The Rage and The Pride

Rating:
Summary: History unchanged
Review: In the Name of Allah, most Gracious most Mercifull

It is always repeated that Oriana Fallaci set forth an arguement or a statement, something that can be built upon and this is very contrary to the truth.
Her words are insulting, generalizing and simply summoning up what Millions of people around the world feel. Muslim are women beaters, savages, polyagamists, terrorists and bearded fanatics.
The only difference with her is that she did not even bother to present it in a way which is acceptable, in simple writers standards.
It is full of Historic errors, Prejiduced statements, and emotional unrational, even personal attacks.
Her describtion of Western Civilization as the contrary to the savage and backward mentality of Islam is so outrageous and tremendously ignorant that only the most naive headnodders will follow her.
The Democracy of the West is not a result of its enlightenment, but of a long perioed of Wars, suffering, torture and pillage.
...

Rating:
Summary: Fallaci's Fallacy
Review: I was raised in a spiritual tradition thousands of years older than islam in a land that suffered grievously from the murder, rape, pillage, forced conversion on pain of death, desecration, and humiliation that its adherents visited upon my people in its name. They destroyed holy places and built their mosques on the ravished sites, preserving within a fragment or two of the original structure as a gesture of interfaith understanding to the infidel, just as they did with the Al Aqsa mosque on the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

My first reaction to Oriana Fallaci's "The Rage and the Pride" was a delight that curled my toes, that finally a writer of some substance got it and was not afraid to say it despite the boringly predictable death threats and attempts to murder that would follow by thugs who knew their god to be remarkably thin-skinned and not quite up to defending herself. I find it hard to argue with many of Fallaci's contentions, such as islam's being the only major faith with absolutely no record of critical self-examination. What other religion prescribes that apostates be killed, and that infidels be forced to pay higher taxes even as they count as only half a person (if male, zero if female) under law?

Fallaci's work was a cathartic outpouring in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. True, there was dancing in the streets of Arab cities as well as expressions of sympathy. Many muslims voiced outrage that the perpetrators had insulted their religion in an atrocious way. Yet neither outrage nor insult could have cut too deeply as not one teeny-tiny fatwah came of it from anywhere in the islamic world calling for bin Laden's head, not even a call for a slap on his wrist with a damp grape leaf. No, but the head of the Italian muslim community did call for the killing of this cancer-stricken septuagenarian woman, from his lair a scant mile from the Vatican, for the crime of speaking her mind. Many protested that muslims were unfairly tagged with a propensity for supporting terrorism. The people of Tibet have suffered horrendously from the cruel, illegal and immoral occupation by Chinese communists, but the Dalai Lama has yet to mobilize squadrons of Buddhist suicide bombers.

After the first flush of empathetic anger and vicarious satisfaction, I began to think, began to see connections and lessons from history, and began to see Fallaci's screed as at best unthinkingly hypocritical. Her book is an excruciatingly chauvinistic polemic against islamic contamination of European christendom that ignores lessons of the past and condemns us to relive humankind's worst mistakes.

Remember Spenser's Faerie Queene? This classic allegorical text of Middle English literature was a seminal work of anti-catholicism with the Anglican Redcrosse Knight embodying St. George battling Archimago the dragon, a composite of pope and satan. This was an early and inspired salvo in an unbroken tradition now shouldered by the abysmal likes of Bob Jones University. The same ideas held in the England of Lord George Gordon, who led the largest riots in memory to protest catholic emancipation, as they did in the America of a hundred years ago. Catholics were evil henchmen to the pope of Rome; the heir to the English throne could marry a Voodoo priest but not one of them; this fifth column of dagos and micks was incompatible with the anglo-saxon protestant world and were sworn to corrupt and overwhelm it. How odd then that the most vociferous "conservatives" of today have names like Buchanan, Hannity, and O'Reilly; they've yet to meet the Orangemen in a dark alley. How odd that a Fallaci so easily dons a New Yorker's cape to indict with a broad brush all muslim immigrants to Europe and the terror they reputedly bring with them, when the founders of that town would have rejected her and her kind and the terror they brought with them in the person of the Mafia, just as roundly!

