Recent Appearances...

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Recent Appearances...

Europe

Italy's political crisis comes to a head as PM tipped to quit

2019-08-21

[DAWN] Italia's political crisis comes to a head on Tuesday with speculation that Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will resign after far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini pulled the plug on the dysfunctional coalition government.

Conte is due to speak in the Senate today following a week of fallout from Salvini's dramatic decision to back out of the alliance on August 8, plunging the eurozone's third-largest economy into political turmoil.

Salvini's anti-immigrant League party has been soaring in opinion polls during months of squabbling over key policy decisions with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S).

Salvini, who is also deputy prime minister, hopes to trigger early elections, which polls suggest his League party and right-wing allies could win.

Conte is expected to make a speech, widely touted to be scathing of Salvini's behaviour, but it is not yet clear whether he will then immediately resign or wait for the outcome of a no confidence vote.

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Europe

Six EU countries ready to take in stranded Open Arms migrants

2019-08-16

[PULSE.NG] Six EU countries have agreed to take in some of the 147 ~~migrants~~ colonists currently stranded on a rescue ship near the Italian island of Lampedusa, Rome announced Thursday, in a welcome development for embattled far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini.

Both Italia and Malta have refused Open Arms permission to dock and unload its passengers

"La Belle France, Germany, Romania, Portugal, Spain and Luxembourg have told me that they are ready to welcome the ~~migrants~~ colonists," Italian premier Giuseppe Conte said in an open letter addressed to Salvini, who has sought to ban the Open Arms rescue vessel from entering Italian waters.

"Once again, my Europe
Europe

...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
an counterparts are offering us a helping hand," Conte wrote, while slamming Salvini who has been calling since last Thursday for the PM to step down.

Salvini has taken a hard line against ~~migrants~~ colonists rescued at sea being brought to Italia, which he says bears an unfair burden in the crisis.

Responding to Conte's announcement, Salvini wrote on Facebook: "It is clear that without (my) resolve, the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
would never have lifted a finger, leaving Italia and the Italians on their own like (previous governments) did for years."

Salvini, head of the anti-immigration League party, broke with his coalition partner the Five Star Movement (M5S) last week, hoping for a no-confidence vote that would topple the 14-month-old government.

But his gamble failed, and his abandoned partner found an unexpected ally in the opposition Democratic Party (PD).

Both M5S and PD on Tuesday voted against Salvini despite his last-minute offer to back a plan to slash the number of the country's politicians.

The fate of the scores of ~~migrants~~ colonists aboard the Open Arms, operated by Spanish charity Proactiva, found itself at the centre of the political crisis in Rome.

Earlier this month Salvini, who is also deputy PM, signed a decree banning the Open Arms from Italian waters, saying it was needed to protect public order.

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Africa North

Salvini: #Libya offered to take 356 migrants aboard charity ships in the Mediterranean

2019-08-16

[TWITTER]

Salvini: #Libya offered to take 356 migrants aboard charity ships in the Mediterraneanhttps://t.co/jLguijyyf8 #Libya pic.twitter.com/SsEYEPssTG
— Alwasat Libya (@alwasatengnews) August 15, 2019

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Europe

The resurgence of Oriana Fallaci's anti-Islam message in Italy

2019-08-14

[Aljazeera] Rome, Italy - At his political rally in Milan in March, Italy's far-right Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini mentioned two women: the Virgin Mary, who, he said "will lead us to victory", and Oriana Fallaci, whom he described as "the founding mother of this Europe".

One of Italy's most famous journalists, Fallaci, who died in her late seventies in 2006, covered the Vietnam War and interviewed the likes of Henry Kissinger, Indira Gandhi and Ruhollah Khomeini.

After September 11, she adopted an anti-Islam stance and today her legacy is enjoying a moment of renewed popularity.

In 2019 Italy, Fallaci's unapologetic Islamophobia is alarmingly mainstream. The new ruling class is rediscovering Fallaci as a prescient thinker.

Streets or squares have been renamed after her in Pisa and Arezzo, in central Italy, and Genoa, further north.

A public garden was also dedicated to her in Sesto San Giovanni, an industrial town close to Milan, where the mayor also blocked the construction of a mosque and recently mentioned Fallaci in his inauguration speech: "Her exhortations to the West to wake up still resonate today."

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Home Front: Culture Wars

NYTimes Op-Ed admits Islamic intimidation is wrong but..

