We also sell it through the little professors of the universities. The historians or alleged historians, the philosophers or alleged philosophers, the scholars or alleged scholars who for thirty years have been denigrating our culture and trying to prove the Superiority-of-Islam. But, above all, we sell it through the merchants of the Financial Club that yesterday we called European Economic Community and today we call European Union. Because, along with the trading of human goods and oil, (send-me-the-oil-and-I'll-take-the-human-goods), the Strasbourg Resolution put forward another demand. Remember? The need to «exalt the immense contribution given by Arab culture to the European development». Along with the warning «immigrants' rights equal to the rights of citizens», the Cairo Convention established the «immigrants' right to propagate and disseminate the Islamic culture». Remember? The two points which drove to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia.
Under the patronage of the Arab League's Secretary General, on March 28th 1977 the Ca' Foscari University in Venice opened the first «Seminar on the Means and Forms of Cooperation
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for the Dissemination of the Arabic Language and its Literary Civilization». A masochism to which also the Vatican Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies participated. With delegates from ten Arab countries (Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Sudan) and eight European countries (Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Britain, Germany, Denmark, Greece) the sad affair lasted three days, and concluded with an unanimous Resolution which called for «the diffusion of the Arabic language» as well as for «the superiority of Arab culture». And, from then on, the masochism became boundless. All over Europe it was as if the so called Academic World had lost any control, any common sense. The world of journalism, publishing, film-making, the same: whoever defined himself or herself as an "intellectual" seemed to live in the obsession of demonstrating la grandeur of Islam, the superiority of Islam. And everything served the purpose. Falsehood, deceit, mendacity. More or less, what happens in Zamiatin We and in Orwell 1984: the novels where history get rewritten, reinvented, without any decency. Take what happened in April 1983 when German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher opened the Hamburg Symposium for the Euro-Arab Dialogue and for an hour he extolled the greatness, the mercy, the beni-
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gnity, the peerless scientific and humanistic richness of Islamic civilization. He called it a «Beacon of Light, a light that for centuries had illuminated Europe, helped Europe escape its barbarism»... That symposium where almost everybody apologized for the iniquities (Crusades, colonialism, etcetera) that ungrateful Europeans had inflicted on the Beacon of Light. Where everybody expressed contempt for those who still nourished doubts or prejudices about Islam. Where our culture was so belittled that the Arab delegates exploited the opportunity for claiming once more the Islamic origins of Judaism and Christianity, for presenting Abraham as a «prophet of Allah» and Jesus Christ as a failed pre-Mohammed. And nobody who dared to protest, to oppose at least an indignant: Have you lost your mind? ! ?
Oh! They spoke of immigrants too, in that symposium. Sure they did. In fact it was there that the term used by the Arab League for the immigrants, «equivalence», became «equality». It was there that our traitors began to say that the rights of Muslim immigrants (not Buddhist or Hindu or Confucian or Greek Orthodox) must be equal to the rights of the host countries' citizens. It was there that they asked us to print newspapers in Arabic, to open radio stations and television channels broadcasting in Arabic. It was there that they
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requested to «increase their presence in trade-unions, in local administrations, in universities, and asked to explore the prospect of their participation in the political life of the host countries». (Read vote). And, from that day on, all the conferences and meetings and seminars and symposiums became more and more an orgiastic apotheosis of Islamic-civilization. A debasement or a condemnation of western civilization.
