Sicilian Culture: News: Oriana Flagellates Italy

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Oriana Flagellates Italy
By Melinda Henneberger, The New York Times

[Preface: As in most European countries, in Italy there is a segment of people, mostly extreme leftist, are opposed to the US led Military Action against Afghanistan, citing that:
1. This is really Israel's War, claiming that Bin Laden would have little support in the Muslim World, if the US had not consistently shown overwhelming favoritism for Israel to the disadvantage of the Palestinians.
2. That the US is Hypocritical, in that the US is bemoaning an attack on Civilians in a War, when in our bombing of GERMANY, heavily populated civilian districts were intentionally targeted. The idea was that by targeting the civilian population, we would disrupt Germany's economy, destroy the morale of its citizens and create chaos by rendering millions of people homeless. Low-income areas were especially targeted for destruction because the population was denser and the buildings closer together. In February 1942, Allied bombers were specifically instructed to concentrate on built-up residential areas instead of targets such as dockyards and factories.
In JAPAN, the use of the A- Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on an almost totally civilian population.
Oriana Fallaci was incensed by these detractors, and while I have been fascinated by her style heretofore, in this case, I totally dismiss her diatribe, since she indicts ONLY Italians, plus she seems to indict ALL Italians. Further she is xenophobic, bigoted, anti female, and filiopiestic.
Her reasoning is as stupid, is if I were to discount her comments merely on the basis that her last name derives from both the English and Italian word meaning: deceptive, misleading, and fallacy.]
PROVOCATEUR IS BACK TO 'SPIT' ON' DETRACTORS OF U.S.
ROME, October 29, 2001 - - Oriana Fallaci, the war correspondent who practically invented it's-all-about-me journalism some 30 years ago, had in effect become the Italian J. D. Salinger, refusing to give interviews and publishing not a word for the last decade.
But now, at age 71 and sick with cancer, she has suddenly returned to her role as professional provocateur. In an expletive-rich indictment of Muslim immigrants and Italian ambivalence toward the United States that filled four full pages in the country's leading newspaper recently, she sent Italy's intelligentsia on a search of its soul.
Her essay, "The Rage and the Pride," began by announcing that reports that some Italians had celebrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America had so enraged her that she had decided to break "the self- imposed silence I have kept for 10 years to avoid mixing with cicadas."
"They say: `Good. Serves the Americans right.' ' she wrote. "And I am very, very, very cross. Cross with a cold, lucid, rational rage, that commands me to answer them and first of all to spit on them."
That was just a warm-up for the scorn she heaped on fellow Italians.
"My country, my Italy, is not the Italy of today," she wrote, "the pleasure-loving, vulgar Italy of people who think only about retiring before they are 50, the evil, stupid and cowardly Italy of the little hyenas who would send their daughter to a brothel in Beirut just to shake hands with a Hollywood star, but when the kamikaze of bin Laden reduce thousands of New Yorkers to mush, laugh and say it serves America right."
She was tougher still, though, on Arab immigrants, saying their arrival in Italy amounts to a colonization, "a secret invasion." Going well beyond Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's recent comments about the superiority of Western civilization, she wrote: "We might as well admit it. Our churches and cathedrals are more beautiful than their mosques."
Her tone and anti-immigrant theme were all but universally rejected, but the criticism of her native Italy as a country of divided loyalties, deeply conflicted about the American-led military action, is getting a serious hearing.
The discussion took on new life this week after Corriere della Sera, the Milan newspaper that published her original piece, ran an article with the headline, "One Italian Out of Four `Justifies' bin Laden."
The article said one-quarter of all Italians could not only understand the reasons behind the Sept. 11 attacks but could also "justify" them - although the actual polling data showed that 27 percent found the attacks completely wrong, 22 percent thought them mostly wrong and only 6 percent considered them mostly right.
Signs of mixed feelings abound here. Some graffiti say, "Siamo tutti americani," ("We are all Americans"), but other spray-painted messages declare, "Siamo tutti palestinesi." ("We are all Palestinians.")
In Italy, as in many other countries, condemnation of the terrorist attacks has been mixed at times with a sense that what happened to America amounted to some form of retribution for the country's dominance of the world's economy, culture, politics and military power.
As so often in the past, it appears - at least to some - that she has hit a nerve in a country where Mr. Berlusconi, a conservative, has already used strong anti-immigrant language that was welcomed by some Italians even as it has angered others.
Ms. Fallaci grew up poor in Florence and fought in the anti-Fascist resistance as a teenager. She always took sides in writing about wars from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, and she became the best-known political interviewer of her generation.
She famously called Yasir Arafat "a man born to irritate," and described Henry A. Kissinger, whom she interviewed in 1972, this way: "Do you know that obsessive, hammering sound of rain falling on a roof? His voice is like that."
"Each interview," she once said, "is a portrait of myself, a strange mixture of my ideas, my temperament, my patience, all of these driving the questions."
In the latest article, she was not even vaguely sisterly toward Muslim women: "If in some countries women are so stupid as to accept wearing the chador, so idiotic as to marry a cretin who wants four wives, that's their problem. But to treat them with indulgence or tolerance or hope is suicide."
This report, from Manhattan, where she now spends most of her time, was as angry as anything she had ever written.
Yet most of the prominent writers and thinkers who answered her in print disagreed but did so carefully and with a respect that was almost as astonishing as her original article.
The novelist Dacia Maraini wrote that "if you turn this into the first move of a holy war, you are helping him," meaning Osama bin Laden, adding, "It is a trap, Oriana, in which you seem to have fallen, spurred on by the impetuousness and the courage - a little quixotic in this case - that characterize you."
Giovanni Sartori, professor of humanities at Columbia University and professor emeritus at the University of Florence, concluded that while he did not completely agree with her, "Oriana Fallaci must be right, since her accusers are thoroughly wrong."
The leader of the leftist opposition, Francesco Rutelli, a former mayor of Rome, said: "I subscribe to a small part of her intervention. She's not a political leader, so she can write what she wants. And all her life is a life of literature, passion and personal commitment, so what she writes is important."
www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/international/europe/30ITAL.html?ex=1005457500&ei=1&en=0f89110e8075ffdd

