Oriana Fallaci.
The Rage and the Pride.
New York: Rizzoli, 2002.

This book had its origin in a letter to a newspaper, to Italy, to Europe written in New York during the weeks after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Fallaci issues a passionate warning about the "nazifascism of Islamic Fundamentalism" and, more importantly, about the religious and cultural war which Islam now openly wages against the West (a Reverse Crusade, she calls it).

Note that I use the label "cultural war" in a metaphorical sense when refering to internal American culture and politics, but it has an entirely different meaning when refering to Europe's Islamic problem, as recent events illustrate (bombings in Spain and England, hostage taking and murder in Russia, assasinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, riots in France and Denmark and the Netherlands and Germany...). How will Europe deal with its unassimilated (and apparently unassimilable) Muslim population? England and France appear to have already taken many steps towards dhimmitude from fear of offending their violent Muslim populations.

Fallaci's most recent book is The Force of Reason (American edition, 2006).

Some recent articles on this topic:

• The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Autumn 2002.


• Europe's Angry Muslims by Robert S. Leiken, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005. (The author's optimism about France has been proved wrong by the riots of October & November 2005.)


• The Suicide Bombers Among Us by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Autumn 2005.


• If the Problem Is Muslim Terror, Then What? by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal, Autumn 2005.
  


• The Real Global Virus: The plague of Islamism keeps on spreading by Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online, 4 November 2005.


• Troubling "Facts" of the Paris Riots: How our newspapers might turn bias to balance by Bruce Thornton (6 Nov 2005)
  
  Thornton clearly identifies the deterministic materialism behind many Westerners' misinterpretation & misunderstanding of the Islamic threat to Western Civilization. He writes:
  
  "Even those who presumably believe that humans do have free will, and that spiritual reality is as real as material, are seduced by the same determinist assumptions. The Bush administration's belief that jihadist terror is a deformation of Islam brought about by lack of political freedom expresses the same assumption. This is akin to the equally mistaken belief that the jihadists in Iraq are blowing up American soldiers and fellow Moslems because of anger over the U.S. overthrow of Hussein. In both cases, those who act on the basis of spiritual beliefs are reduced to mere reactors to environmental forces outside their control. And when the jihadists identify for us, as they do repeatedly, the religious beliefs and doctrines that inspire their actions and that are consistent with the history and theology of their religion, we arrogantly dismiss their words as expressions of some neurosis or delusion whose true sources lie elsewhere."


• Articles by Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal:
  Ramadan Rioting in Europe's No-Go Areas (2 Nov 2005); The Fall of France (5 Nov 2005); Show Them Who Is the Boss in France (6 Nov 2005).

For more on this topic, see the works of Bat Ye'Or:

• The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam (1985)


• The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century (1996)


• Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2001)


• Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005)

and the works of Bernard Lewis:

• Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East (1973, 2001)


• The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982, 2001)


• Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople: Politics and War (1987)


• Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry (1992)


• The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (1994)


• Islam and the West (1994)


• Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery (1996)


• The Middle East (1997)


• The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (2001)


• The Emergence of Modern Turkey (2001)


• What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2001, 2003)


• The Arabs in History (2002)


• The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (2002)


• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003)


• From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (2004)