What are you currently reading in 2017?

[Bill Moore]

The Force of Reason
by Oriana Fallaci

https://www.amazon.com/Force-Reason-...70_&dpSrc=srch

It has been awhile since I have read a book written with this much passion. She is a self-described Christian atheist, whose isn't left or right politically, but she viciously attacks the brain dead far left incapable of reason. More to the point she describes what she sees as an existential threat to Europe, the Eurarabia trend, where European culture is rapidly being displaced by Islamic culture, enabled by feeble far left politicians.

I write not for money, I write out of a sense of duty. A duty which is costing my life to dispel the silly and cynical lies dispensed to us like arsenic inside the soup.

Although she has a history of leaning left politically, she rejects the new left (my words), which is incapable of independent thinking and void of logic.

"Though the daughter of secularism, (besides a secularism begotten by liberalism and consequently not consonant with dogmatism), the Left is not laic. Whether it dresses in red or black or pink or green or white or in all the colours of the rainbow, the Left is confessional. Ecclesiastic. Because it derives from an ideology of religious character. That is it appeals to ideology which claims to possess the Truth. . . Like Islam it considers itself sanctified by a God who is the custodian of the Truth. Like Islam it never acknowledges it faults and its errors, it considers itself infallible and never apologizes. Like Islam it demands a world at its own image, a society built on the verses of the Prophet. . . Like Islam it does not accept different opinions and if you think differently it despises you. It denigrates you, it punishes you. Like Islam, in short, it is illiberal."

In sum this book is about resistance to Islamic fascism. She argues Troy is burning in Europe, but she has great faith in America to oppose this evil.

"The war that Islam has declared on the West is not really a military war. It's a cultural war. A war, Tocqueville would say, that instead of our body wants to strike our soul. Our way of life, our philosophy of Life. Our way of thinking, of acting, of loving. Our freedom.
Don't be fooled by their explosives. They are just a strategy. Those death lovers don't us just for the pleasure of killing: they kill us to break our spirit.

The decline of intelligence is the decline of Reason. And everything which now happens in Europe, in Eurabia, is also a decline of Reason. A decline which before being morally wrong is intellectually wrong. Refusing to admit that all Islam is a pond inside which we are drowning, in fact, is against reason. Not defending our territory, our homes, our children, our dignity, our essence, is against Reason.

I enjoyed the passion, the prose, and agree with her message.

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period. Oriana Fallaci

To learn about this fascinating author who sadly passed away in 2007, the following links to one short story and one of medium length provides some insights to her life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/b...e-stefano.html

Oriana Fallaci, Right or Wrong
By NINA BURLEIGHNOV. 3, 2017

Her interviews remain studies in speaking truth to power. Interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, she famously called the chador a “stupid, medieval rag” and took it off, provoking the Ayatollah to leave the room. (It is a testament to her journalistic power that he came back the next day.) She badgered Ariel Sharon about the meaning of the word “terrorist” and accused him of having been one himself. She got Henry Kissinger to compare himself to a cowboy, alone “with his horse and nothing else.” Nixon, De Stefano writes, “was not at all pleased by the cowboy metaphor.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...hought/305377/

She Said What She Thought
Mark Steyn December 2006 Issue

One would have been only mildly surprised had her interview with Ayatollah Khomeini followed the same trajectory. After traveling to Qom and cooling her heels for ten days waiting for him to agree to see her, she was ushered—barefoot and wearing a chador—into his presence—and found what she subsequently described as the most handsome old man she’d ever met. In his own way, Khomeini must have dug the crazy Italian chick. The meeting was terminated when she tore off “this stupid medieval rag” and hurled her chador to the floor, but he agreed to finish the interview a day or two later.