The Rage of Oriana Fallaci

[Fallaci died of cancer in 2006...she was a truly brave and remarkable woman. I strongly recommend her stirring and brilliant books "The Rage and the Pride" and "The Force of Reason". - jtf]

by George Gurley
The New York Observer
7:00 PM January 26, 2003
http://www.observer.com/


On a recent afternoon, the telephone rang in Oriana Fallaci's Manhattan townhouse. The tiny, blue-eyed 72-year-old writer put down her cigarette and picked up the receiver.

"Oh, it is you!" she said. She assured the caller she was all right, then thanked him and hung up.

"He calls to see if I'm alive," she said, "to see if I need something."

The caller was a police officer, who has been checking in on Ms. Fallaci since the publication of her most recent book, The Rage and the Pride, which she wrote in New York during the weeks following Sept. 11. The book-a passionate cry in which she accuses the West of being blind to the true threat of Islam-caused a scandal when it was published in Europe last year, but has raised barely a murmur in the U.S. In her native country of Italy, the book has sold over 1 million copies and over 500,000 in the rest of Europe. In the U.S., it has sold just 40,000 copies since October. The relative silence with which Americans have greeted the book is somewhat puzzling: It is precisely Americans who have the most evidence, in downtown New York, of the danger which Ms. Fallaci lays out in her 187-page book.

In The Rage and the Pride , Ms. Fallaci compares Islam to a "mountain which in one thousand and four hundred years has not moved, has not risen from the abyss of its blindness, has not opened its doors to the conquests of civilization, has never wanted to know about freedom and democracy and progress. In short, has not changed." She warns that "from Afghanistan to Sudan, from Palestine to Pakistan, from Malaysia to Iran, from Egypt to Iraq, from Algeria to Senegal, from Syria to Kenya, from Libya to Chad, from Lebanon to Morocco, from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to Somalia, the hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. And the followers of Islamic Fundamentalism multiply like protozoa of a cell which splits to become two cells then four then eight then sixteen then thirty-two. To infinity."

In France, a group called the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People tried to get the book banned. A French court rejected the request. In Italy, a booklet titled "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," written by the president of the Italian Islamic Party, called for Muslims to "go and die with Fallaci." Ms. Fallaci sued the author for slander and instigation to murder.

"My life," Ms. Fallaci wrote in her book's preface, "is seriously in danger."

And not only from terrorists. In 1992, she underwent surgery for breast cancer; she told me she could die any day. But she still moves about like a spunky teenage girl, leaping up and down, making faces. She drinks fine wines which she keeps in her townhouse and smokes two packs of cigarettes a day-she said her oncologist allows it.

Prior to her new book, Ms. Fallaci had achieved international fame as a journalist and author-the beautiful, outspoken, brilliant "La Fallaci"-who had covered the Vietnam War and conducted spirited, combative interviews with celebrities-Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, Hugh Hefner, Sammy Davis Jr.-as well as world leaders like Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, the Shah of Iran, Ariel Sharon, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasir Arafat and Deng Xiaoping (or, as she called some of them, "those bastards who decide our lives"). Henry Kissinger said that his interview with Ms. Fallaci was "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press."

Her writing has made her life comfortable-in addition to her Manhattan townhouse, she owns a residence in Florence and a 23-room country house in Tuscany-though comfort has not dulled her edges.

As we drank Sancerre in her sitting room, surrounded by bookshelves filled with Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Poe, Hemingway, Malraux and Kipling, she talked about The Rage and the Pride 's success in Europe.

"I have been months and months and months of best-seller No. 1," Ms. Fallaci said in her strong Florentine accent. "I do not say this to make self-congratulations. I say this to underline my thesis-that the moment was mature! That I have put the finger on the nerve of something: the Muslims' immigration, which grows and grows without inserting itself in our way of life, without accepting our way of life and, on the contrary, trying to impose on us its way of life …. And people in Europe are so exasperated by the arrogance of most of these 'invaders' and being blackmailed with the unfair term 'racist' when they protest, that there was a kind of thirst for a book like this …. There is no other explanation for the book's success! I have written better books than this. I have written beautiful books over my life's work. This is a scream rather than an essay-a book written in two weeks, c'mon. Why? It was not the book itself. It was the thirst , the hunger.

