Programming note: Tomorrow, Sunday, I'll be hosting another audio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week on Serenade Radio in the UK at 5.30pm British Summer Time (that's 12.30pm North American Eastern/9.30am Pacific). You can listen from anywhere on the planet by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner here.
Afterwards right here at SteynOnline we will have a musical bonus for you.
~Welcome to Episode Thirty of our weekly audio adaptation of my book Mark Steyn's Passing Parade.
In this weekend's episode, we feature two untypical victims of the post-9/11 world. First up, Hollywood's most successful Arab-American, the producer of the Halloween slasher flicks, Moustapha Akkad:
The filmmaker in Akkad might have found something similar in the husband-and-wife suicide-bomber team who killed him: Mrs al-Shamari entering the Radisson, the camera's eye nervously darting around, shuffling through to the ballroom; the guests standing about, Muslims holding their wedding party in a semi-Westernized style, the ladies with bright glossed lips and coiffed hair bursting through their perfunctory head coverings. What does the jihadi think? Is she disgusted? Or just concentrating on her mission? She struggles with the cord on her explosives belt, but it jams, and she tugs more frantically, and her husband sees her fumbling and pushes her out of the room, either in what passes for gallantry in the death cult or because he's concerned she'll jeopardize the operation. And then he pulls his cord, and he and the wedding party explode.
After Mr Akkad, we turn our attention to Oriana Fallaci, whose antipathy to Islam went way beyond terrorism:
She scorned Muslims for their habits of reproduction, of evacuation, of female genital mutilation. She developed obsessions both arcane—who really invented sherbet (the ancient Romans, not the 'sons of Allah')—and unhealthy, if not psychologically then certainly actuarially: What's the deal with Muhammad's nine-year-old wife? Who sodomized whom at Mehmet II's big shindig to mark the fall of Constantinople in 1453? These are areas over which more discreet scholars prefer to draw a veil, if not the full burka. In The Rage and the Pride (2002), she dwelt upon the hitherto-neglected topic of micturition among Somali Muslims in Florence's Cathedral Square, whom she accused of leaving 'yellow streaks of urine' that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery: 'Good Heavens! They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?'
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