2010-04-26

In a way, the muzzling of "South Park" is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions' cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It's no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart's opera "Idomeneo" because it included a scene featuring Muhammad's severed head. Or Random House's decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet's third wife. Or Yale University Press's refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons ... in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians -- the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands -- have been hauled before courts and "human rights" tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam.
so you think he is ready to end the column with a punch
This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that "bravely" trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Happily, today's would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn't Weimar Germany, and Islam's radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.
unfortunately, the islamic supremicists are not just a radical fringe and they are an existential enemy but maybe not in the columnists neighborhood
For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there's enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe
or the same foe after it has grown incrementally
might be able to bring them crashing down.

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Europe

Florence celebrates Oriana Fallaci

2008-04-18

(ANSA) - Florence, April 17 - A new multi-centre exhibition dedicated to controversial crusading journalist Oriana Fallaci opens in her home town of Florence on Friday. Known for her abrasive interviewing style, chain-smoking Fallaci (1929-2006) was one of the first female war correspondents and shot to fame in the years before her death with scathing attacks on Islam for which she was accused of inciting hatred against Muslims.

At the show's inauguration on Thursday, Tuscan regional president Riccardo Nencini described Fallaci as ''an absolutely atypical and cantankerous but beautiful person''.

On display are many of Fallaci's personal belongings, including coquettish little hats, glasses, typewriters, scraps of paper covered in notes, books published in various languages, paintings of the white roads and hills of Tuscany, and a large number of photographs. ''Oriana was a very shy person, but she loved being photographed,'' said Fallaci's nephew and curator of the show Edoardo Perazzi.

The show is split over two locations in the city, with a section at Palazzo Medici Riccardi tracing Fallaci's Florentine beginnings, her family and personal history, her anti-Fascist youth and her first steps in journalism.

The second section at Palazzo Panciatichi concentrates on Fallaci's later life as a war correspondent and writer, with objects on show including her clunky tape recorder, the audio tape of a hallmark interview with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the camouflaged rucksack she took with her to Vietnam with instructions for the recovery of her body.

Also on show are some of the articles she wrote for Italian daily Corriere della Sera in the last years of her life. ''We wanted to concentrate more on Oriana's love for Florence rather than the polemics of recent years,'' Perazzi said.

Fallaci sparked a storm with two anti-Islam books after the September 11, 2001 attacks on America - The Rage and The Pride (2002) and The Force of Reason (2004), in which she slammed Islam as ''oppressive'' and Arab immigrants in Europe as ''bigoted''. Defying political correctness, she wrote that Europe risked becoming 'Eurabia' and had ''sold itself like a whore to sultans''.

Fallaci first showed her combative spirit in joining the Italian Resistance as a teenager. She was later a war correspondent, covering the Vietnam war, the Indo-Pakistani and Middle East conflicts, and South American uprisings. She was wounded in 1968 at a protest against the Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Working for Italy's leading newspaper Corriere della Sera and the newsweekly L'Europeo, Fallaci won renown with a series of prickly interviews with some of the world's most powerful figures including Kissinger, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, General Giap, Colonel Gheddafi, Indira Ghandi, Deng Xiaoping and Ayatollah Khomeini - defiantly whipping off the headscarf the Iranians forced her to wear.

She harangued Kissinger into calling the Vietnam War ''useless'' - an admission that later prompted him to call the interview ''the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with a member of the press''.

She also worked for leading publications across Europe and the United States including the The Washington Post, the New York Times, Life, the New Republic, Le Nouvelle Observateur and Stern.

Fallaci wrote best-selling works of fiction and semi-fiction including Letter To An Unborn Child (1975), which topped the charts in Italy for years, A Man (1979), the story of the love of her life, tragic Greek leftist Alekos Panagulis, and Inshallah (1990) - her last publication before her anti-Islam tirade 12 years later. Her works sold millions of copies in some 30 countries including China, Japan, Thailand and across the Arab world, but she always felt an outsider in Italian literary circles.

Spurning the Italian intellectual elite, Fallaci lived most of her later years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She returned to Florence in 2006 a few weeks before her death from cancer aged 77.

Oriana Fallaci - A Florentine by Race runs at Palazzo Medici Riccardi and Palazo Panciatichi in Florence until May 11.

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Europe

The inconvenient Serbs

2007-04-27

When the outcome of a tragedy is known in advance, it finds ways of occurring earlier than expected. In this case, the fate of 100,000 Serbian Christians who remain in Kosovo may pre-empt the debate over Europe's eventual absorption into the Muslim world.