"You know in the turning of history there are, at times, a brusque turn," she said. "Consider all the steps of history. I'm afraid that we are now at one of those turns. Not because we want it. Because it is imposed on us. It is not this time a revolution, like the American Revolution or the French Revolution …. It is a counterrevolution! Alas. And it is against us. I am kind of happy not to have ahead of me a very long future which will confirm my prediction. But you will live all of it."

The West, she said, is under assault and doesn't realize it.

"If we stay inert, if we let ourselves be scared, then we become collaborationists," she said. "If we are passive … then we lose the war that has been declared against us.

"We can talk for centuries about the word 'racist,'" she said. "'Racist' has to do with race and not with religion. Yes, I am against that religion, a religion that controls the life of people in every minute of their day, that puts the burqa on women, that treats women as camels, that preaches polygamy, that cuts the hands of the poor thieves …. I am not religious-all religions are difficult to accept for me-but the Islamic one is not even a religion, in my opinion. 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?

"Listen," she said, wagging a finger. "Those who do not follow what people like me say are unrealistic, are really masochistic, because they don't see the reality …. Muslims have passion, and we have lost the passion. People like me who have passion are derided: 'Ha ha ha! She's hysterical!' 'She's very passionate!' Listen how the Americans speak about me: 'A very passionate Italian.'

"Americans," she said, repeating for me something she told the American Enterprise Institute, "you have taught me this stupid word: cool. Cool, cool, cool ! Coolness, coolness, you've got to be cool . Coolness! When I speak like I speak now, with passion, you smile and laugh at me! I've got passion. They've got passion. They have such passion and such guts that they are ready to die for it."

I asked her about the death threats she receives.

"You put the finger on the wound," she said-but not because she's afraid. "I can't bear the bodyguards," she explained. In Italy, she said, they are "imposed" on her. Her homes in Florence and Tuscany are closely guarded. If anything happened to her in Italy, she said, it would be a political scandal.

However, in New York she's fairly vulnerable, and she likes it.

"Thank God the Americans don't care about me!" she said, adding that the F.B.I. had been over a few times.

"I am not saying this because I want to look like I am like Rambo, or that I don't care. That's stupid," she said. "It's my temperament. When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life-trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die. And when you love your own freedom as much as I do, you don't bend to the fear to be killed, because otherwise you do nothing-you go under the bed and you stay hidden 24 hours.

"The point is not winning or losing," she said. "Of course, I want to win. The point is to fight well with dignity. The point is, if you die, to die on your feet, standing up. If you tell me, 'Fallaci, why do you fight so much? The Muslims are going to win and they're going to kill you,' I answer to you, 'Fuck you-I shall die on my feet.'"


July 5, 1963 EFE

When she gets phone calls threatening her life, she said, she lets them talk. "Then I say, 'Do you know where it is your mother and your wife and your sister and your daughter are right in this moment? They are in a brothel of Beirut. And do you know what they're doing? They are giving away their'-I don't tell it to you, but I tell it to them-'and you know to whom? To an American . Fuck you!'"

How did she feel about President Bush?

"We will see; it's too soon," she said. "I have the impression that Bush has a certain vigor and also a dignity which had been forgotten in the United States for eight years."

She doesn't like it, however, when the President calls Islam a "religion of peace."

"Do you know what I do each time he says it on TV? I'm there alone, and I watch it and say, 'Shut up! Shut up, Bush!' But he doesn't listen to me.

"I adore his wife," she said. "You wouldn't believe it: Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'"

Oriana Fallaci grew up poor, the oldest of three sisters, in Florence. Her father Edoardo was a craftsman and anti-Fascist political activist. Her bedroom was filled with books. "I woke up, I saw books," she said. "I closed my eyes to sleep, the last thing I saw was books." She started writing short stories at age 9 after reading Jack London.

