Italy and Islam. Oriana’s thread

A vituperative literary crusader against Muslims

THERE is nothing al-Qaeda would like more than for Europeans to turn on Muslims in their midst, uniting fundamentalist militants with those who are neither fundamentalist nor militant. In that sense, Osama bin Laden won yet another victory this week with the publication of another hate-filled, anti-Islamic diatribe by an Italian writer who has become noted for such diatribes: Oriana Fallaci. Over the past three years, the 76-year-old Ms Fallaci has carved out a role as the voice of what might be a new European racism - were race, not religion, her primary cause.

Ms Fallaci hates Muslims. All of them. The idea of moderation in Islam, she wrote this week, is a fraud and an illusion. Tolerance of Muslims is a comedy; integration by them is a lie; multiculturalism is a farce. Europe, infiltrated by illegal Muslim immigrants who tend to have a higher birth rate than the natives, is turning into “Eurabia”. Her thoughts were first aired after the September 11th attacks on New York, where Ms Fallaci lives. She has since written two more books in the same vein. In May, an Italian judge committed her for trial on charges of offending Islam, but this has served only to reinforce her self-image as a wronged Cassandra. Her writings have been the subject of legal proceedings in France and Switzerland.

What is most alarming is not the virulence of Ms Fallaci's ideas but the backing they have received in Italy and America. Her books have been bestsellers. Her publisher, Rizzoli, markets them in lush, boxed editions of a sort normally reserved for the collected works of great authors. Italy's most respected newspaper, Corriere della Sera, part of the same group as Rizzoli, gave her over two pages for her latest onslaught. Ms Fallaci has become one of the darlings of Italy's ruling class, especially of the xenophobic Northern League.

Some support for her is purely libertarian, based on the right to express opinions even if they are offensive, incendiary and blasphemous. But a lot also reflects sympathy with her views. Paradoxically, such sympathy is often expressed by the same people who were most impressed by Britain's measured reaction to the London bombings. And yet that reaction reflected in large degree a belief in the virtue of the same multiculturalism that Ms Fallaci and her friends so despise.