A new book on the Islamification of Europe appears almost weekly, adding to the efforts of Ben Wattenberg, Oriana Fallaci, Bat Ye'or, George Weigel, Mark Steyn, Philip Jenkins and a host of others. Scholars debate whether the decline and fall of Europe will occur by mid-century, or might be postponed until 2100. The inconvenient Serbs may force the issue on Europe a great deal sooner.

If Serbia and Russia draw a line in the sand over the independence of Kosovo, we may observe the second occasion in history when a Muslim advance on Europe halted on Serbian soil. The first occurred in 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople, when Sultan Mehmed II was thrown back from the walls of Belgrade, "The White City", by Hungarian and Serb defenders. The Siege of Belgrade "decided the fate of Christendom", wrote the then Pope Calixtus III. Not for nothing did J R R Tolkien name his fictional stronghold of Minas Tirith "The White City".

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Britain

British Muslims Get Their Soapbox

2007-01-22

Thanks to the Internet, television borders, like national ones, have grown blurry. A program broadcast in one country can now be seen the same night in another, at least in YouTube-size segments. A good case in point is "Dispatches: Undercover Mosque," a secret investigation by Britain's Channel Four into anti-democratic, anti-Western preaching in reputedly moderate British mosques. The documentary, which was shown in Britain on Monday, was linked via YouTube on the Drudge Report the following day.

Radical Islam in Britain will also be featured tomorrow night on "CNN: Special Investigations Unit," a new series which sounds like something involving David Caruso, designer sunglasses, and murdered fashion models. In fact, this episode, "The War Within," stars Christiane Amanpour, and while it would be going too far to call it an unflinching look at Muslim extremism, it does at least look at it. But let's not give Ms. Amanpour, arguably the most famous female journalist in the world, too much credit. Oriana Fallaci lamented before her death last year that she had come so late to the most important story of her lifetime. She was talking about the growth of Islamic radicalism in Europe, and she was referring to its beginnings in the 1970s.

Now in 2007, we have Ms. Amanpour, chicly turned out in dark glasses and a long dark coat, announcing at the outset that London, which has been not only her home but also her "refuge" from conflicts overseas, is itself embattled, a site of conflict and suicide bombings and fear. Unfortunately, little history or context for the eruption of this problem is provided. A massive, highly politicized Muslim population is just suddenly there, in Britain. There is no reference to the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie in 1989, when there was widespread rioting by British Muslims, let alone to the notorious 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech by the maverick Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which the issue of immigration was placed dramatically on the front burner of English politics before being swiftly removed for the next three decades.

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Home Front: Culture Wars

Western culture: Is it death by fertility rate?

2006-12-11

By PETER WORTHINGTON

In Macleans magazine last month, Mark Steyn wrote a plaintive piece about how his new book, America Alone, was unavailable in Canadian bookstores an apparent victim of a fear of militant Muslim reprisals.

The Chapters-Indigo chain subsequently insisted it wasnt giving Steyns book the Mein Kampf treatment (banned from being sold in the chain by the boss, Heather Reisman), but that they hadnt anticipated the popularity of America Alone (a best-seller) and hadnt ordered enough copies.

Last I heard, the book was in its fourth printing and, happy to say, a phone check with Chapters indicates theyve now got plenty of the books. Good news, because in my view, America Alone is not a polemic against Muslims in the way that the late Oriana Fallacis The Force of Reason or Melanie Phillips Londonistan are.

Rather, Steyn seems to be saying the rise of militant or extremist Islam is partly our fault the non-Muslim worlds passivity or acquiescence to outrageous acts or intemperate demands.

True, he sees Europe being overwhelmed by Muslims not because of violence, but because of Europes declining birthrate and the high fertility rate of Muslims. Thats a far cry from legions of jihadists sweeping over the continent, intimidating all in its path.

For a stable population that is, no growth a country has to have a fertility rate of at least 2.1 live births per woman. Of all developed countries, only the U.S. meets that standard. Canadas fertility rate is 1.48 while Europe as a whole is even lower at 1.38. Japans is 1.32, Russias 1.14, and so on throughout Europe. Steyn calls it the self-extinction of civilization. In other words, there is no population bomb that many saw threatening the world and its resources.

But Muslim countries have a live birth rate ranging from five to seven per woman that already has had a dramatic effect on Europe.

