There is very little trust in the West about our intentions over the war on terror, as is eveident from the news and views Pakistan gets in their media
aAngling for heaven is an outri mix of men and women — suicide killers solidified into smithereens, others, still with us, but a sure pain in the neck... like Oriana Fallaci for example. But more of her later, first the terrorists.
So do you think those 19 Arab hijackers who changed the world (and I mean it) on 9/11 are living it up in their new home upstairs? Or have they grown wings? Only a wacko would think so. To kill innocent people is prescribed nowhere. The most recent fatwa by some odd 40 clerics in Pakistan against suicide bombing cranks up the argument, albeit the fatwa refers to killing Muslims only.
Terrorism in the name of Islam is haram. And yet, this bearded man who kills 20 innocent shrine attendees at Bari Imam last week and perishes himself must robustly believe in a nonstop passage to heaven.
Did he make it? Many will swear he did. These crazies think destroying Muslims of another sect wins them a lottery ticket to paradise. Seeing his gory face flash fulsomely by a private TV channel in Pakistan, we in America were flummoxed by the fine job and the lightning speed of the cosmetic surgeons who must have fixed the botched up remains real quick for a photo-op. And of course, the Islamabad police came out a topper. It handed the bloody image to the media for display, pronto.
Is Islamabad then what Hollywood is to the nip and tuck industry? And more importantly are the cops there what CHiPs — those thrilling California Highway Patrolmen we used to watch on TV — today’s law and order champs?
Seriously, how can a man strapped with dynamite not disinter the second he pushes the button? Think about it. And hello...think of the hapless viewers forced into watching the dead man’s face the whole day without warning? If this is not overkill, pray what is?
Elsewhere, TV watchers get warned in advance that the images they are about to witness can be ‘disturbing’ to some (most of us are squeamish about blood you know).
Muslims are mocked enough by the West for believing that to kill is to go direct to heaven and for the male variety await virgins or houris to have and to own ad infinitum. Western wiseacres argue Muslims kill themselves for an everlasting paradise. You have to see the smirks on their faces when they laugh at us. In the forefront is Fox News. It specializes in foul mouthing Islam to mollycoddle the religious bigots in America.
Is Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, that sly old fox, killing two birds with one stone: sucking up to the Bush administration on earth while working on his candidacy for paradise hereafter like a good Christian snitching on our faith?
Surprise, surprise! This old boy network of religious right has just pulled out an old bunny from its hat. Bingo, it’s Oriana Fallaci, that icon of interviews, once wanted by the world’s political leaders grovelling to be her subjects and asked saucy questions by the sexy Italian intellectual.
She’s gone bananas in her dotage.
Sick in the head and sick in the body (she’s got cancer), the recluse who lives alone in New York and refuses to meet anyone, has inked yet another stinging attack on Islam. In her book La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason) she incites religious hatred against Muslims, writing that terrorists had killed 6,000 people over the past 20 years in the “name of the Koran” and that Islam “sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom”.
Adel Smith, heading an Italian Muslim organization, goes to court against her. His complaint gets thrown out. The lawsuit is frivolous, maintains the Italian state prosecutor. Hold on... this is not the end of the story.
Judge Armando Grasso of Bergamo, a town in Northern Italy, picks up the threads, revives the complaint with sensitivity without a religious bias and finds Fallaci guilty of defaming Islam. He slaps an indictment on the celebrity journalist.
“A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel! O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!” said Shylock in Shakespeare’s play set in Italy Merchant of Venice. Well, we have a replay 400 years later. Our Daniel of Bergamo has passed judgment at the risk of drawing heavy fire from the Italian justice minister. He wants Fallaci tried.
She’s the same shrew who wrote The Rage and the Pride after 9/11 and called Muslims, “insects who, disguised as ideologists, journalists, writers, actors, commentators, psycho-analysts, priests, warbling crickets, putains a la page, (that is, polished sluts), only say what they are asked to say.”
