Great Stuff from Horsefeathers again. Of course I know the NEW YORKER. My liberal roomate in college who used nitrous oxide -he said it was better than sex- to make Cousteau like noises loved the NEW YORKER. I even have old anthologies of its cartoons which remind us the New Yorker was not always so liberal. In the 1950's it was, like most Americans, staunchly anti-Communist. I remember the cartoon of the KGB officer telling a gang of subordinates, upon seeing a happy painting, "An artist so happy has not suffered enough. Send him to Siberia!"

Fallaci is right as Churchill was right, as Marines are right and by the way Highland soldiers were and I hope a few still are about the virtue of COURAGE: “In my old age, I have been thinking about this, and I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage,” she said. “Physical courage is a great test.” She added, “I know I have courage. But I’m not alone. My sister Neera was like me. And my second sister, Paola, too. It came from the education my parents gave us.”
***
What is happening in Europe is far worse than the Mexifornia incursion that Victor Davis Hanson rights about. For Mexicans and Latin Americans though certainly not liberal law-abiding birth control using Sangerites and English speaking peoples are at least, Thank God, our Western Allies. I just talked to a Hispanic father today about his son who did not graduate today -and hid this truth from a disappointed father to go to Disneyland- and this man though cleaned up and presentable was covered with scratches and bruises from many hours of hard physical labor. He wanted nothing more than a graduation picture with his son. He spoke to me in a labored English and even though i could speak to him in Spanish he wanted to show his fluency and competency. This was not an alien but clearly a man of the West,a man who was a 'classical republican' in the Aristotlean/Alfonso the Wise/Queen Isabella sense a man who was the production of at least 1600 years of Christendom in some of his ancestors and at least 400 years among the rest. This was a man of the West not an enemy alien. He was a good father who loved his only son and I am sure loved his only wife. He wore his golden wedding ring proudly but unubstrusively.
And it is well known . . . that I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists...

As I have written before I hope that she is not right. I personally have known many moderate modern Muslims from Yemen, Egypt, Pakistan, Kuwait and Kosovo. They educate their young girls and embrace MONOGAMY. They love the West...the love English literature and American movies and music. Some, also, quietly love Scotch.
While at NYU the greatest connossieur of single malt I knew was a charming Kuwaiti who spoke English with an impeccable accent. We used to have long talks about Scotland becasue he was fascinated by the Burns and the Celtic fringe. Though he had attended Oxford he did not know that BURNS was not actually writing in Gaelic but in Scots dialect. I remember telling him I was not surprised. Gilbert Highet, whom my father and uncle knew, studied over eight languages and even tried Hebrew but he knew scarcely a word of the everyday language of villages only a hundred miles from his town of birth! The reason was of course was that LATIN and GREEK AND FRENCH were languages of the sign that is languages of prestige and Gaelic, humble Gaelic, the native langauge of the ancient Scots was not. The Highets of course probably never were Gaelic speakers since they were Anglo-Normans likes the Bruces and Stongbow; the went from French and Latin straight to Scots and English.

But I disgress.

"And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says. Whatever its version."

THEN SHE REALIZES...
"Of course there are exceptions."
Because this is like saying the Hun is at your feet or at your throat. Believe me, I come from a long line of German haters. After all the cause of so many of the sorrows and exiles of my family the reason there were so many widows and spinsters was the fact that DOZENS of my male relatives were killed in action fighting the "Jairmans". In compensation of course, I must say that Johnny Robertson and Auld Pop did all they could to even the score. Though they claimed to have killed more Bulgarians and Turks than Germans they -their section- killed a score or more in one day at 2nd Ypres. But he always said he hated the Turks far more because then at least the German treated allied prisoners well and according to the rules of war. But they were still rotten bloodyminded bastards to Auld Pop because after all they were so diabolical about efficiency and ruthless about hideous weapons like poison gas. It was poison gas really that made the kilt a ceremonial dress and I think Auld Pop hated them for that.

The common people however unschooled still have a visceral hatred for Germans. Germans are warned to rent cars in English and NEVER speak German in public even today.

SHE WRITES

"Also, considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good Muslims must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and secularism."

Yes there certainly are and we hope there are more of them but...

But, as I say in the ‘Apocalypse,’ . . . good Muslims are few. So tragically few, in fact, that they must go around with bodyguards.”

MUNRO...in Europe this is certainly true.

(Here she mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch parliament, whom Holland, shamefully, declared last month that it would strip of her citizenship, citing an irregularity in her 1997 asylum application.)

***
She wrote that she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques in Europe “insidious” and “offensive,” because it “aims to portray me as the bloodthirsty fanatics, who during the French Revolution beheaded even the statues of the Holy Virgin and of Jesus Christ and the Saints. Or as the equally bloodthirsty fanatics of the Bolshevik Revolution, who burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used the churches as warehouses.
MUNRO:
LIBERALS (like TOM PAINE AND JEFFERSON and their descendants Black etc.) conveniently forget this. They like to talk about the Spanish Inquisition but not the TERROR.

"Really, no honest person can suggest that my ideas belong to that kind of people. I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its ‘Mein Kampf,’ its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”

Yes, Islam needs to reject its militaristic bloodthirsty past. But instead seems to embrace it and glorify it. THAT is scary. Even if it is only a minority. Because remember the Nazis started with only seven members.... Liberal Europacifist Sangerites ARE Ostrichs and probably cowards too. They mock the men (and women who guard them while they sleep). PRAISE THE LORD and PASS the ammunition. We are going to need plenty of both. Al Quaida DELENDA EST.

