Oriana Fallaci may be over the top...

...but she is no fool. I like her. There are two reviews of her new book Force of Reason, one by Ira Stoll in the New York Sun which concentrates almost entirely on its' failings, and a lengthier one by Brendan Bernhard in LA Weekly which looks at the strengths.

Bernhard:

...in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that the...Arab goal...was to wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”

Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens … In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.”

Bernhard, again quoting Fallaci:

“In 1974 [Algerian President] Boumedienne...spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.’ ”

No surprise then, at least to Fallaci, the Islamic immigration into Europe of the last three decades, nor the lack of assimilation. Still, is this simply the routine failure of first generation immigrants to fully assimilate, or is it far more threatening? It would be interesting to know how well the children and grandchildren of immigrants of non-Western religions generally assimilate. Does the difference between the Chinese-American and Japanese-American experience vs the Arab-French experience tell us much? The former were blatantly discriminated against, but only one group has chosen riots and terror.