Author: Brendan Bernhard
Publication: LA Weekly
Date: March 15, 2006
URL: http://www.laweekly.com/index.php?option=com_lawcontent&task=view&id=12921&Itemid=47
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 … 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] 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 … 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).
