Cohen's Fallaci. posted by Richard Seymour

Nick Cohen. You know he gives me those Sunday morning blues. If there is no sin except stupidity, there is no greater defiler of your holy day of rest than the one-time star cynic of the Observer's back-pages. I'm just interested in this paragraph from his latest :

In Italy, a journalist, Oriana Fallaci, faces trial for writing a book which is 'unequivocally offensive to Islam'. The alleged crime of The Rage and the Pride is to insist there is an unbridgeable divide between the Islamic world and the West. What she says may not be true, although it certainly is true of Islamism and the West, which have armies at war to prove it. It's also the case that even by the standards of Italian journalism, Fallaci is a raging prima donna. Still, since when has it been a criminal offence for prima donnas to sing, however tunelessly?

As a plea for freedom of religious (or irreligious) expression, this would not make Spinoza turn green with Dutch envy, but it is nice to know that Cohen doesn't want to see morons locked up for being morons.

However, it would be refreshing to see him get his facts right, just for once. The Rage and the Pride is a stupid polemic by a hysterical racist witch whose main prophylactic against such charges is to make her racist remark and then say "and now they will call me a racist!", and then follow it up with a contrived idiocy. In that book, she has the immigrant "sons of Allah" pissing on Rome's Catholic monuments, contributing to prostitution, drugs and crime. Her verdict: "Terrorists, thieves, rapists. Ex-convicts, prostitutes, beggars. Drug-dealers, contagiously ill". She has Muslims forming a fifth column, coming into Europe in waves with the express goal of conquering Europe and destroying Western civilisation. They're bringing diseases, shrieks Fallaci, straining those tendons in her throat. Syphillis and AIDS are just the start. (Some of the Egyptian fundamentalists say the same thing about the Jews, and about the tourists whom they blow up). They have "orders to multiply like rats". Aye, the House of Allah has many finely appointed wombs. In the service of this case, she fabricates evidence , time and time again . How could one not, making such a fantastical case? It is her Protocols of the Elders of Allah. And she bemoans the absence of a Richard the Lionheart to take the fight to these people.

Very well, Fallaci is who she is - a bitter, tired, whipped old shit-stirrer who has long since pissed her talent up against the wall. Gore Vidal once had cause to refer to her as the greatest political interviewer of all time, and she did have an admirable set of balls. Let's leave it at that and move on.

Cohen must know that this amounts to more than stipulating an incommensurability of values between Islam and the West (what categories! The categories, in fact, of an Orientalist). Why cover that flaccid fundament? It is one thing to say that Fallaci should not be on trial, but why make it appear as if the complaint is groundless? And why does Cohen imagine that Islamism is what the West is at war with? Because he doesn't know what he's talking about. If all Muslims aren't the same for him, all Islamisms are - a fairly obvious process of substitution to preserve Cohen's amour propre if you ask me.