Rick,
I have a proposal to solve the immigration problem. We'll open the doors to Mexicans if Vicente Fox will permit us to ship the entire liberal arts faculties of the Ivy League universities to Mexico. Mexican I've known have been hard working, patriotic and love America, by contrast with the Ivy faculties.

I happened to read the article a couple of days ago. Talbot painted a very interesting portrait of an EXTREMELY interesting woman. (The account of her interview with Khomeini was priceless.) And she let that Fallaci speak A LOT throughout the article. Talbot's claim that she found Fallaci's definition of 'mainstream' Islam, and her assessment of the threat that it poses to Europe, to be unconvincing was at the end of the profile, and stated with almost no elaboration. That is to say, it was largely tangential to main point of the article, which was to paint a largely positive profile of an amazing character. An article that made me, a liberal with absolutely no idea of Fallaci's background and history, and only the vaguest notion of her temperament, want to read one of her books.

Talbot's claims in her article that the phenomenon of European Muslims insisting on Islamic religious education for their children in public schools shows the wisdom of America's separation of religious instruction and public education. Just what is so "witless" about that, "Horsefeathers"?

Fallaci just flattened Talbot in this article; Talbot had nothing to bring to the table (you don't bring visions of multicultural sugar plums dancing inside your head to Oriana Fallaci). Thus we were spared 3 extra pages of New Yorker "profile" psycho-blather.

Increasingly the left is just silent before the flames of jihad murder; witness the complete silence of the US media before the Danish Cartoons.

For an entire intellectual/media class to hold that GW Bush is the enemy is a measure of the reserves of innocence and childish freedom still available to us.

But for how much longer?

Interesting.
i just read the article today and I thought it was very sympathetic to Fallaci and made her about to be a heroic figure and basically correct, if sometimes a bit extreme.

TO DAVID SUCHER....I agree with your comments up until a certain point but Talbot sounded like a 30's isolationist/appeaser to Fallaci as a Churchill-like Cassandra. Talbot REALLY doesn't thinkk it is bad as all that. After all WE could NEVER lose our economic, naval, air and military supremacy. All we need to do is talk it out and sign treaties.

If Fallaci sounds somewhat hysterical to us it is because her native land has been penetrated and the seeds are set for an Islamization of Italy (and France and German) withith the next 50-100 years.
It will be North Africa, Egypt, Lebanon and yes Mesopotamia ALL OVER AGAIN.

Some facts in AD 700 North Africa, Mesopotamia Eqypt and Syria were probably 95% Christian and 5% Jewish. What happened next was bloody conquest, the burning of books and libraries and CENTURIES OF REPRESSION and DHIMMITUDE.

Spain in the period 711-1000 became fully 3/4 Muslim;in reaction to the Jihad Spain formed its Reconquista with all its virtues and flaws (one of the greatest was its Monism and Anti-Jewish feeling)

So that is the question, really, before us and before FALLACI. Europe, including her beloved Italy is on the brink of a New Dark age or perhaps a long twilight period of Civil Wars, internal terrorism accompanied by the decline of culture and democracy..

THAT TERRIBLE reality, that terrible threat which will probably include at one time or another a nuclear exchange killing 90% of the people of Israel , Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a terrible reality to think of.

It is essentially about the fall of the West and the extinction of the homelands of the Romance languages.

Of that Talbot has no clue, no worry no anxiety.

After all it is not her home nor her house nor her langauge. She has the moderan materialist Sangerite attitude that in the long run "we are all dead."

Yes, this is true for me, as an indivudual but it is not true for my race and my line, for our adopted nation for our culture, faith and language.

There is a great division in America, indeed the entire West, between the PARTY-ON Ostrich Hedonists and the Realists and Patriots who genuinely concerned about the common good and our national as well as universal patrimony.

I do not hestiate to say I AM A MAN OF THE WEST and "The West" matters to me...that is to say Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, London -yes even London- and her cubs and weens now, thankfully, in their maturity and ready to come to the aid of the Old Motherland if she only would defend herself!

There is coming battle for control of the ancient heartland of the West.

Of this I am certain as I have never been certain of anything.

We may be losing, gradually, already. Remember Byzantium "won" most of its campaigns from 622-750. But gradually the military and demographic balance turned against her and at Manzkiert much of her army -Muslim Turkic mercenaries deserted.

When I wonder, I fear, will our Manzikert come?

The Islamofascit Jihaddists believe in one big thing GOD IS GREAT and that means of course the future belongs to them.......

There is but a THIN RED, WHITE AND BLUE LINE OF HEROES between us and THEM, the Islamofascists. Make no mistake THEY ARE THE ENEMY of freedom and the West.

This enemy will prove, in my view, the greatest threat to the West since Hitler, greater in fact than the deadly threat of Soviet Communism, which was, let's be honest, fatally wounded in its encounter with the Nazi tyranny.

PRAISE THE LORD
AND PASS THE AMMUNITION...
WE ARE GOING TO NEED PLENTY OF BOTH....

Bill Buckley once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book then by the faculty of Harvard University - you can say the same thing about the type of people who write for and who read The New Yorker. You said months ago that the 'wordsmiths' were not the ones who led the way out onto the ballfiled or who showed you how to change the oil on your car. Quite true. The worsmiths are the ones who went to Ingmar Bergman movies to dissect from his unwatchable films soem existentialist meanings. They are the one who kept telling us what a genius Woody Allen was.

In a perfect world the apolgists for Islamofascism would have to live in nations such as Iran, the Sudan, the 'Palestinian Authority.' Saudi Arabia - well you get the picture.

Sorry for the misspellings. I hit post before preview.
I will never forget Fallaci's article "I Stand With Israel" in 2002 when all the Eurotrash were marching for the Palestinians.

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