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Subject: Effort to ban anti-Islam book fails in France
From: <Thetruth@coptsdigest.com>
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 01:59:07 -0400
Effort to ban anti-Islam book fails in France
From combined dispatches
PARIS — A French judge yesterday refused an "anti-racism" group's
request for an immediate ban on Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci's new
book, which argues that the September 11 attacks shows the true face of Islam.
The Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, also
known as MRAP, had asked Judge Herve Stephan to ban the book, "Rage and
Pride," saying its contents are an incitement to racial hatred.
Judge Stephan said he saw no point in an urgent ban, because the book
had already sold 45,000 copies in France since its publication last month
and nearly a million copies in Italy. He referred the case to another
court, which is scheduled to hear it July 10.
MRAP, which was founded in 1949 and calls itself a democratic
organization, also named French publisher Editions Plon in its complaint.
Its leader, Mouloud Aounit, insists that the group believes in freedom of
expression. He argues that the book is "racist delirium" that "incites
racial violence."
Miss Fallaci, 72, a former war correspondent who is known for candid
interviews with world leaders, ended a decade-long, self-imposed silence
after September 11 with the book, written in reaction to the terrorist
attacks in New York, where she lives.
The book, due out in the United States in the fall, contains such
provocative statements as assertions that Western civilization is superior
to Islam and that Muslim immigrants in the West, who "multiply like rats,"
are to blame for the rise in crime and prostitution.
"The children of Allah," she writes, "spend their time with their
bottoms in the air, praying five times a day."
Earlier this month, Miss Fallaci rejected the accusations against her
and denounced recent anti-Jewish violence in France, linked to a spillover
of Middle East tensions into the country's Muslim and Jewish populations.
"I find it shameful that in France — the France of liberty, equality and
fraternity — synagogues are burned, Jews are terrorized and their
cemeteries are profaned," she wrote in a column in the prominent daily
newspaper Le Figaro.
Muslim immigrants in France and elsewhere in Western Europe have been
blamed for rising crime and anti-Semitic attacks, a development that has
fueled recent gains by anti-immigration political parties throughout the
continent. Miss Fallaci said she reserves the right to sue MRAP for
branding her book "racist." She said she has been receiving death threats.
In addition to MRAP, two other anti-racism groups have complained
about the book and asked that a disclaimer be included in every French copy
instead of a ban.
The judge refused this plea as well.
Miss Fallaci has interviewed such political figures as former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former German Chancellor Willy Brandt,
and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late Iranian supreme leader, as well
as Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, Italian film director Federico Fellini and
actor Sean Connery.
Mr. Kissinger, who called his Fallaci interview "the most disastrous
conversation I ever had with any member of the press," offered the first
glimpse into the Austrian-born diplomat's private life.