Last night, past midnight, my wife found me furtively hunched over my laptop. "What are you looking at?" she asked accusingly, as I quickly turned on the screen saver. "Nothing", I said. "It's not nothing. I saw you looking at a picture."
I was found out. Game over. I clicked the mouse and the picture filled the screen. There she was, in all her glory. Another real beauty, smooth and shiny. "Oh, God", my wife sighed in disgust, then grew silent. I just sat there, my head hung in shame, waiting for her to say something else. Finally, she spoke: "Why can't you look at porn like a normal guy?"
On the screen was a photo of the hardcover "Printed in Italy" edition of Oriana Fallaci's book "The Rage and the Pride", for sale at $28 plus $11.47 postage, on which I had just pushed the Buy It Now button.
In this book, with her well-known courage, Oriana Fallaci faces the themes unchained by the Islamic terrorism: the contrast and, in her opinion, incompatibility between the Islamic world and the Western world; the global reality of the Jihad and the lack of response, the lenience of the West. With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls "our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct". With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us. Published just after 9/11, this book is even more pertinent now than it was twenty-five years ago.
Click here for the English narrative
What is happening in Europe right now reminds me of the popular fable about the boiling frog. Do you remember it? It claims that if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump out immediately, but if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, the frog will not notice the danger and will boil to death. Well, let me tell you, a live frog will jump out to save itself. Real frogs do not sit still and boil to death, only Europeans do.