Professor Ben Lawton's Response:
Carissimo Riccardo,
Did you base your comments on what Fallaci wrote on or the article by Henneberger? I ask, because, given your intelligence and your integrity, I have to believe that you responded to Henneberger's article. Had I only read that article, I would have come to the same conclusions. However, having finally read Fallaci, my reactions are rather different.
Fallaci does not indict ALL Italians (she condemns those Italians who try to find alibis for the massacre of September 11 those Italians whose self-interest and vanity take precedence over the national interest; those Italians who forget or deny that there is a difference between the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Italian Renaissance culture and that spawned by Mohammed; those Italians who only wave the Italian flag at soccer games, but despise its deeper meaning as symbol of patriotism; those Italians who don't understand that an attack on the Twin Towers is an attack on all the West; those Italians who forget the sacrifices that Italians made during the Risorgimento, WWI to free and unify Italy); she is not xenophobic (she simply has had it with the invasion of Italy by illegal immigrants; she is tired of illegals urinating and defecating on and in Italian churches (this I saw with my own eyes in Florence this past summer); she is tired of the constant verbal and physical assault to which women are subjected (this I observed repeatedly this summer); she is tired of the copy/theft of Italian copyrighted artifacts which are then sold in Italian cities to duped tourists (this I observed this summer); she is tired of the fact that you can't walk the streets of Florence because they clog the streets to sell their wares (this I observed this summer); she is appalled by the fact thatif the police tries to get them to move, the illegals react by attacking the police with knives and guns (this I read about this summer); she is not bigoted (she simply says that a fundamentalist wing of the Islamic religion has declared a crusade in the opposite direction against the West; she then goes on to give numerous examples preceding the September 11 massacre; among many other instances she describes public executions of a twelve "impure" youths in Dacca. In front of a crowded stadium, full of people chanting Allah akbar, the youths were bayoneted to death. Then, as the crowd of tens of thousands continued to chant Allah akbar the formed and order row and marched over the cadavers of the youths until they had been reduced to "a bloody carpet of squashed bones); she is not anti female (she condemns [somewhat unfairly, I grant you] Muslim women for tolerating the absurdities of their condition under Islam; she goes on to describe the horrors perpetrated in numerous Muslim countries against women and her own experiences which ranged from humiliating to life threatening).
While one doesn't have to agree with everything Fallaci says (as I stated above, her comments about the Afghan women are less than kind and less than honest, and I am certain Fallaci herself is aware of this; her description of American patriotism may be a bit overly optimistic), this is unquestionably the most impassioned wake up call for Italian patriotism I have read in decades. It is also a long overdue rejection of PCness (be it leftist, rightist, or multiculturalist) a paean to the values of the West and to their fruition in the United States.
Fallaci's essay is 20 single-spaced pages long. The criticism of the aspects of Italy mentioned above constitute a minimal part of the essay. Henneberger's review synthesizes the entire essay in two paragraphs. The other paragraphs concern her biography or are comments on reactions to Fallaci. In short, as usual, a major event is completely trivialized either because it comes from Italy or from an Italian. And, sadly, because for themost part the Italian American activists don't read Italian or are not particularly concerned about things Italian, this further manifestation of defamation will continue to go unchallenged.
Until Italian Americans send their children to "Italian school" as "religiously" as Jewish Americans send theirs to "Jewish school," the New York Times and other such publications will be able to continue to publish drivel such as this. To defend your culture you have to know about it--and that includes its history, its literature, its cinema, and its language.
Sciao-as usual.
Ben

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