In The Rage and the Pride, she writes about a day in 1943 when Allied bombs fell on Florence. She and her father took refuge in a church, and she started crying. Her father, she writes, "gave me a powerful slap, he stared me in the eyes and said, 'A girl does not, must not, cry.'"

He was a leader in the Resistance against the Fascists and made his daughter a soldier in the cause. According to a 1998 biography by Santo L. Aricò ( Oriana Fallaci: The Woman and the Myth ), she smuggled explosives past checkpoints; her nom de guerre was "Emilia." In 1944, her father was captured and sentenced to death, but the city was liberated before the sentence could be carried out.

"The Second World War looked to us, to me, endless," she told me. "Bombing, bombing, bombing. I know about bombs. Every night the sirens- whoo, whoo! … When the war in Italy was over, I remember one idyllic moment; I think I shall die and, in search of a moment of happiness, I will think of that. It was Sunday, I had a new dress. White. And I was cute with this white dress. I was eating ice cream in the morning, which made me very happy. I was all white-it must be some psychological thing associated with purity, I don't know. And all at once, I don't know why, it must have been a holiday, all the bells of Florence-and Florence is a city of bells-started ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong! The whole city was bursting with this marvelous sound of the bells. And I was walking in the street, and I shall never, never-I have had honors, prizes-I have never felt what I felt that morning. During the war the bells never rang, and now the whole city was exploding with the sound of bells! I have never tasted it again. Never! … I felt that the world was opening up for itself …. It seemed to me that the war was over, forever, for everybody! That was stupid. Right at that moment, you know what they were preparing? Hiroshima. I didn't know!"

She graduated high school at 16 and attended the University of Florence, where she studied medicine before being hired at a daily newspaper. At 21, she also began writing for one of Italy's top magazines, Europeo. Soon she was interviewing people like Clark Gable. "He was so sweet," she said. "I have never met a man more shy than Clark Gable. He was so shy you couldn't make him talk."

While covering Hollywood in the 1950's and 60's, she wrote about Joan Collins, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Burt Lancaster, Jayne Mansfield, William Holden. She became close to Orson Welles, who would write the preface to her 1958 book, The Seven Sins of Hollywood (" Mamma mia , he ate so much food!" she told me), as well as Maria Callas and Ingrid Bergman-whose daughter, Isabella Rossellini, defended Ms. Fallaci in a November 2001 letter to The New York Times.

(In the 1980's, she got to know director Martin Scorsese, who was Ms. Rossellini's first husband. "I think Scorsese is a tremendously interesting director," she said. "As a director, I adore him. As a man, I cannot bear him. Because he doesn't smoke. She invited me to dinner at their house, and in order to smoke a cigarette I had to go in the bathroom. So each dinner became a nightmare. I had to bend from the window of the 58th floor, risking to precipitate down on the sidewalk, and I came to hate him and to forget that he was such a good director.")

I asked about the secret of her huge success as a journalist. She said it had to do with the fact that she never tried to be objective. Objectivity, she said, was "a hypocrisy which has been invented in the West which means nothing. We must take positions. Our weakness in the West is born of the fact of so-called 'objectivity.' Objectivity does not exist-it cannot exist! … The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only."

We decided to go out to dinner. I asked if it would be safe.

"When you are with me, you're safe. I defend you," she said. "I promise you, nothing will happen to you if I am there."

In her hallway, I noticed a framed advertisement for a speech against Hitler and Mussolini which the anti-Fascist writer Gaetano Salvemini gave at Irving Plaza in 1933.

"They wouldn't listen," Ms. Fallaci said. "They wouldn't believe him; it was too early. I feel myself very near like Salvemini. Because he was shouting with the same despair, with the same arguments, and people did not believe him. When you say things a little too early, they don't believe you. Capito ?"

At the restaurant, we sat at a table by the bar so she could smoke. After a long, heated discussion with the restaurant's proprietor, Ms. Fallaci ordered the Spanish prawns very reluctantly. She didn't believe they were like Italian ones.

