On Saturday 29 September 2001, "Corriere della Sera" gave its front page to one of the most extreme racist tirades I have ever had the bad luck to read.
To put things in focus, "Corriere della Sera" is not a skinhead broadsheet. It is the leading daily of Milan, the industrial capital of Italy, and is read throughout the country. Thousands and thousands of people go to work on the subway reading it.
The article is by Oriana Fallaci, a retired reporter who in the late '60s and '70s became famous for being a tough girl in tough places, like Vietnam or Iran (they say that a good deal of her claims, like a supposed interview with Khomeini or an affair with Fidel Castro, were entirely made up, but I have no idea). She now lives part of the year in Florence, part in Manhattan and she was there (or claims she was there) when the Twin Towers were struck (she shows off by saying that she had "a feeling of danger" impending, like in "all those fucking wars which have ruined my life").
Her very long article starts by claiming that "some people in Italy were rejoicing like the Palestinians in Gaza, [shouting] "Victory! Victory" Men, women, children". I have no idea where Oriana dreamed this scene up, but her dream is enough to say "I spit" on such people.
Oriana claims "forty thousand, fifty thousand" people were killed in the Twin Towers. She first claims the Americans will never let us know how many people died, in order not to encourage terrorists, then she goes on to say the US is vulnerable because it is a free and open country.
As far as one can make out any logic in what she says, she seems to say Arafat was behind the attack - she also takes the opportunity to remind the world that she once interviewed him: "If I met him again, or rather, if I let him into my presence, I would shout to him who are the real martyrs", not the suicide bombers who "are fucking huris in Paradise", but the passengers on the aeroplanes.
She then makes the fantastic claim that "about twenty-four million Americans are Arab-Muslims" (the actual figure for all Muslims, including Black Muslims, is around 6 or 7 million, if I remember rightly). "When any Mustafa or Muhammed comes, let us say, from Afghanistan to visit his uncle, nobody forbids him [...] from entering a University to study chemistry and biology (I hope they are going to change this) [...] even if the government fears that that son of Allah is going to [...] throw a phial of bacteria into the water".
The US, she tells us, is a "special country", courageously set up by "illiterate peasants"; a few lines later, she tells us that the Founding Fathers used to read Aristotle in Greek and Cicero in Latin. BTW, it is interesting to see how the racist discourse is built up by presenting every kind of "positive" data about "our" side, no matter how contradictory (along with anything negative about the other side). She then tells us a very romantic history of the USA, where the words "native American" or "slavery" somehow never appear. She does claim that the USA has defeated all kinds of wicked people, including the Nazis, the Communists, the Fascists, the Vietnamese (because the latter now want to re-establish relations with the US) and the Mexicans. That reminds me that I am of Mexican origin...
She moves on to make an appeal to people who "are afraid of appearing as racists". There is a "religious war" going on "aimed at conquering our souls", "destroying our freedom and our civilization", "annihilating our way of life and civilization", "our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating, and drinking and dressing and having fun and being informed": "If we do not fight, the Jihad will win".
"Christ! Can't you see that the Osama Bin Laden's feel they are authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, or don't wear a long beard or a chador?" She then says she likes "Dante Alighieri more than Omar Khayyam". The latter of course wrote a lot of nice things about drinking wine, but Oriana probably does not want to know that.
Skipping from one idea to the next, Oriana then tells us that secular Iraq, where nobody in the government wears a beard, where women walk freely without veils, and which Osama has always considered to be an enemy, "will provide chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear weapons" to the fundamentalists.
"If America falls, then Europe will fall [...] instead of church bells, there will be the muezzins, instead of miniskirts, chadors, instead of cognac, camel's milk".
"In Italy the mosques of Milan and Turin and Rome are full of rogues who sing the praises of Osama Bin Laden, of terrorists waiting to blow up the Dome of Saint Peter's".
"Behind our civilization, there are Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Phidias, by God! There is Ancient Greece [...] There is Rome [... ] there is Christ [...] there is the Renaissance [...] there is science [...] which has taken us to the Moon and Mars".
Of course, Homer and the Dome of Saint Peter's don't necessarily represent the same view of life, and the West is *also* a lot of other things, like two world wars in recent decades, but racists build their world pictures in a selective fashion.
"Now what is there behind the other culture?" Nothing, of course. The fault lies in the Qur'an, according to which "women are worth less than camels" and "have to wear a chador" which "covers their eyes with a thick mesh" and are "not allowed to go to school"; she also claims there is the "death penalty for those who drink alcohol". "Osama Bin Laden claims that the whole planet Earth must become Muslim".
Osama Bin Laden, she tells us, should be killed, but there is apparently a lot more work to do. There are "tens of thousands of Osama Bin Laden's", "everywhere, and the most aggressive ones are here in the West", among the immigrant workers. "It is impossible to negotiate with them. Unthinkable to reason with them. To treat them indulgently or tolerantly or with hope, would be suicide". The reasoning is interesting:
a) Osama Bin Laden should be killed.
b) Every foreign immigrant in Europe is an Osama Bin Laden.
c) It would be suicide to tolerate them.
d) Notice that the obvious conclusion - gas chambers for "them" all - is not specified.
She then boasts of several adventures she claims to have lived through in far-apart countries of the Orient: she says for example that "that Palestinian called Habash had his men point a machine gun at my head for twenty minutes". Georges Habash was of a Christian family, a detail Oriana somehow fails to mention.
