, not many like her. Maybe Lady Thatcher and Camille Paglia, two more of my icons. I reread The Rage and the Pride the other night. It is comparable to Zola's "J'Accuse" that appeared in L'Aurore. In it she described the execution of three women who had been to a beauty parlor. Despicable savages. And Rosie has the nerve to compare modern day Christians to such venal filth.
We are still here!
She reminds me of myself a lot so I just ordered the Rage and the Pride and will read it through even though I'm not much of a novel reader.
From reading the speech the Pope was specifically making the point that Islam exalts irrationality in contrast to Christianity.
From the speech:
"The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1702938/posts
Nor is the islamic allah bound up in truth or righteousness. He is a lying @sshole and so are his followers.
The Western left has no fear of having "its skyscrapers, planes, trains, buses, nightclubs and synagogues blown apart or its oil cut off". No fear whatsoever.
Instead, they quake at simply being called "racists". They will appease the radical Islamists until they are separated from their heads -- all so that the dread word won't be used against them.
I love Victor Davis Hansen and he makes good points here, but it's worth pointing out that no civilization "birthed" Christianity.
I love Victor Davis Hansen and he makes good points here, but it's worth pointing out that no civilization "birthed" Christianity.
The Pope knew exactly what he was saying. And he knew exactly what the reaction would be.
He did is either to demonstrate the irrationality of the Islamics or to serve as a lightening rod to divert violence from another venue. If the latter I hope he doesn't end up a martyr.
Hanson always manages to get right to the heart of every issue.
BTTT
Her incisive/sharp wit writing will be missed by many............
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.