Here are some extracts....
Oriana Fallaci: Anti-Islamic Italian author in new legal fight
Long-running battle over post-9/11 books pits freedom of speech against respect for religious belief.
By Guardian Newspapers, 7/13/2005
One of Italy's best-known authors faces renewed legal action in a dispute that has raised fundamental questions about respect for religion and the right to free speech.
A radical Muslim leader, Adel Smith, told the Guardian he was bringing a civil action for damages against the writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci. He has already succeeded in getting Ms Fallaci committed for trial next year in criminal proceedings for blasphemy.
Last month a judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo agreed that the 76-year-old Ms Fallaci should answer to claims of abusing Islam in her book The Strength of Reason. Since then, her cause has become a rallying point for mainly rightwing intellectuals and politicians in Italy and the US, where Ms Fallaci lives.
Mr Smith said he would be seeking damages for libel on the grounds that the author had claimed in a recent essay that he had issued death threats against her. Ms Fallaci, who is ill with cancer, could not be contacted for comment.
Mr Smith, who converted to Islam in 1987, said he had inherited his surname from a 19th century British ambassador to the Holy See. His association, the Muslim Union of Italy, claims about 5,000 members.
The venomous row with Ms Fallaci has its roots in the events of September 11 2001. Horrified by the attacks, the veteran foreign and war correspondent wrote a diatribe entitled La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio (published in English as The Rage and the Pride). Ostensibly directed at Islamist fundamentalists, it makes scant distinction between militant and moderate Muslims.
Ms Fallaci attacks "arrogant ... Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalis, Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistanis, Nigerians who with much fervour contribute to the commerce of drugs and prostitution".
She even rebukes the late Pope John Paul II for taking an interest in their welfare. "Your Holiness, why in the name of the only God, don't you take them into the Vatican?" she asks. "On the condition that they don't smear with shit the Sistine Chapel ... "
But her anti-Muslim views clearly found an echo in Italy, where The Rage and the Pride sold 700,000 copies in little over a month.
Mr Smith, who is best known for a failed attempt to get crucifixes removed from school classrooms, initially responded with a book of his own. Entitled Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci - Letter to an Old Woman who has Never Grown Up, it was, he says, intended to put right misunderstandings about Islam in Ms Fallaci's book.
But it goes beyond that. In the passage interpreted as a death threat by Ms Fallaci, Mr Smith reminds his readers how many people die of alcohol, adding that non-Muslims have the opportunity either to give it up "or continue to die along with 'La Fallaci'".
Undeterred, Ms Fallaci produced a second book, published last year by Rizzoli under the title La Forza della Ragione (The Strength of Reason). It has so far run through 18 editions.
The author foresees a "clash of civilisations" such as that defined in Samuel P Huntington's 1998 work of that name. But, she adds, "it annoys me even to talk about two cultures, to put them on the same plane". Her main theme is that Muslims are engaged in a plot to conquer her native continent by immigration, transforming it into what she dubs "Eurabia".
"Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam," she writes. "In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Koran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism."
Mr Smith accuses her of "using the same techniques as were used in the Nazi era against the Jews". The judge in Bergamo to whom he took his complaints rejected a request for Ms Fallaci to be charged with inciting racial hatred, but agreed that there were 18 instances of blasphemy.
His decision outraged many, particularly on the right of Italian politics, who saw it as a frontal attack on freedom of expression and Ms Fallaci as Italy's equivalent of the murdered Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh.
Silvio Berlusconi's justice minister, Roberto Castelli, said he would try to get an amendment inserted in a bill that is currently before parliament to cancel the offence of which Ms Fallaci is accused. The author has said she does not intend to return to Italy for the trial if it goes ahead.
Mr Castelli, a member of the Northern League, which has campaigned against immigration, said: "No one could have imagined that, having left behind the bloody 1930s in which books were burnt, it would be necessary to take steps to avoid the burning of the books of a provocative but successful author."
Ad hoc groups supporting free speech and Ms Fallaci have been founded in several parts of the country, including her native Florence, and their cause has been backed even by some of the author's critics. Magdi Allam, who writes on Islamic affairs for the daily Corriere della Sera, is the author of an open letter to Ms Fallaci deploring her failure to distinguish between Islamism and Islam.
But he described Mr Smith as a "fanatic" and said he was "100% on the side of Fallaci" in the dispute. Mr Allam said: "The way to respond to her is in print and not in the courts".
Fallaci goes down fighting...
