A Giant Has Fallen, and A Pope is Attacked

Oriana Fallaci has died after battling illness for some time. Michael Ledeen remembers her here, and Michelle Malkin adds her thoughts here.

I tie this in with the Pope being burned in effigy throughout the easily aggrieved sections of the globe because she too faced recriminations and death threats for speaking the simple truth about Islam.

It's amazing that they can be burning effigies in the streets this very day, and a book that imagines in mastubatory detail the death of the current pope (obviously created well before the current 'inflammatory' statement from Benedict XVI), can bring up Urban II and the First Crusade in 1095 as being morally equivalent to gunpoint conversions in 2006 (I just heard this today on KCRW, realplayer stream here)

The difference between the faiths right now would seem to be that Christians aren't the same Christians that they were in 1095 and are glad of it, while Muslims aren't the same Muslims they were in 1095 and are angry about it.

They wish to return the world to those days when Islam was at its political, intellectual and technological height and a true adversary, and often surpassing the west in each of those dimensions.

But, that was almost 1000 years ago, and alot has changed. Beyond inventing new tactics to kill civillians and new ways to depict themselves as victims even while doing the victimizing, Islam has produced very little.

If they truly mean to reject all that the West represents, then put down those cel phones, shut down those TV and Radio networks and get off the internet. The modern world is no place for folks whose fervent desire is to plunge the world back 1000 years.

Maybe they believe the Mahdi will only reveal himself if the world he returns to resembles the world he left (though to be fair, the current crazies burning effigies aren't just the Shia crazies who believe the Mahdi will soon reveal himself).