Other Blumenfeld Articles:
The Boom in Home School Conventions
Sex Ed And The Destruction Of American Morality
By Samuel Blumenfeld
June 11, 2003
NewsWithViews.com
I have just finished reading Oriana Fallaci's passionately written book, "The Rage and the Pride," in which she warns us, loudly and clearly, of the Islamic Reverse Crusade which has as its goal the conquest of the West. The attack on 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor of the Crusade. "It is a war of religion," she writes. "A war they call Jihad. If we do not defend ourselves, if we do not fight, the Jihad will win. � It will cancel our culture, our art, our science, our identity, our morals, our values, our pleasures�. Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam�.It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control"
Oriana Fallaci, the dauntless, uncompromising Italian journalist, made her mark as an international writer by her incisive interviews with such world leaders and politicians as the Dalai Lama, the Ayattolah Khomeini, Kissinger, Arafat, Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon, Indira Gandhi, Ali Bhutto, Willy Brandt, and many others. She lives in Manhattan where for the last ten years she has been working in seclusion on a historical novel.
She was at home on September 10th when she had a premonition of something terrible happening. On the next day, hearing the sirens of police cars and fire trucks, she turned on the TV and, she writes, "don't ask me what I felt at that moment or soon after�.I was ice-frozen. Even my brain was ice-frozen. I don't even remember if I saw certain things on the first tower or on the second. The people who jumped from the windows on the eightieth and ninetieth and hundredth floors so as not to burn alive, to begin with. Who broke the glass of the windows, climbed over the windows, and jumped the same way we jump from a plane with a parachute. By dozens. And they came down so slowly. Slowly tossing their arms and their hands, slowly swimming in the air�.And, finally, they dropped like stones and bang!"
She didn't know what to do, until, six days later, when the editor of a major Italian newspaper came to New York and asked her to write about what had happened in the form of a letter to him. She wrote the article, and the paper sold a million copies. She decided to expand the article into a small book. "It was born all of a sudden. It burst like a bomb. Unexpectedly like the catastrophe that on September 11 disintegrated thousands of creatures and destroyed two of the most beautiful buildings of our time: the Towers of the World Trade Center." Writing nonstop, "The Rage and the Pride" was completed in two weeks.
It caused a sensation in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. In France, a Moslem group tried to get the French edition banned because they considered it racist. But the judge saw no point in banning a book that had already sold 45,000 copies in France and about a million in Italy. Besides, the book has nothing to do with racism. It has everything to do with the war between religions. Fallaci writes:
All the so-called Revolutions of Islam began in the mosques. Not in the universities, as the [liberals] want us to believe. Behind every Islamic terrorist there is an Imam, and Khomeini was an Imam.� And I declare that many Imams (too many) are spiritual guides of terrorism�.[The Saudi Ministry of Religion] is the mighty organism that divulges Fundamentalist theories throughout the world. That throughout the world builds mosques and schools where the unlucky Moslem students learn nothing but the 6,236 Koran's verses by heart.� And where they are recruited to fight the Holy War.
The Islamists have threatened to kill Fallaci because of her courage in speaking out against the Islamization of Europe. But now she is not alone. Brigitte Bardot, the famous French film star, writes in her new book, "A Scream in the Silence," "I am against the Islamization of France�.For centuries our forefathers, the ancients, our grandfathers, our fathers gave their lives to chase all successive invaders from France." There are now five million Muslims living in France. But the situation in Italy is worse, since it is like a land bridge from Africa to the European Union. Fallaci writes:
Because out cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us � who are not ready to become like us, to be absorbed by us�.Who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us. To change our principles, our values, our identity, our way of life. And who in the meantime molest us with their retrograde ignorance, their retrograde bigotry, their retrograde religion. I am saying that in our culture there is no room for the muezzins, for the minarets, for the phony abstemious, for the humiliating chador, for the degrading burkah.
Fallaci, a passionate defender of Western Civilization, vows to fight to the death. She tells the Islamic enemy, "War you wanted, war you want? Good. As far as I am concerned, war is and war will be. Until the last breath."
� 2003 Samuel Blumenfeld - All Rights Reserved
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Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, including �Is Public Education Necessary?� and �The Whole Language/OBE Fraud,� published by The Paradigm Company, 208-322-4440. His reading instruction program, �Alpha-Phonics,� is available by writing The Tutoring Company, P.O. Box 540111, Waltham, MA 02454-0111. www.alpha-phonics.com www.howtotutor.com
"The Islamists have threatened to kill Fallaci because of her courage in speaking out against the Islamization of Europe. But now she is not alone. Brigitte Bardot, the famous French film star, writes in her new book, "A Scream in the Silence," "I am against the Islamization of France�.For centuries our forefathers, the ancients, our grandfathers, our fathers gave their lives to chase all successive invaders from France."