The aged lioness still has long enough nails on her claws to scratch the Muslims all over the world? Is she on a holy crusade by turning into an American mouthpiece? The New Yorker makes no secret of her adoration of all things American.
Home is where the heart is for her — she abandoned Italy several seasons ago.
Yes, she’s the same Fallaci you all must have watched on your TV sets when she interviewed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. A few years later, his successor and hangman Zia, dying to be canonized as the hero of Islam, was not that fortunate. The general got the brush off despite wooing, charming and even stooping to conquer the hot-tempered Latina, storied for her fierceness.
One remembers the ZAB interview; an opinion-slinging duel that the black and white Pakistan Television played to death in those halcyon days.
Fallaci was charitable to Bhutto. He flirted with her while the lioness reduced his rambunctiousness to levels of unbelievable docility. Had he refused to cooperate, she would have labelled him “a bastard, a fascist, an idiot,” as was her wont.
But Bhutto’s blabbing got him in trouble. His loose lips gave away things to Fallaci about Indira Gandhi which almost put the Simla Agreement in jeopardy. We’re told that an alarmed Foreign Office frantically contacted the then Pakistan’s Ambassador to Italy, Brig. Hamid Nawaz over a weekend and sent him scurrying post haste in search of Fallaci all over Italy.
Finally, the flustered envoy found Fallaci and begged her to expunge the anti-Indira remarks from her interview. The woman refused point blank and told our Ambassador to go take a flying jump!
Last week in its Op-Ed column, the New York Times circuitously blamed Pakistan’s military intelligence agency for raking up Afghan rage in which 17 Afghanis were killed when they came out on the streets to protest against the sacrilege of Quran at Guantanamo prison camp.
Sarah Chayes, the Kandahar based writer, hinted: “Although Pakistani officials have mastered their role as allies in the ‘war on terrorism’ and play it convincingly, they would like nothing better than to see the United States pull out of Afghanistan. What better, then, than to project Afghanistan as a volatile place, hostile to Americans?”
Calling the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency “adroit”, the writer accuses it of “planting operatives in the student body (in Afghanistan). These students can also provoke agitation at Pakistani officials’ behest, while affording the government in Islamabad plausible deniability.”
Putting the blame squarely on ISI for inflaming the Afghans against America, Chayes concludes: “when the United States can be plausibly depicted, by Pakistani operatives or Muslim extremists, as a country with little regard for the human dignity of Muslims, such friendships founder.”
And on top of this comes a statement from Dick Cheney, the vice president, that the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, recently in Washington DC, informed the Americans that “the demonstrators who torched the cultural centre at Jalalabad against one Quran allegedly being flushed in the toilet burnt 400 copies of Quran in the centre”!
Who then has flipped? Fallaci and the right wing West or us?
There is very little trust in the West about our intentions over the war on terror, as is eveident from the news and views Pakistan gets in their media
Did he make it? Many will swear he did. These crazies think destroying Muslims of another sect wins them a lottery ticket to paradise. Seeing his gory face flash fulsomely by a private TV channel in Pakistan, we in America were flummoxed by the fine job and the lightning speed of the cosmetic surgeons who must have fixed the botched up remains real quick for a photo-op. And of course, the Islamabad police came out a topper. It handed the bloody image to the media for display, pronto.
Is Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, that sly old fox, killing two birds with one stone: sucking up to the Bush administration on earth while working on his candidacy for paradise hereafter like a good Christian snitching on our faith?
She’s the same shrew who wrote The Rage and the Pride after 9/11 and called Muslims, “insects who, disguised as ideologists, journalists, writers, actors, commentators, psycho-analysts, priests, warbling crickets, putains a la page, (that is, polished sluts), only say what they are asked to say.”
But Bhutto’s blabbing got him in trouble. His loose lips gave away things to Fallaci about Indira Gandhi which almost put the Simla Agreement in jeopardy. We’re told that an alarmed Foreign Office frantically contacted the then Pakistan’s Ambassador to Italy, Brig. Hamid Nawaz over a weekend and sent him scurrying post haste in search of Fallaci all over Italy.