"I don't believe what he said," she told me. "Spain is looking one side on the Mediterranean, but the other side is on the Atlantic ocean. Thus if he speaks of the prawns which are fished in the Atlantic, I promise you they are going to be like the American ones. And then I don't want them."

When her prawns arrived, she said, "Do you know the only thing the Muslims and the Arabs have been teaching to me? The only one? To eat with the hands. The pleasure of eating with the hands is infinite. The Arabs, the only thing they do well is how elegantly they touch the food."

Last April, she said, Ariel Sharon phoned her to praise an article she had written in the weekly Italian publication Panorama about the problem of European and Arab anti-Semitism.

She said she answered the phone and said, "'Hey, Sharon! How are you? Are you as fat?' Because I know him. Sharon said, 'Oriana, I called you to say, "Damn, you have guts; damn, you are courageous; damn, do I thank you."' I said, 'Ariel, you thank me-I apologize with you. I was too tough to you 20 years ago.' And he was, as usual, a gentleman."

The night before the phone call, there had been an attack on a kibbutz.

"I said, 'Listen, dear, I know what happened last night in that kibbutz. Will you please permit me to express to you and to your people my condolences?' Sharon started crying. I don't know, I didn't see the tears. But the voice was of a crying man, and he started to shout: 'Oriana! You are the only one who says the word condolences ! Do you know, these bloody heads of states, I just spoke with the British and the Americans'-meaning Blair and Bush-'they did not say that word to me.' And then with broken voice he said, 'Do you know who were the dead last night? One was the grandmother who was in Dachau and who still had the number on her arm. The second one was her daughter, who was seven months pregnant. And the third one was the child of the daughter, who was 5 years old. And they are all dead! All dead! All dead!' He was crying."

He told her he would be coming to America soon.

"I said, 'Ariel, we've got a problem: How do we see each other in New York without the journalists knowing it?' So we have organized 007 story-beautiful. And the night before-do you remember what happened, the great massacre in Jerusalem? I remember that his assistant, this woman, she called me. I answered the phone and she said, 'We're leaving, we must go back, we don't come to New York, do you know what has happened?' I said, 'I know, I heard it, tell the Prime Minister I shall come to Jerusalem.' I never went. I couldn't."

Not that she feared any danger. After all, she'd been to Vietnam. By the late 60's, she had written hundreds of articles, appeared on The Tonight Show, published four books-so she went to the war, where she interviewed generals, soldiers, P.O.W.'s and civilians.

"Suddenly I've been seized by a fear that isn't the fear of dying," she wrote in 1968. "It's the fear of living."

In 1968, while covering a student uprising in Mexico City, she found herself in the middle of a massacre. She was shot three times; earlier, she'd lifted her blouse to show me the scars on her back and the back of her knee.

"I was so lucky, because everywhere it entered, it didn't touch the artery or the vein," she said.

In 1973, she interviewed a Greek resistance leader, Alexandros Panagoulis, after he was released from prison. They became lovers. He was killed in a suspicious car accident in 1976. She wrote a novel, A Man, based on their relationship. In the 1960's and 1970's, she conducted many of her infamous interviews with world leaders; her work appeared in publications like Life, The Washington Post and The New York Times. In 1990, the book she calls her "modern Iliad ," Inshallah -a 600-page novel about the war in Lebanon-was published and sold well.

In 1992, she had surgery for breast cancer.

I told her she looked very healthy for someone who was still dealing with cancer.

"Nooooo, you have not met me before," she said. "I am unrecognizable."

When she started to recover, she began writing what she calls her "big novel."

"It was 30 years that novel was sitting in my mind, and I haven't the guts to write it, because I knew it would be very long, very difficult, very complex," she said. "It scared me. When I got the cancer, I found the courage. I'm very grateful to the cancer, because it pushed me. I said, 'Hey, if you don't do it now, you die.' … So the dumb alien-I call the cancer 'alien'-must leave me alone until I have finished that book. If I died the day after I finish it, I die happy. "Remember, if you hear that Fallaci died, but she finished the book-you must think Fallaci died happy."