Absolutely orgiastic. I have collected many complete proceedings of those conferences and meetings and seminars and symposiums, I have studied them, and for God's sake! In each one the apotheosis is so unanimous that it seems to read Allahs Sonne iiber dem Abendland. That is The Sun of Allah Shines over the West: the famous essay in which oriental studies scholar Sigrid Hunke argues the absolute superiority of Islam and states that «the influence exerted by the Arabs on the West was the first step in freeing Europe from Christianity». The trouble is that Mrs. Hunke was a fucking Nazi. As learned as you like, as intelligent as you want, but a fucking Nazi. She was already such in 1935 when at the age of twenty-two she produced a degree thesis claiming that racial purification was an urgent task. Thus, the Jews had to be eliminated in a hurry. She was even more such in 1937 when, the spiritual heiress of Lud-
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wig Ferdinand Clauss (an eminent historian of National-Socialist Germany), she wrote a dissertation where she called Hitler «the best model that History has ever offered to Germany». She was such and more than ever in the early Forties, when together with her sister she joined the Ger-manistischer Wissenschafteinsatz: the German Sciences Service of the SS, the organization conceived and run by Himmler to oversee the Germanization of northern Europe. She was just as much when in the same years the Palestinians and the other Arabs signed alliances with Hitler. For example when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and uncle of Arafat reviewed the troops of the Islamic SS. (Have you ever seen the photo?). The same, at the aftermath of the Second World War, when many Nazis were tried at Nuremburg and hanged but she got off unscathed. The same, when in 1960 she wrote her famous book. A book which with the pretext of tearing Europe off its Judaic-Christian roots proposes again the axioms of the Third Reich. Including the alliance with the Arabs in order to fight British imperialism. (In those days anti-Americanism was called anti-Britishism). The same, in 1967 when the German government led by Christian Democrat Kurt Georg Kiesinger sent her on a cultural tour of Arab countries to give lectures in Aleppo, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo
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where the Supreme Court of Islamic Affairs appointed her an honorary member. And, more than ever, she was such in 1990. That is when, nine years before dying, she wrote for an Islamic publisher her last book: Allah ist ganz anders: Allah is something else entirely. (Meaning, something unparalleled. Matchless, incomparable). This said, let me tell you about the conference which along with the Council of Europe and at the suggestion of the Fundacion Occidental de la Cultura Islami-ca, longa manus of the Euro-Arab Dialogue in Madrid, the Parliamentary Assembly of the European Union held in May 1991 in Paris. Title, «The contribution of Islamic civilization to European culture». A conference which the Arabs did not even care to attend. Apart from two Americans with Koranesque surnames, this time all the delegates were European. I mean Spanish, French, Belgian, German, Italian, Swiss, Scandinavian.
Among all the material I have assembled in the last years, I choose it because they were all Europeans. And, as I read again the volume containing their speeches, my indignation turns into dismay. In fact all the participants who take part in the apotheosis echo Sigrid Hunke's Nazi propositions. Unawarely, I hope, they rephrase to Allahs Sonne iiber dem Abendland or Allah ist ganz an-ders. And the synchronization with which these
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hopefully-unaware disciples of Sigrid Hunke.pay their homage to Islam is chilling. So chilling that instead of listening to a conclave of scholars, you feel like watching a Wehrmacht parade in Alexan-derplatz. Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. And always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us. Who enlightened us. Who acted as a schoolteacher guiding dimwitted pupils.
In the days of the Soviet Union there was Popov. Nobody knew who Popov was or had been. When or in what region he had lived or died, what his face had been like, what proof of his existence he had left. It was not even known whether the name Popov was a first name or a surname or a nickname or an invention. But the Soviets and the Italian servants of the Soviets used to tell us that he had invented everything. The train, the telegraph, the telephone, the bicycle, the zipper, the sewing machine, the lawnmower, the violin, the
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ice-cream, the pizza. I mean all the things that we thought the West had invented. Well: with the hopefully-unaware-disciples of Sigrid Hunke, it's quite the same. Only difference, their Popovs are called Muhammad or Ahmad or Mustafa or Rashid. And instead of belonging to the Soviet Union, instead of representing the superiority of Communism, they belong to the past of Islam and represent the superiority of Islam. For example: I believed that the sherbet was already eaten at the time of the Ancient Romans who manufactured it with snow brought from the mountains and conserved it in cold cellars. But Margarita Lopez Gomez of the «Fundacion Occidental de is Cultura Islarnica in Madrid» tells me that it was invented by the Popovs of Allah. That in Mesopotamia the snow could be conserved better than in our modern refrigerators. That the word «sherbet» comes from the Arabic «sharab».
I also believed that paper had been invented by the Chinese. To be precise, by a certain Tsai-lun who in 105 Anno Domini (therefore 500 years before the Prophet) succeeded in manufacturing paper from mulberry and bamboo fibres. But, always according to Margarita Lopez Gomez, paper was invented by the Muslims of Damascus and Baghdad then widespread by their descendants in Cordoba and in Granada. (The «most splendid and ci-
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del-dogs but because they profoundly admired those Popovs. He also adds that the Normans, their chasers, admired them as much. And it goes without saying that during the Conference Belgian and French delegates outdo him a lot. In his passionate encomium, for instance, the Director of the Paris Institut du Monde Arabe, Professor Edgar Pisani, reproach the Jacobins who during the French Revolution negotiated with the Catholic Church and not with Islam.
