Fallaci’s Glorious Forest

Much of the recent criticism of Oriana Fallaci’s new publication, “The Force of Reason,” is rather beside the point, focusing as it does on stunted trees rather than the glorious forest she has cultivated for the past many years. Yes, there are rhetorical flourishes – as her diatribe against kosher and halal slaughtering methods – that are very annoying, and yes, her eccentric insistence on translating her fiery and elegant Italian text into her own equally fiery but inelegant English, was certainly a mistake. There are some lines that cannot be parsed unless you are familiar with the Italian (and sometimes the Tuscan) figures of speech from which they were mistranslated, and there are some moments when her passion (and perhaps her physical suffering) lead her to excesses.But so what? To criticize Fallaci for such things reminds me of a professor of mine who attacked Gregor Mendel for paying insufficient attention to the details of his genetic research. But Mendel had it right, whatever the numbers in his notebooks. Fallaci has it right, too, and we would do well to pay attention. Anyone who, like Fallaci, sells millions of books is a force to be reckoned with. And anyone who is hauled into court for heresy-of-political-correctness all over an increasingly brain-dead Europe has obviously touched a source of passion that just might provide grounds for hope. We should celebrate this sort of brave maverick, yet even some members of our own deluded intelligentsia find it easier to debate the recent condemnation of the great liar David Irving, and even to defend his right to lie, than to defend and extol a truth teller like Oriana Fallaci. For she is surely right to say that we are at war with virulent Islamic forces who desire to dominate the West, to convert or kill us, as she is right to say that the West has yet to find the will to assert our own more enlightened values against the Islamists who want to reassert the standards of a failed medieval civilization.We should pay close attention to her main theme, a very important theme, perhaps even a matter of life and death: Europe has lost its soul, and America is in grave danger of losing its brain. Europe has surrendered and we are at mortal risk, but we have lost our wits, we have fallen prey to ignorance and stupidity.Her evidence of European surrender is very strong indeed, and the European response to her evidence further buttresses her case. She documents the many times that European leaders – famous men such as Hans Dietrich Genscher, once German foreign minister – have praised the “superiority” of Islam and apologized for the crusades, the many times that great works of theater and literature have been censored (by their own publishers and producers), the many times European police have deliberately ignored their own laws (as the one against polygamy). And she tells us why: “even if your grandparents died at Dachau or Mauthausen, it is not easy to be brave in a country where there are around ten million Muslims and more than three thousand mosques.”Fear having set in, and those who dare to criticize any aspect of Islamist theory or practice subjected to physical and/or legalistic terrorism (in Fallaci’s case by “Western” courts), one short step takes us to an embrace of the “genius” of Islam, crediting it for all knowledge, including science, art, and literature. Even though anybody looking clearly at the Muslim world sees that it is notably lacking in science, art, and literature. This is not simply an embarrassing naivete, mind you, it is a suicidal stupidity; our acceptance of such nonsense empowers the terrorists, as we learn from a letter “to the authorities” from the North Carolina would-be mass murderer, Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar: “In the Qur’an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women. I know that the Qur’an is a legitimate and authoritative holy scripture since it is completely validated by modern science and also mathematically encoded with the number 19 beyond human ability.”She is very pessimistic about our chances of defeating the Islamists. She does not think we have the will to block the immigration-without-standards that has brought the Islamists into our societies, nor to close the Islamist mosques that are invariably the inspiration for Western Islamist terrorists, nor to insist that new citizens accept the same rules as the rest of us. I am not so pessimistic as she, I believe that, if we win the war in the Middle East, Messianic Islam of the bin Laden or Khomeini variety will be as discredited as communism following the fall of the Soviet Empire. But she is a brave, serious, and wonderfully passionate woman who deserves to be taken seriously. She is fighting for us, after all.Mr. Ledeen is Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The War Against the Terror Masters.”

Fallaci’s Glorious Forest

Fallaci’s Glorious Forest

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