An Interview with Oriana Fallaci

[You can find more articles concerning this incredible woman by typing "Oriana Fallaci" into the blog's search engine at the top of this page. - jtf]

CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

Prophet of Decline

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN

The Wall Street Journal

Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids--so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview--one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state."

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." So in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years' imprisonment for her beliefs--which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.

It is a shame, in so many ways, that "vilipend," the latinate word that is the pinpoint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A "vilification," by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid--hardly fitting for a grande dame.

**********

"When I was given the news," Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch. The complainant, one Adel Smith--who, despite his name, is Muslim, and an incendiary public provocateur to boot--has a history of anti-Fallaci crankiness, and is widely believed to be behind the publication of a pamphlet, "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," which exhorts Muslims to "eliminate" her. (Ironically, Mr. Smith, too, faces the peculiar charge of vilipendio against religion--Roman Catholicism in his case--after he described the Catholic Church as "a criminal organization" on television. Two years ago, he made news in Italy by filing suit for the removal of crucifixes from the walls of all public-school classrooms, and also, allegedly, for flinging a crucifix out of the window of a hospital room where his mother was being treated. "My mother will not die in a room where there is a crucifix," he said, according to hospital officials.)

Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "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. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).

"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci's. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: "The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?" She then says "Phwah, phwah," and gestures at slashing her wrists. "He committed suicide!" Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. "What could Seneca do?" she asks, with a discernible shudder. "He knew it would end that way--with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing."

**********

The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!"--a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. "In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour--Europe needs a Cavour." Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as "a revolutionary"--"because I do what conservatives in Europe don't do, which is that I don't accept to be treated like a delinquent." She professes to "cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow."

Here she pauses to light a slim black cigarillo, and then to take a sip of champagne. Its chill makes her grimace, but fortified, she returns to vehement speech, more clearly evocative of Oswald Spengler than at any time in our interview. "You cannot survive if you do not know the past. We know why all the other civilizations have collapsed--from an excess of welfare, of richness, and from lack of morality, of spirituality." (She uses "welfare" here in the sense of well-being, so she is talking, really, of decadence.) "The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." The force with which she utters the word "dead" here is startling. I reach for my flute of champagne, as if for a crutch.

**********

"I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

Ms. Fallaci, who made her name by interviewing numerous statesmen (and not a few tyrants), believes that ours is "an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century." Of George Bush, she will concede only that he has "vigor," and that he is "obstinate" (in her book a compliment) and "gutsy. . . . Nobody obliged him to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did."

But it is "Ratzinger" (as she insists on calling the pope) who is her soulmate. John Paul II--"Wojtyla"--was a "warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America," but she will not forgive him for his "weakness toward the Islamic world. Why, why was he so weak?"

The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself," from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: "The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure."

"Ecco!" she says. A man after her own heart. "Ecco!" But I cannot be certain whether I see triumph in her eyes, or pain.

**********

As for the vilipendio against Islam, she refuses to attend the trial in Bergamo, set for June 2006. "I don't even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty."

At this point she laughs. Bitterly, of course, but she laughs.

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Daniel Pipes: Appreciating Oriana Fallaci

Daniel Pipes
http://www.danielpipes.org/
September 18, 2006

Oriana Fallaci died Friday, September 15, in Florence, Italy.

In her memory, I offer an introduction to Ms Fallaci that I delivered, at her request, on November 28, 2005, at a Center for the Study of Popular Culture event honoring her, chaired by David Horowitz. Her talk that evening, at the 3 West Club in New York City, was latterly incorporated in her book, The Force of Reason. I believe this was her final public appearance.

It is my great pleasure to introduce Oriana Fallaci to you.

Born in 1930 in Florence, Italy, she was brought up in an anti-fascist family and her father was a leader in the fight against Mussolini. At age 14, Ms Fallaci took part in the Resistance. For her work during the war, she received an award from the Chief of the Allied Forces in Italy. She then attended the University of Florence.