After having accused every Muslim (and a Christian Palestinian) of being violent, she then boasts of nearly having burned alive a group of Somali immigrants all by herself.
Somalia was invaded and occupied by Italy for about six decades (a fact which Oriana, who apparently thinks the West was only Plato, conveniently forgets), so Somalis enjoy a special relationship with Italy. However, since they have no officially recognized state today, Somali immigrants have a very hard time: for example, a lady spent months in gaol here for having brought in her child, since there was no embassy to prove it was actually hers.
Last year, a group of Somalis - who were not of course Muslim militants, but simply people with a serious problem - after getting all the necessary permits, set up a tent in front of the Cathedral in Florence to collect signatures. This is something *every* group with a cause of any kind does normally.
Oriana says that this way "Somali Muslims defaced and shitted and outraged for three months the main square of my city"; "blaming condeming insulting" the Italian government which did not give them the papers they needed to "bring in hordes of relatives" "mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, pregnant sisters-in-law".
She claims that some "children of Allah" urinated on the walls of the Cathedral, something which she herself admits is physically impossible due to the barrier in front of it, but never mind; she also claims that they had mattresses inside the tent "to sleep and fuck on" and poisoned the square with the smell and smoke of their cooking. She claims they had a recorder where one could hear the voice of a muezzin - the little tape recorder apparently was powerful enough to "drown out the sound of the church bells". It is interesting to notice that Oriana apparently neither saw nor heard the thousands of cars which pass constantly next to the Cathedral, nor the millions of swarming tourists.
So she claims she went to a "nice policeman who runs the security department" (?) and said: "When I say I am going to do something, I mean it. I also know warfare and I know how to do certain things. If you don't take away that fucking tent by tomorrow, I'll burn it. I swear on my honour that I'll burn it". She then claims that the policeman "took the tent down a few hours later".
One is left wondering whether she actually made this homicidal threat, and if so, why the policeman, instead of arresting her as a potentially dangerous terrorist, caved in to her threats.
The Somalis' problem with papers has of course nothing whatsoever to do with the Egyptian and other suicide pilots in the US: people who belonged to well-off families, and who we can imagine must have been the ideal neighbours, since they never attracted the attention of the FBI even though they came from the Near East.
Nor does this have to do with the fact that out of ten immigrants to Italy, one (or less) is a bad apple (and certainly anything but a "terrorist"). However, Oriana goes on to say that Florence, "once the capital of art and culture and beauty" is "wounded and humiliated" by "arrogant Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalese, Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistanis and Nigerians" who "sell drugs" and work as pimps. Of course, most of the Nigerians here are Christian and the Albanians have basically no religion whatsoever, but then that's Oriana for you.
After telling us that Osama is going to kill us if we drink wine, she says that "they" (Bengalese? Tunisians?) "get drunk with wine and beer and liquor" in front of the Church of San Lorenzo. She boasts of having kicked one of "them" in the testicles.
She also claims that "they" have turned Turin into Nairobi and that the buildings in Genoa have been "raped" by "them".
"Instead of calling them sons-of-Allah in Italy they call them 'foreign workers'". "What kind of work do they do [...] camping in our cities with the excuse of selling trinkets? Lazing around and ruining our monuments? Praying five times a day? [...] And if they are so poor, who gave them the money to come to Italy? [...] Is it Osama Bin Laden who is giving them the money to start a conquest, not only of souls, but also of the territory?" She describes the "wicked, twisted" faces of the immigrants.
Like many Italians with a bad conscience, she tries to distinguish between the good Italian emigration to the USA in the past and the wicked immigration to Italy today: the former was "not illegal", and the US "gave them land". Whose land it was, Oriana does not tell us. It is also hard to see why the fact that the hosting country changes its laws should change immigrants from being good to bad, but never mind.
It is interesting to see how religious fundamentalism develops: Oriana has always been a fierce enemy of the Catholic Church - she makes the unlikely claim that the Inquisition, which ceased to exist even formally in the 18th century - "burned her grandmother". Now, seeing the Muslims, she suddenly decides that her country is Catholic and should stay that way: "there is no room in our country for the muezzins, the minarets, teetotallers, their fucking Middle Ages, their fucking chador [...] and even if there were, I would not give them that room."
Remember the double-slap trick every sergeant uses to manipulate his subordinates? "The 41st is the most glorious regiment in the army... you of the 41st are the worst bunch of cowards I have ever seen". Oriana uses it too:
"The wicked, stupid, cowardly Italy of the little hyaenas who would sell their daughter to a Beirut brothel in order to shake the hand of a Hollywood star but when Osama Bin Laden's kamikazes turn thousands of New Yorkers into a mountain of ash which looks like ground coffee sneer happily, the-Americans-got-what-they-deserved".
Racism works by constantly associating different things. Of course, any person who would sell his daughter to shake the hand of a Hollywood star presumably adores the US.
With the strict logic which is such a feature of racists, Oriana ends up by saying that Italian politicians are losing their grip on syntax, and Italian young people "play the role of wannabe terrorists in time of peace waving black flags".
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This incredible article, published - as I said - in one of the main daily newspapers of the European continent, without any apology, gives a terrifying but authentic picture of how many, possibly most Italians feel today, despite the hypocritical official position that "this is just a war on terrorism, not on Islam". People like Oriana Fallaci at least let the cat out of the bag.
If anybody wondered how Germany in the 1930's or Yugoslavia in the 1990's could suddenly turn barbarian, well - here is the answer.
Genocide is possible.