Remember the Spanish Inquisition and the evil the church felt it had to do to protect its turf? Slave-mongers in America? Colonizers in the new world? Fallaci cannot stand the African immigrants who defile her precious Firenze by selling bric-a-brac by the duomo, but fails to get her knickers in a twist about the Italian occupation of Ethiopia or Libya or the older adventures of Rome. Are muslim pioneers penning Europeans onto reservations, breaking their spirit and then breaking treaty after treaty, using bioweapons like typhoid-infected blankets to decimate survivors?

Remember the Holocaust? European identity and christendom felt threatened then, and before and since, by the presence among them of the family of the man they purported to worship. The pro-muslim and anti-Israel rhetoric that many Europeans spout today can only be a restatement of that ancient and terrifyingly illogical prejudice, given the contempt for muslims that would surely surface if Jews were taken out of the context.

Are evangelists any better? Whole civilizations have lost their connection to their roots through colonization and conversion, and ended up destroying their heritage, vilifying their ancestors and glorifying their subjugators, be it Iran or Pakistan, the Philippines or Peru. Witness the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan. The Filipinos lost their very names and heritage through colonization and conversion, with the final insult of being forced as a people to bear the name of a dissolute European king. Imagine the reaction that massive outreach programs and televangelism funded in Europe and America by Arab and Iranian oil money would provoke.

It was a mistake for Fallaci to translate the work herself. What might well be scintillating in Italian sounds stilted and inept in her translation. The book reads like the retranslation from the French of Mark Twain's 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'. I kept hearing Guido Sarducci's voice every time she put a backhandedly pious rhetorical question to the 'Most Holy Father'.

Fallaci's fallacy stems from ignoring history and rejecting balance. This book damages her legacy.

Rating:
Summary: Absolute must read whether you agree or not
Review: A book written with passion and intelligence without concern about diluting her message with concern about villification---it underscores the long term challenge that confronts the world and, like the real events in the dismantling of Yugoslavia, reminds us that modernization and globalization have not come close to eliminating the primal hatred and ignorance born of centuries of history.

Rating:
Summary: The passion and the fury
Review: Tucker Andersen's February 17 review nailed it: Passionate story, clumsy translation, brief and worth reading.

Fallaci published two recent op ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal. In her wonderful, piercing March 2003 column, she lamented the failure of Western European leaders, including the pope, to recognize and respsond to the [ill treatment] in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In April 2003, she published the words of an Iraqi POW at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. He put an Iraqi's words to the [horrible things] observed and described by Fallaci.

"The rage and the pride" is more indirect and problematic. Translating her own work, Fallaci at times succumbs to waves of literary inventiveness that sweep away some of the focused anger and outrage. Perhaps she has seen too much. Yet the passion, the frustration, the anger and the fury are evident. She especially despises the pope for receiving the emissary from Iraq, creating a perverse form of... equivalence between the United States and the Hussein regime.

Rating:
Summary: From what I've seen so far, lack of facts...
Review: Read the Wall Street Journal excerpts and not very impressed with it. I think the time has arrived that the war had started and plenty of informations have been floating around the internet, one could easily varify things which she claimed as true- arn't so true, and she seems grossly unaware of many. If Fallaci actually checked out some declassified documents of the US regime, including CIA's covert ops in her own country after the WW2 (plans to interfere with democratic election, etc), she won't be such a US lover. Most of the arguments around her support for war seems emotional, based on flawed inductions from things worth little factual value. One can seriously undermine her book after reading Chomsky and doing some personal research. I am confident to write a book of my own countering everything she said in the excerpt, based on the documents I've researched lately. So can you, if you make the effort to truth.

Rating:
Summary: To tell the truth needs great integrity and Fallaci shows it
Review: I just want to ask one question: Why almost all of the democratic and developed countries are Christian countries ? Why there are millions of people from Islamic countries immigrated to USA, UK, and other Christian countries but you rarely see anyone from Christian countries want to immigrate to Muslim countries?

Religion is the foundation for the most important principles of ideaology. And it is responsible for the development of any society.