She had the writer's urge from early on. She was writing what she calls "naïve short stories" at the age of 9 and at 16 (after lying about her age) began covering police and hospital topics. Here is how she has described the writing experience:

I sat at the typewriter for the first time and fell in love with the words that emerged like drops, one by one, and remained on the white sheet of paper ... every drop became something that if spoken would have flown away, but on the sheets as words, became solidified, whether they were good or bad.

In a less poetic vein, she has also acknowledged that "What really pushes me to write is my obsession with death."

Ms Fallaci subsequently wrote for many Italian, European, and American publications, including Corriere della Sera, Le Nouvel Observateur, Der Stern, Life, Look, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and The New Republic.

As a war correspondent, she covered the major conflicts of our time.

She covered the insurrection in Hungary, getting arrested in the process.

She spent seven years in the field in Vietnam, both North and South, and ended up being thrown out of the South.

She reported about the revolutions in Latin America: Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, as well as the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City, where she was one of just two survivors. (She got caught up in a rally to oppose the Mexican government's decision to spend enormous amount of money on the 1968 Olympics and Fallaci was shot at by police, taking bullet fragments in her shoulder, back, and knee.)

She covered the Lebanon civil war and the Kuwait War.

Ms Fallaci conducted her trademark confrontational interviews with powerful figures, or to use her more colorful terminology, "those bastards who decide our lives," including Willy Brandt, Lech Walesa, Muammar Qaddafi, Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon, Haile Selassie, the Shah of Iran, Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and Deng Xiaoping, and H. Rap Brown. Also, she interviewed leading non-political figures such as Federico Fellini, Sean Connery, Sammy Davis, Jr., Arthur Miller, Orson Welles and even Hugh Hefner.

She is the only person to have interviewed the Ayatollah Khomeini, with whom she spent six hours. At one point, she memorably ripped off her chador in indignation and heaved it at his eminence.

Known for her challenging interviewing tactics, Fallaci goaded her subjects into making unintended revelations. "Let's talk about war," she challenged Henry Kissinger in their 1972 interview, perhaps the one Americans remember best. Prior to this interview, Kissinger had revealed little to the press about his life and personality. Fallaci kept after the secretary of state during their conversation to explain why a mere diplomat enjoyed such fame. He dodged the question, but eventually gave in. "Sometimes," he said, "I see myself as a cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, a wild west tale if you like." Kissinger thus revealed how he saw himself - as a heroic, imposing leader who controlled the direction of U.S. politics – and, consequently, was massively criticized. Even years later, Kissinger referred to his interview with Ms Fallaci as "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press."

Her interviews also included unusual details. For example, she wrote of Yasir Arafat about
his "thick, Arab mustache and his short height which, combined with small hands and feet, fat legs, a massive trunk, huge hips, and a swollen belly, made him appear rather odd." She described his head and face in great detail, noting that "he has almost no cheeks or forehead, everything is summed up in a large mouth with red and fleshy lips, an aggressive nose, and two eyes that hypnotize you."

One biographer, Jill M. Duquaine, calls Fallaci the "greatest political interviewer of modern times"

She is the author of 13 books, all but two of them translated into English. In all, they have been translated into 26 languages and published in 31 countries.

The first one, The Seven Sins of Hollywood, came out in Italian in 1958, featuring a preface by Orson Welles.

The Useless Sex: Voyage around the Woman, 1964. (reportage on a whirlwind trip around the world for a weekly newspaper, L'Europeo)

Penelope at War, 1966. (a novel about a career-minded young female journalist who refuses her boyfriend's pleas to stay home and have a family)

If the Sun Dies, 1966. (collected articles about the U.S. space program)
The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, 1968.

Nothing, and So Be It, 1972 (on the war in Vietnam, sympathetic to the Vietcong) – she shares Second Thoughts with our host tonight, David Horowitz

An Interview with History, 1976, collected some of her outstanding interviews; it has been described as "one of the classics of modern journalism."