Look, in these one hundred and eighty-five pages I can see only one hero: the Norwegian congressman Hallgrim Berg who at the Strasbourg Assembly convened to approve the conference report, took the floor and gave Sigrid Hunke's disciples a good answer. «Ladies and gentlemen» he said «here we are fooling ourselves: this report has nothing to do with a retrospective view of Islamic Culture and is not as innocent as it looks. It is not, first of all, because it does not spend a word for the abominable treatment that women undergo and have always undergone in the Islamic culture. Such indisputable fact has been completely ignored by you, completely covered
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up under the pretext that Westerners have always told a pack of lies about Islam. And I shall never accept a report which hides the tragedy of Muslim women instead of taking a stand against it. I shall never vote for a report which avoids the question of Human Rights in Islam. Which blathers of Human Rights in the world but does not ask Islam to respect Human Rights in its world. A report, furthermore, which hides the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Which covers up the crimes of Islamic fundamentalism and all the other negative features of Islam. Ladies and gentlemen, which kind of Euro-Arab Dialogue are you chattering about??? Yours is no dialogue. It's a solitary diatribe where, in the name of liberal thought and of intellectual generosity, things are seen from one point of view only. But liberal thought and intellectual generosity don't work when they exist on one side only. You ask, for instance, for the withdrawal of school texts which make no mention of the presumed «contribution made by Islam to the culture of Europe». But what about the contribution that the West has given and gives to their progress? Have we any evidence of their intention to explain in Islamic countries the immense contribution that Christianity and Western values have brought everywhere? You also ask to introduce the study of
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Koranic Law in our educational system. Especially in our universities. What about the introduction of our Law in their educational system, their universities? Have we any reason to believe that such study will ever be permitted in their schools? Ladies and gentlemen, your report is not a cultural document. It is a political document which serves exclusively the purpose of underpinning the Islamic interests all over Europe. In the name of democracy I ask that it be revised, discussed, rectified, and...». But it was no use. «Mr. Berg, you must admit that we have been very flexible with you. We've allowed you five minutes, and the five minutes have passed a long time ago» interrupted the president of the Assembly. Then he put Berg's request to the vote, Berg's request was rejected, and the report was approved unanimously. It became «Recomman-dation Numero 1162 sur la Contribution de la Civilization Islamique a la Culture Europeenne». A piece of tomfoolery that suggests more tolerant rules on immigration and calls for the withdrawal of Western school texts not sufficiently respectful to Islam. It also calls for the introduction of Koran studies in our faculties of law, theology, philosophy and history.
Not surprisingly, I came to learn that soon after the approval of the Recommandation Nu-
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mero 1162 Mr. Berg abandoned politics. He left Strasbourg Parliament, went back to Norway, and threatening to throw off the cliffs anyone who reminded him of the European Parliament he retired to a forest overlooking the fjords of Nordkinnhalvaya. But not even there did he find the peace belonged for. Because a couple of years later his Norway was used as the setting for a film entitled «The Thirteenth Knight»: a sort of medieval fable interpreted by a Spanish actor who had previously distinguished himself playing Mussolini as a young socialist: Antonio Bande-ras. And do you know who is, the «Thirteenth Knight»? A most handsome, most mild, most merciful and of course most religious Muslim who, escorted by a no less perfect tutor (Omar Shari° in the Tenth Century ends up right among the fjords of Nordkinnhalvaya. There he meets twelve obtuse and ignorant blond louts who, being infidel-dogs, are in need of his Islamic virtues. Out of pure nobility he joins them, together with them he establishes peace and civilization. Then he reunites with Omar Sharif who being a Muslim and therefore a pacifist had stayed behind to pray and, carrying off a Norwegian girl clearly destined to become the first of four wives, rides off into the sun. The Sun-of-Allah-that-shines-over-the-West.
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Well, I never found out if Mr. Berg ever recovered or not from the trauma. In return I know that in subsequent European Union's conferences The Recommandation Numero 1162 was extended to philology, linguistics, economics, agronomy, political science. That it exhorted to establish Euro-Arab universities in every country of Europe, to publish more Islamic books, to mobilize all the media. And the results were immediate. Last summer a leftist Rome newspaper, La Repubblica, printed an article on the opening of the great mosque in Granada. More than an article, a Sigrid Hunke hymn to the glory of the Prophet. Recalling that in 1492 Isabella of Castile had not only completed the expulsion of the Moors from Spain but had also financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the West Indies, the hymn concluded with the following words: «Columbus succeeded. But he also discovered America. And now we live in a world which is still suffering from the success of those Isabella's two enterprises».
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