To tell the truth needs great integrity which most of the politicians don't have. I have several friends from muslim background. I like them a lot but I also understand from them that intollerance, hatrade, and revenge lies in the center of their religion. Although they live in the Christian society, and they want to live like any Western people, but they have this split personality. They don't really belong to the West and they hate the West ALWAYS. They want to keep their own religion which they regard as their only identity left. I told them it is wrong. If something can only bring your country misery and suffering, no freedom and no democracy, even you yourself have deserted the countries under its rule, you still want to keep the stuff as your only identity ? That is STUPID. Right?

Rating:
Summary: Rock on, Oriana!
Review: Oriana Fallaci is tired of this debate. She's wants one thing: victory over the Islamists by any means necessary. There comes a time when arguing with evil in its purest form does nothing more than legitimize this evil. If a society cannot stand up and call this evil out, to its face (and yes, evil has a face in this case), then that society is either: 1) as good as dead , or 2) a friend to that evil.

In "The Rage and the Pride," Oriana Fallaci uses her eyewitness account of the 9/11 attacks on lower Manhattan, New York City, to launch into a rant against radical Islam and its proponents' repeatedly stated intentions to conquer the world. Ms. Fallaci takes on the European Muslim leaders and their total condonation or, at best, acquiescence to the vitriolic, hate-filled rhetoric coming from some of the leading mosques and Islamic scholars in Europe and around the world. She directly attacks Yasser Arafat for the terrorism he wages against not only the civilized world but against his own people, while running up a personal net worth of an estimated $300 million. Ms. Fallaci, a lifelong Leftist and true "libertarian" is a great example of how the International Left should have reacted to 9/11 and the rise of Radical Islam. Instead, much of the Left, with the cowardice that Fallaci rips them for in this book, can only mount tepid condemnation of democratic, Western leaders that pose no threat to them, while excusing and turning a blind eye to those that seek to kill us all, no questions asked.

The Rage and the Pride is not well-composed and not well thought out. But it is a better read just for those reasons. It is an emotional roller coaster of anger and passion that laughs at the thought of continued diplomacy and debate with the Islamists and their dictatorial protectors in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and so on. Anyone who values enlightened, democratic, freedom will love this book and have a profound respect for Ms. Fallaci's rage. Anyone who does not is simply not with us. They're with them. Period. And Oriana Fallaci knows how true this is.

Rating:
Summary: She Lets them Have It!
Review: Oriana Fallaci is angry and she lets them have it!

I wish I could read her in Italian, but I can't, so I purchased this book. This book deals with her rage over the bombing of the World Trade Center and the arrogance of those fanatics who think that by random terrorist acts they can--what--put us back into the 14th century with Osama bin Laden as caliph of Baghdad?

This is a short book and not very deep but Ms. Fallaci does say a lot of things many of us are thinking.

Rating:
Summary: Brains before feelings create a force.
Review: A book to keep and then to pass along to the rising generation that is deeply marked by 9/11. Fallaci's passion for history and superior culture is what makes her rage so true. Her intellect, along with acquired powers of peception as a war journalist, drive her emotions. She puts brains before feelings, the proper order to create a forceful polemic.

BTW, the physical production of this slim little book is excellent, with good binding and slightly larger print.

Rating:
Summary: Believable?
Review: Let me first say that I am a non-muslim reading this book, so my comments have not been affected by some bias!

I admire Oriana Fallaci for her passion but she has allowed her judgement of the book to make it unbelievable - there was no argument between 2 sides, there was no balance to an argument, it was taken from just one view. She clearly thinks Islam is a threat to the West which has made her so very passionate. Im going to ignore the lack of good English. And I didnt like being told that if I didnt accept her view, I was stupid. Because of all these reasons I did not think the book was credible and I felt I was reading someones diary instead.

Of course muslim fundamentalism is a problem; she takes into account, for example, that Islam is the largest growing religion in the world. But she didnt look at why? Probably it is because of the imperialist policies of the West, so non western peoples perhaps look for a religion that know how to stand up to the West? - Did she take into account Western atrocities? About why muslims crashed into the World trade Center? About how Iraq invented writing? Some of her facts were wrong. No , the West can do no wrong which is why I found this book unbearable to read and only increased my resenment - this book didnt increase my understanding of why Sept 11 happened more.