Oriana Fallaci: Anti-Islamic Italian author in new legal fight
Long-running battle over post-9/11 books pits freedom of speech against respect for religious belief.
By Guardian Newspapers, 7/13/2005
One of Italy's best-known authors faces renewed legal action in a dispute that has raised fundamental questions about respect for religion and the right to free speech.
A radical Muslim leader, Adel Smith, told the Guardian he was bringing a civil action for damages against the writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci. He has already succeeded in getting Ms Fallaci committed for trial next year in criminal proceedings for blasphemy.
Last month a judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo agreed that the 76-year-old Ms Fallaci should answer to claims of abusing Islam in her book The Strength of Reason. Since then, her cause has become a rallying point for mainly rightwing intellectuals and politicians in Italy and the US, where Ms Fallaci lives.
Mr Smith said he would be seeking damages for libel on the grounds that the author had claimed in a recent essay that he had issued death threats against her. Ms Fallaci, who is ill with cancer, could not be contacted for comment.
Mr Smith, who converted to Islam in 1987, said he had inherited his surname from a 19th century British ambassador to the Holy See. His association, the Muslim Union of Italy, claims about 5,000 members.
The venomous row with Ms Fallaci has its roots in the events of September 11 2001. Horrified by the attacks, the veteran foreign and war correspondent wrote a diatribe entitled La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio (published in English as The Rage and the Pride). Ostensibly directed at Islamist fundamentalists, it makes scant distinction between militant and moderate Muslims.
Ms Fallaci attacks "arrogant ... Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalis, Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistanis, Nigerians who with much fervour contribute to the commerce of drugs and prostitution".
She even rebukes the late Pope John Paul II for taking an interest in their welfare. "Your Holiness, why in the name of the only God, don't you take them into the Vatican?" she asks. "On the condition that they don't smear with shit the Sistine Chapel ... "
But her anti-Muslim views clearly found an echo in Italy, where The Rage and the Pride sold 700,000 copies in little over a month.
Mr Smith, who is best known for a failed attempt to get crucifixes removed from school classrooms, initially responded with a book of his own. Entitled Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci - Letter to an Old Woman who has Never Grown Up, it was, he says, intended to put right misunderstandings about Islam in Ms Fallaci's book.
But it goes beyond that. In the passage interpreted as a death threat by Ms Fallaci, Mr Smith reminds his readers how many people die of alcohol, adding that non-Muslims have the opportunity either to give it up "or continue to die along with 'La Fallaci'".
Undeterred, Ms Fallaci produced a second book, published last year by Rizzoli under the title La Forza della Ragione (The Strength of Reason). It has so far run through 18 editions.
The author foresees a "clash of civilisations" such as that defined in Samuel P Huntington's 1998 work of that name. But, she adds, "it annoys me even to talk about two cultures, to put them on the same plane". Her main theme is that Muslims are engaged in a plot to conquer her native continent by immigration, transforming it into what she dubs "Eurabia".
"Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam," she writes. "In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Koran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism."
Mr Smith accuses her of "using the same techniques as were used in the Nazi era against the Jews". The judge in Bergamo to whom he took his complaints rejected a request for Ms Fallaci to be charged with inciting racial hatred, but agreed that there were 18 instances of blasphemy.
His decision outraged many, particularly on the right of Italian politics, who saw it as a frontal attack on freedom of expression and Ms Fallaci as Italy's equivalent of the murdered Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh.
Silvio Berlusconi's justice minister, Roberto Castelli, said he would try to get an amendment inserted in a bill that is currently before parliament to cancel the offence of which Ms Fallaci is accused. The author has said she does not intend to return to Italy for the trial if it goes ahead.
Mr Castelli, a member of the Northern League, which has campaigned against immigration, said: "No one could have imagined that, having left behind the bloody 1930s in which books were burnt, it would be necessary to take steps to avoid the burning of the books of a provocative but successful author."
Ad hoc groups supporting free speech and Ms Fallaci have been founded in several parts of the country, including her native Florence, and their cause has been backed even by some of the author's critics. Magdi Allam, who writes on Islamic affairs for the daily Corriere della Sera, is the author of an open letter to Ms Fallaci deploring her failure to distinguish between Islamism and Islam.
But he described Mr Smith as a "fanatic" and said he was "100% on the side of Fallaci" in the dispute. Mr Allam said: "The way to respond to her is in print and not in the courts".
Fallaci goes down fighting...
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