Saturday’s LAT featured an essay by Catherine Seipp in which she passes on a story told to her by a friend about visiting San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore and asking if they had the English-language edition of Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason, only to be told: “No, we don’t carry books by fascists.” (As one wag’s noted, the proper response to that would be, “Oh, good, so you’ve tossed out all of Ezra Pound’s poetry?”)
The article’s not without its offensive touches, like assuming that a man who works in a San Francisco bookstore is a “suspected homosexual” and that “by now we understand the Muslim world all too well,” but perhaps it does offer hints to the reaction Fallaci’s book, which continues the vehmenent critique of Islam that began with The Rage and the Pride, may receive when it’s published by Rizzoli in the near future. In the meantime, it certainly inspires Ed Brayton, the author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, to reflect on the political and intellectual attacks on Fallaci and others: “The lack of protection for free speech on the part of our European allies has reached the point where it can no longer be dismissed as anamolous.”