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Antonella Gambotto-burke

The Force of Reason

by Oriana Fallaci

Rizzoli International, $156

'They are flooding all over,'  Oriana Fallaci writes on the opening page, quoting Virgil on  the burning of Troy, 'the city now buried into torpor and sleep and wine, the invaders.'

The invaders to whom she refers are Muslims, the city is  the First World, and the book in question is The Force of Reason, the sequel to 2002's The Rage and the Pride. In Europe or, as she now calls it, 'Eurabia', The Rage and the  Pride sold more than one million copies; in the US and Canada, 50,000 copies. Importantly, it has led to her legal indictment for defaming Islam.

The Force of Reason is Fallaci's third volume in her trilogy on Islam and the west, and her most vituperative. She writes: '... if I am invaded by weeds, suffocated by ivy, poisoned by an insect, bitten by a dog, attacked by a human being, I fight. I make war, I fight ... no jester bawling at me in a square, no jackass smearing my photo  on TV, no vicious comedienne deriding my deadly illness is going to stop me ... because my war is right. Legitimate, dutiful, right.'

Yes, folks, it's time for more bloodshed, a jihad in reverse, bigger riots, better hate crimes,  and to hell with cultural pluralism and the 'most squalid plot that through ideological fraud, cultural indecency, moral prostitution, deception, our time has produced ... By the hypocrites who invented the fraud of Humanitarianism'.

Her prose - tight, clean, tough - is, in its original Italian, superlative; her English translation, on the other hand, could be the work  of David Sedaris ('I take upon myself the responsibility for this translation ... it may contain  what certain critics define as 'the oddities of Fallaci's English'.') Oddities or ignorance? On page 14, an 'underhand' translation of her work is quietly passed around  a factory in Moscow. Other examples? '... all the blood has flown down' (p63); 'Thanks to a wrong procedural technicality, I was not condamned: it's known.' (p65); 'A girl may be deflored' (p212); '... we were fond of each other! Didn't we?!?' (p208); 'the bullshits pronounced' (p233), and so on.

A 'long-time expert on Islam', Fallaci proffers curious evidence  of Islamic infamy. Her history? An irrelevant - and selective - blur.

In 827, she writes, the Muslims raped Sicily, 'another target of their voraciousness. Massacring, beheading, impaling, crucifying as usual'. Fallaci then asks: '... do you know who was Mehmet II?'

(A ruler with a superior grasp of foreign languages?) But, hey - those Ottoman troops just loved

to 'hack ... on to death with scimitars, then burst into the cathedral and behead even newborn babies. They amuse themselves by snuffing out the candles with their little severed heads'.

Fallaci conveniently ignores  the many millions - some of them Muslim - murdered in the name

of Christ.

The inconsistencies are staggering. Fallaci begins with an account of freakish 14th-century torture over ideology at the hands of priests, and then holds up freakish 9th-century torture over ideology at the hands of Muslim soldiers as evidence of Islam's perfidy. It does not occur to  her that freakish torture - Abu Ghraib, say - has always been  a characteristic of extreme ideologies, a game she plays with geriatric abandon.

'Islam,' she grandly continues, 'has always persecuted and silenced its intelligent men.' Perhaps she has forgotten the Vatican's violent opposition to Copernicus'  1513  discovery that  the Earth orbits the Sun, or the persecution of Galileo (jailed, threatened, forced to retract his beliefs), or that in 1327, Cecco d'Ascoli,  who suggested there were men on the other side of the world, was burned at the stake?

Fallaci is right in blasting the barbaric extremist Islamic practice of infibulation, in which the clitoris and labia minora of girls are hacked off in order to prevent sexual arousal: two million die from sepsis  and blood loss each year. That which she doesn't address is the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by their mothers, who perform the ritual with an unsterilised knife or scissors, and the impact this would have on the way in which they then mother their sons.

It is not too difficult to see how, mothered by women coerced  into brutalising (or murdering) their daughters, boys grow into brutalised - and brutal - men.

On page 182, she writes: '... nobody calls you a crap when you vacuously declame'.

Oriana, I am calling you a  crap. A catastrophic crap. For embarrassing yourself and your country. For being all that you revile in your declamation, and vacuously so. For inciting hatred and creating fear in a climate in which hatred and fear lead to the senseless persecution of children. For demonstrating all the rage and pride of the most virulent Islamic extremist, while claiming the ideological immunity  of a tender Christian.

The difference? With all your money and liberty and education, you should know better.



The Force of Reason