So, just to clarify, neither of us got “punked” by The Little Green Book, a book neither of us so much as mentioned. We both cited Khomeini’s “Blue Book”, because that’s where we got it from. And Oriana’s cited source for her Italian translation, “The Ten Khomeindments”, was published in 1979, a year before Bantam released The Little Green Book, and at a time when the strictures of the “Khomeindments” were among the research she took to Iran for her famous interview with the Ayatollah.
So I wonder what it is Professor Ethics-Bore thinks I should have “checked”. That the Ayatollah disapproves of post-coitally chowing down on your barnyard sex partner? Check! Indeed, check mate. On the other hand, the E-Bore didn’t check anything – not my original book review, not Oriana’s original quote. He pronounced magisterially on the non-existence of any such “Blue Book” without checking a thing.
But, beyond all that J-school snoozeroonie stuff, what I find even more perplexing is why Prof Miller, M J Murphy and the nellies at Law Am Cool are so weirdly obsessed with insisting that somehow the Ayatollah’s rulings about eating shagged sheep and having sex with nine-year olds must be some malicious rumor got up by Oriana and me and a couple of other neocon ignoramuses. No one who knows anything about Khomeini or Shia jurisprudence would be in the least bit surprised, so why would a prissy PC drone like Prof Miller be so cavalier as to expose himself as entirely ignorant of the subject he’s loftily pontificating on? Not for the first time you realize that, for the lazy white liberal, driving around with a “CELEBRATE DIVERSITY” sticker absolves one from having to take the slightest interest in other cultures.
So, just to bring the deplorably unicultural Prof Miller up to speed, the easiest way to get a flavor of the Ayatollah’s book is simply to sample the contents pages:
THE UNCLEANS
1&2. Urine and stool
3. Semen
4. Corpse
5. Blood
6&7. Dog and pig
8. Infidel
9. Wine
10. Beer
11. Sweat of an unlawful ejaculation
12. The sweat of a camel that eats uncleans
Hey, Multiculti Man, that would be you at big hit sound number 8: “Infidel” – right behind “Dog and pig” but, if it’s any consolation, ahead of “Sweat of an unlawful ejaculation”. But hang on: ejaculate-wise, the Ayatollah’s just getting cranked up:
PRECEPTS OF EJACULATION
Things that are unlawful for an ejaculator
Things that are loathesome for an ejaculator
The bath of ejaculation…
I confess I was worried that Prof Miller, M J Murphy and Law R Cool might be in breach of the Ayatollah’s “Precepts of Ejaculation” but, after thumbing through them, I can’t find anything in there preventing you from doing it repeatedly all over the Internet.
In other words, anyone who had the most casual acquaintance with the Ayatollah’s writings would be aware not only that it’s not in the least bit surprising but entirely par for the course that the old boy had complex rules re using your embraceable ewe for the Friday night kebab special. But let’s leave me and M J Murphy out of it, since we’re merely the middle men in what is in effect Prof Miller’s “fact check” of Oriana Fallaci. Could anything be more ludicrous than the tenured Ryerson bore presuming to lay down the law on Ayatollah Khomeini to the last western writer ever to interview him? In my (rigorously fact-checked) obituary of her for The Atlantic Monthly I wrote of Oriana’s encounter with the Ayatollah:
After traveling to Qom and kicking her heels for ten days waiting for him to agree to see her, she was ushered – barefoot and wearing a chador – into his presence and found what she subsequently described as the most handsome old man she’d ever met. In his own way, he must have dug the crazy Italian chick: The meeting was terminated when she tore off ‘this stupid medieval rag’ and hurled her chador to the floor. But he agreed to return a day or two later to finish the interview.
It seems a fantastical encounter now: a man who’d just shoveled every female in supposedly the most modernized of Middle Eastern nations back into ‘medieval rags’ versus the apotheosis of the ballbusting western career woman. The phrase ‘personality interviewer’ is grossly devalued these days: look at Mike Wallace’s cringe-makingly oleaginous encounter with today’s Iranian must-get, President Ahmadinejad. Indeed, Wallace seems to have found Ahmadinejad more attractive (‘very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way’) than Fallaci found Khomeini. She was by that stage ‘the greatest political interviewer of modern times’ (Rolling Stone), and yet unlike so many of the bland bigshots jetting from foreign ministry to presidential palace she gravitated to power mainly for the opportunities it afforded to knee it in the crotch. She asked the Ayatollah indignant questions about the executions of prostitutes and homosexuals and he sneered at women like her for going around uncovered ‘dragging behind them a tail of men’.
It’s worth citing the “medieval rag” bit in full. La Fallaci had just raised with the Ayatollah the matter of “the condition of segregation into which women have been cast” in the Islamic republic. “They can’t study at university with men, or work with men,” she said, “or go to the beach or to a swimming pool with men. They have to take a dip apart, in their chadors. By the way, how do you swim in a chador?”
What a splendidly offhand question. Alas, the Ayatollah didn’t care for it. “This is none of your business,” said Khomeini. “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.”
“That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done. But tell me something. A woman such as I, who has always lived among men, showing her neck, her hair, her ears, who has been in war and slept in the front line in the field among soldiers, according to you, is she an immoral, bold and unproper woman?”
That was 1979 – before any “literary hoax” called The Little Green Book was ever published. I had a thousand points of disagreement with Oriana Fallaci, but I adored her. She was a fearless woman, and when she went into a room with the dictators of the day she was full of facts. In a navel-gazing media forever congratulating itself on “speaking truth to power”, she just got on and did it. In his soi-disant fact-check of me, Professor Miller wrote of Oriana:
When The New York Times wrote her obituary on Sept. 15, 2006, the headline called her a ‘writer-provocateur’. Sound familiar? Remind us of anyone we know?
What a sad little man. He actually thinks he’s insulting me by comparing me to the peerless Fallaci. But, of course, he’s only doing it so he can go all J-school on us:
Journalists usually try to deal with primary sources (Writer-provocateurs seldom do).
Golly! I wonder if he has any idea quite what a Ryerson-atrophied pansy he sounds wagging his finger at Oriana Fallaci? “Writer-provocateurs” don’t “deal with primary sources”? Well, her “primary source” on Ayatollah Khomeini is Ayatollah Khomeini. What have you got, Finger Boy? When she was hurling her chador at him in 1979, what were you doing? Retyping press releases from Ed Broadbent?