Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism--pacifism synonymous with anti-Americanism--they feel protected....Mr. Blair too leads a country which is invaded by the Moors. A country that hides that resentment.

"Invaded by the Moors"??

That's Oriani Fallaci; the words can be found at OpinionJournal.com, the Web version of the allegedly respectable Wall Street Journal editorial page. Do I have to say the obvious -- that this is essentially what American bigots said about the immigrant generation of my great-grandparents -- my Italian great-grandparents, Oriana? That they couldn't be assimilated by "civilized" America? That the Italians were anarchists and the Jews were communists and they posed a danger to the Republic? And here I am, Oriana -- an American, an Italian-American. Here a lot of us are.

And the quote above is merely the lite version of Fallaci's message these days -- for a stronger dose, read this January New York Observer interview of Fallaci (by George Gurley, who also interviewed Ann Coulter for the paper and thus apparently has its bigot beat):

"It is a tyranny, a dictatorship -- the only religion on earth that has never committed a work of self-criticism .... It is immovable. It becomes worse and worse .... It is 1,400 years and these people never review themselves, and now they want to come impose it on me, on us?..."

There's yet more of this in her current book, The Rage and the Pride. I haven't read it -- if you want to, be my guest.

(By the way, I wonder what Fallaci would say in response tothis article from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine about a young Jordanian whose two dreams are jihad against the West and being a programmer at Microsoft. No, it's obvious -- she'd think it proves her point. She'd dismiss the fact that the young man's father thinks his son could get a job if he'd just shave the beard that makes him look too religious. Could the urge to jihad just be generational -- and if it varies from generation to generation, doesn't that demonstrate that it's not immutable?)