The Vent Pipe

From Amazon.com:

With her well-known courage Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct. With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us.

My mother gave me this book, along with her follow up The Force of Reason (which I haven’t read yet).

I read about 75% of it Saturday night, but was unable to get around to finishing it until tonight.

What a book! Apparently, Fallaci chose to translate it from her native Italian tongue to English herself, rather than allow an editor to do this task.  Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say about this on the Amazon listing of the book:

From Publishers Weekly
Noted Italian journalist Fallaci (Interview with History; etc.) is capable of hard-hitting, trenchant social criticism, but she fails to accomplish that in this impassioned but sloppy post-September 11 critique, which has been a bestseller in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Fallaci only aggravates her lack of rigorous thinking by translating the work herself, resulting in a clumsy text that appears not to have been edited or proofread by a fluent English speaker. (Whatever resonance “cicada”-her choice term for the “so-called intellectuals” whom she addresses-has in Italian fails to translate into English.) After a melodramatic preface in which Fallaci congratulates herself on her courage in speaking the truth (and in her defense, apparently there have been efforts to ban the book in France), she lights into the European, and especially Italian, “cicadas” who felt that, on September 11, 2001, America got what she had coming to her and who, in the name of political correctness, fail to condemn the “Reverse Crusade” being waged by Islamic zealots like Osama bin Laden. But Fallaci’s love for America, her adopted home, and her critique of European intellectuals’ perverse contempt for it, is laced with a bile that may lead readers to suspect her of anti-Arab bias-a possibility she is all to aware of, repeatedly defending herself against the charge of racism.

While the book is “choppy” (if you want to use that word) because of her self translation, this is one of the most emotionally charged features of her lengthy letter to the world.  She doesn’t attempt to write in a style that is soaring or eloquent; instead she provides a raw, emotional and unapologetic delivery of her views.

I do agree with Publisher Weekly’s charge that she appears “anti-Muslim,” probably because she is, in so much as she sees Islamic culture (as it stands right now) as being incompatible with Western Civilization.  Again and again, Fallaci outlines the flaws in trying to draw some moral equivalency between Western Civilization and Islamic culture — what equivalency can be drawn between a culture that subjugates women and one that sees gender equality as a hallmark of civil rights?

All in all she provides a fantastic wake up call for Europe and, to some extent, to all of the West. She calls for us all to identify this War on Terror not as some isolated event or series of events, but instead as a battle to the death between Western Culture and Islamic culture.  A war that, according to Fallaci, Europe is doing well in defeating itself.