Old Weird Ward

Old Weird Ward

Unless otherwise noted, that which is posted here is opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If you don't like my opinions, go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to actually read this drivel. The presumption exists that you can read at all. That may be a large assumption.
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Saturday, May 28, 2005

 

- - - - - Foreign Law - - - - -

There has, of late, been a certain amount of fairly muted discussion about foreign law influencing US law.

When I see the legal problems that Orianna Fallaci is having with Italian law, I am so glad that I live in the US, where freedom of speech is the law of the land, not just the custom.

ROME (Reuters) - A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

The decision angered Italy's justice minister but delighted Muslim activists, who accused Fallaci of inciting religious hatred in her 2004 work "La Forza della Ragione" (The Force of Reason).



But, some of the Justices of the Supreme Court want to cite foreign law to interpret the Constitutionality of US law.

So, according to those Justices, the quotes I make below, from the Fallaci book (which I have not read - I got the quotes HERE), would make me liable to Italian law for insulting Islam - regardless of the protections of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

I remain inclined to the views of Justices Thomas and Scalia - The US Constitution is THE supreme law of the United States.

HERE are the offending quotes - "The Eighteen Things You Can't Say About Muslims":

1) during the occupation of Montecassino in the 9th century “the Muslims amused themselves by sacrificing each night the virginity of a nun. Do you know where? On the altar of the cathedral.”

2) while occupying Constantinople in 1453, the Turks led by Mohammed II “decapitated even newborns. And extinguished candles with their little heads.”

3) “In a woman the Koran sees above all a womb to give birth.”

4) “In the dream that the sons of Allah have been nurturing for years, the dream of blowing up Giotto’s Tower or the Tower of Pisa or the cupola of St. Peter’s or the Eiffel Tower or Westminster Abbey or the cathedral of Cologne and so on . . .”

5) “…halal butchery is barbarous” just as “shechita butchery is barbarous. That is, the Jewish version which is carried out in the same way and consists of slitting the animals’ throats without dazing them.”

6) France is a country “where Islamic racism, that is the hatred of the infidel-dogs, reigns supreme and is never put on trial, never punished. Where the Muslims declare openly: “We must take advantage of the democratic space that France offers us, we must exploit democracy, that is, make use of it to occupy territory.” Where not a few of them add: “In Europe the Nazi position was not understood. Or not by all. It was judged a vehicle of homicidal folly, when actually Hitler was a great man.”

7) for Muslims “biology is a shameless science because it is occupied with the human body and sex.”

8) “ . . . we will have to resign ourselves to the yoke of a creed that . . . instead of love spreads hatred and instead of liberty slavery.”

9) “a Right and a Left . . . that (in Italy) are both on the side of the enemy (Islam).”

10) the demands of the Islamics with regard to school curricula mean that in literature classes “we will not be allowed to include for example The Divine Comedy . . .nor the Canticle of Creatures nor the Sacred Hymns of Alessandra Manzoni . . .” etc. etc.

11) “ . . . the uncouth wailing of the muezzin . . .”

12) the terrorist attacks of the last twenty years have caused six thousand deaths “to the glory of the Koran. In obedience to its verses.”

13) “Our Jesus of Nazareth . . . they put him in their Danna where he eats like Trimalchio, drinks like a drunkard, screws like a sexual maniac.”

14) “. . . the revolting, reactionary, obtuse, feudal Right is found today only in Islam. It is Islam.”

15) infibulation is “the mutilation that the Muslims force on little girls to prevent them, once they are grown . . . from enjoying the sexual act. It is a female castration that the Muslims practice in twenty-eight countries of Islamic Africa and because of which two million persons die each year from sepsis or loss of blood . . .”

16) the Italians afflicted by atavistic loss of pride “are not offended when Islamic immigrants urinate on their monuments or soil the sacristies of their churches or toss their crucifixes out the window of a hospital.”

17) “. . . Islam is a pond. And a pond is a trough of stagnant water. . . it is never purified . . . it is easily polluted, like a watering hole for livestock of little value. The pond does not love life: It loves death . . .”

18) “ . . .despite the massacres through which the sons of Allah have bloodied us and bloodied themselves for over thirty years, the war that Islam has declared against the West . . . is a cultural war. . .they kill us in order to bend us. To intimidate us . . . Their goal is not to fill cemeteries. Not to destroy our skyscrapers . . . It is to destroy our soul, our ideas. Our feelings and our dreams. It is to subjugate the West once again.”