What is Italy thinking?

[Dian Cecht]

So apperentally the Current governement beleives that trafficing Cannabis is on par with trafficing Cocaine/Heroin. Sounds kind of rediculous to me! At least we can hope for an opposition win in the next round election of elections. Any who, what does every one think about this rather disturbing news?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4695368.stm (a little blurb about the story)

Dian Cecht Reviewed by Dian Cecht on 02-13-2006. What is Italy thinking? So apperentally the Current governement beleives that trafficing Cannabis is on par with trafficing Cocaine/Heroin. Sounds kind of rediculous to me! At least we can hope for an opposition win in the next round election of elections. Any who, what does every one think about this rather disturbing news? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4695368.stm (a little blurb about the story) Rating: 5

[beachguy in thongs]

Italian scientists were the ones who discovered that your melatonin levels go up 4,000% two hours after smoking a joint.

Is their government, now, lying and withholding information from it's people?

[Awill3449]

I lived in Italy this summer, and frankly, people couldn't care less about the pot laws there. I saw kids taking bong hits on the beach at night and cops would drive by and not give a shit. People don't really care about the laws as much over there (huge generalization). My friend who lives there was telling me that where he lives, if you get caught smoking they just throw your shit away. It's a totally different culture, and this new law --however crazy it is-- isnt gonna change anything,IMO

[amsterdam]

Italy has a record of being kinda wishy-washy if you know what I mean. Here is an art exhibit in Milan. Nothing more than leftist propaganda.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=21265

More on the exhibit here:
http://sapere.virgilio.it/gallery/gi...ano/zoom1.html

All of that is kinda funny when you consider that a man is on trial for DEFAMING ISLAM!! See here.
http://washingtontimes.com/world/200...0551-2231r.htm

Such double standards. Needless to say, none of Fallaci's supporters have threatened suicide bombings across Italy, burned down the art exhibit, or cast a fatwa on the painter.

[Breukelen advocaat]

Ms Fallaci is safe in New York right now, but has cancer. Her trial in Italy is scheduled for June 2006, but she says she will probably not be around for it. Oriana Fallaci is an Athiest. Thomas Paine, a non-christian Deist, was hated for his book, The Age of Reason, and she is getting persecuted for her book, The Force of Reason. Here's a good article from the Wall Street Journal.

OPINION JOURNAL FROM
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

Prophet of Decline
An interview with Oriana Fallaci.

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:01 a.m.

NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

It is a shame, in so many ways, that "vilipend," the latinate word that is the pinpoint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A "vilification," by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid--hardly fitting for a grande dame.

"When I was given the news," Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch. The complainant, one Adel Smith--who, despite his name, is Muslim, and an incendiary public provocateur to boot--has a history of anti-Fallaci crankiness, and is widely believed to be behind the publication of a pamphlet, "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," which exhorts Muslims to "eliminate" her. (Ironically, Mr. Smith, too, faces the peculiar charge of vilipendio against religion--Roman Catholicism in his case--after he described the Catholic Church as "a criminal organization" on television. Two years ago, he made news in Italy by filing suit for the removal of crucifixes from the walls of all public-school classrooms, and also, allegedly, for flinging a crucifix out of the window of a hospital room where his mother was being treated. "My mother will not die in a room where there is a crucifix," he said, according to hospital officials.)

Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).

"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: "The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" She then says "Phwah, phwah," and gestures at slashing her wrists. "He committed suicide!" Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. "What could Seneca do?" she asks, with a discernible shudder. "He knew it would end that way--with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing."

The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!"--a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. "In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour--Europe needs a Cavour." Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent." She professes to "cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow."
Here she pauses to light a slim black cigarillo, and then to take a sip of champagne. Its chill makes her grimace, but fortified, she returns to vehement speech, more clearly evocative of Oswald Spengler than at any time in our interview. "You cannot survive if you do not know the past. We know why all the other civilizations have collapsed--from an excess of welfare, of richness, and from lack of morality, of spirituality." (She uses "welfare" here in the sense of well-being, so she is talking, really, of decadence.) "The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." The force with which she utters the word "dead" here is startling. I reach for my flute of champagne, as if for a crutch.

"I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

Ms. Fallaci, who made her name by interviewing numerous statesmen (and not a few tyrants), believes that ours is "an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century." Of George Bush, she will concede only that he has "vigor," and that he is "obstinate" (in her book a compliment) and "gutsy. . . . Nobody obliged him to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did."

But it is "Ratzinger" (as she insists on calling the pope) who is her soulmate. John Paul II--"Wojtyla"--was a "warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America," but she will not forgive him for his "weakness toward the Islamic world. Why, why was he so weak?"

The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself," from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: "The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure."

"Ecco!" she says. A man after her own heart. "Ecco!" But I cannot be certain whether I see triumph in her eyes, or pain.

As for the vilipendio against Islam, she refuses to attend the trial in Bergamo, set for June 2006. "I don't even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty."
At this point she laughs. Bitterly, of course, but she laughs.

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

below: depition of a defiant Ms. Fallaci on the top left side, and Thomas Paine to the top right.

[amsterdam]

That was a good read Breukelen.

[Breukelen advocaat]

That was a good read Breukelen.

Thanks. I wonder if anybody else has caught the similarities between Fallaci and Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason, Common Sense, the Rights of Man, etc.). They BOTH ended up in New York, Paine died there and Fallaci seems to be headed for that also, and both were heretics (but by no means the most radically anti-religion) in their time. Her (controversial) book is called The Force of Reason.


http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/lewis/lewis01.htm