For example, 10% of Frances population is Muslim.

Yet of citizens under the age of 20, 30% are Muslim.

In the cities that ratio rises to 45%. So when the youth of Paris and other centres erupt in violence and burn cars, rampage the streets, rape and vandalize, statistically its mostly young Muslims.

Huge problem

In Britain and Europe, around 15% of the population is under 15 years old, while in countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, 40% to 50% of the population is under 15. Its going to be a huge problem for all countries when the grandparents outnumber the grandkids.

Demographically, Steyn feels groups with soaring birthrates will eventually dominate todays developed world. Without a shot being fired.

With the U.S. about the only country with a viable birthrate that will keep its population from stagnating, the developed world has virtually surrendered to Muslim militancy.

As a people, we may fret that moderate Muslims are reluctant to speak out against Muslim terrorism and intimidation when they occur, for fear of reprisals.

But non-Muslims are even more loath to risk controversy. So how can moderate Muslims be blamed for their silence?

Steyn is more hawkish than many, especially in the media. Generally, most of the media dont want trouble, or to appear insensitive or intolerant. After 9/11, most media tried to keep things in perspective, and not incite vengeance or reprisals on Muslims.

Fair enough. World leaders made pilgrimages to mosques to set an example.

Cartoon fiasco

While that discouraged anti-Muslim hysteria, it didnt alleviate anti-West passions. Rather, it increased intimidation witness scurrying for cover over the Danish cartoons fiasco, which was never about religion, but about politics and ideology. Today, not much has changed.

We still try to show sensitivity and understanding.

Often, cowardice is camouflaged as principle. Its also a rule of nature, that if you can be intimidated, you will be intimidated.

That doesnt affect the demographic reality that the worlds population will peak before 2050 and then start to decline. Read Steyns book for his answer to the worlds most aggravating problem.

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Home Front: WoT

Jeff at Protein Wisdom explores important topic: libel tourism

2006-11-11

Oriana Fallaci, RIP, was a prime example of this abuse of Western legal institutions against us. This is an important topic... another vector of the pathogen and one that can silence those with the stones to inform the dullards. Jeff does a nice job.

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Europe

Italian gift to Pope may renew Muslim ire

2006-10-23

Oriana Fallaci, the controversial Italian journalist, who left her books and papers to a Rome university because of her admiration for Pope Benedict XVI, may have lent further strength to Muslim suspicions about the Popes perceived Islamophobia. In her last days, Fallaci, who became a bitter foe of Islam, which she saw as a destructive force at war with the West and its values, had a private audience with Benedict at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. In one of her final interviews, Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal, I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true.

A report in Boston Globe on Sunday said that Benedict was surprised by the gift of the books, which dated back as far as the 17th century. The veneration that she had for you, Holy Father, persuaded her to make this donation, which will be known as the Oriana Fallaci Archives, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, rector of the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome said during a ceremony at the university announcing the gift of the books.

Pope Benedict greeted Fallacis nephew and his family during the ceremony, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. After an absence from the publishing scene for nearly a decade, Fallaci returned to the spotlight after the 9/11 attacks with a series of blistering essays in which she argued that Muslims were carrying out a war against the Christian West. At the time of her death, she was on trial in northern Italy, accused of defaming Islam in her 2004 book, The Strength of Reason.

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-Short Attention Span Theater-

Oriana Fallaci gifts pontifical school in will

2006-10-21

EFL

Oriana Fallaci had described the pontiff as an ally in her campaign to rally Christians in Europe against what she saw as a Muslim crusade against the West. As she battled breast cancer last year, she had a private audience with Benedict, who was elected only a few months earlier, at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.

In one of her final interviews, Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal: "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true."

Benedict was surprised by the gift of the books, which dated back as far as the 17th century and included volumes about the formation of modern-day Italy, American history, philosophy and theology, said Monsignor Rino Fisichella, rector of the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome.

"The veneration that she had for you, Holy Father, persuaded her to make this donation, which will be known as the Oriana Fallaci Archives," Fisichella said during a ceremony at the university Saturday to announce the gift of the books.

Benedict greeted Fallaci's nephew and his family during the ceremony, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. He then spoke briefly about the search for truth in science and academia.

"God is the ultimate truth to which all reason naturally gravitates," the pontiff told an audience of students and faculty.

The real message here is that Pope Benedict publically accepted the Fallaci archive just a few days after receiving the "open letter" from 38 Muslim scholars. How I love and admire this man.

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