Legal prosecution of anti-Islamic polemicists reinforces their self-image as persecuted truth-tellers.

Evidence

One of the most prominent exponents of Eurabia is the veteran Italian journalist and self-proclaimed Cassandra of the Islamic threat, Oriana Fallaci, who told the Wall Street Journal in June last year that ‘Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘‘Eurabia’’, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense’. … Fallaci’s books have been the subject of various lawsuits in Switzerland, France and Italy, where she was indicted last year for ‘defaming Islam’. These various lawsuits have reinforced Fallaci’s perception of herself as a courageous iconoclast, bringing the bad news of a sinister alliance between ‘Islamic Nazism’ and the ‘anti-American’ Left to a world that has supposedly been blinded to the true nature of the Islamic threat by political correctness and a cowed media. — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 18

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could trace how martyrdom-by-lawsuit functions as a branding mechanism for provocateurs across eras.
• XREF: Connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid), where hostility and grievance are mutually reinforcing narratives.