Letter to a Child Never Born, 1976 (a novel, called "one of the finest feminist writings about pregnancy, abortion, and emotional torture").

A Man, 1980 (a novel based on her personal experience with the Greek poet and resistance leader Alekos Panagoulis)

Inshallah, 1992 (another novel, about the civil war in Lebanon).

After a silence of ten years, she published The Rage and the Pride in 2001, a response to the challenge of radical Islam. It sold 1 million copies in Italy and 500,000 in the rest of Europe.
In 2004, she wrote The Force of Reason, out this month in English from Rizzoli. It also sold 1 million copies in Italy. In it, she argues that the fall of the West has commenced due to radical Islam. Western-style democracy, with its liberty, human rights, freedom of thought and religion, cannot coexist with radical Islam. One of them has to perish. She puts her money on the West failing.

* The third book of her Islamic trilogy, Fallaci Interviews Herself and The Apocalypse, also came out in 2004, in Italian (and not yet in English). Here is what Bat Ye'or had to say of it, writing at FrontPageMag.com, another activity of this evening's sponsor, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture: "In this brief masterpiece Oriana Fallaci moves us to tears, shakes us with laughter, enlightens us and transmits her love and despair for a Europe she served with such great devotion and now watches in despair as it goes adrift."

In an interview in 2002, she was asked about George W. Bush. "We will see; it's too soon," she replied. "I have the impression that Bush has a certain vigor and also a dignity which had been forgotten in the United States for eight years." But she has her differences with him, especially when the president calls Islam a "religion of peace." "Do you know what I do each time he says it on TV? I'm there alone, and I watch it and say, ‘Shut up! Shut up, Bush!' But he doesn't listen to me."

In earlier years, her reportage put in her many times in harm's way; nowadays, it is her direct and unflinching writings on Islam that create dangers for her: "My life," Ms Fallaci wrote recently, "is seriously in danger."

She also has legal headaches. She was on trial twice in France in 2002 and was brought up on charges in Italy in May 2005. She was indicted under a provision of the Italian penal code that criminalizes the "vilification of any religion admitted by the state." Specifically, it states that The Force of Reason "defames Islam." One might therefore say that, wanted for a speech crime in her native country, Europe's most celebrated journalist now lives in exile in Manhattan.

The plaintiff is an extremist Muslim of Scottish origin named Adel Smith. He is thought to be the author of a pamphlet titled "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," that calls upon Muslims to "eliminate" her and to "go and die with Fallaci." Bye the bye, Smith has also called for the destruction of the medieval fresco, "The Last Judgment" by Giovanni da Modena, in Bologna Cathedral, because it depicts the Prophet Muhammad as languishing in hell.

Ms Fallaci's writings have also, of course, won her many opportunities. I'd like to mention one:
that she was among the first persons invited by Pope Benedict XVI for a chat, an encounter all the more significant for her being publicly declared an atheist. Before their meeting, this is what Ms Fallaci had to say about the new pope:

I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.

It is a particular honor to have Ms Fallaci with us here tonight, for she is not exactly known as a socialite. Here is her description of her work habits:

I start working early in the morning (eight or eight-thirty a.m.) and go on until six p.m. or seven p.m. without interruption. That is, without eating and without resting. I smoke more than usual, which means, around fifty cigarettes a day. I sleep badly in the night. I don't see anybody. I don't answer the telephone. I don't go anywhere. I ignore the Sundays, the holidays, the Christmases, the New Year's Eves. I get hysterical, in other words, and unhappy and unsatisfied and guilty if I don't produce much. By the way, I am a very slow writer. And I rewrite obsessively.

To conclude, here is Oriana Fallaci, speaking of her legacy:

She hopes, through her books,to die a little less when I die. To leave the children I did not have...To make people think a little more, outside the dogmas that this society has nourished us with through centuries. To give stories and ideas that help people to see better, to think better, to know a little more.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Oriana Fallaci who will speak on "The European Apocalypse: Islam and the West."

Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Obituary: Oriana Fallaci

[I did not share her atheistic leanings but Ms. Fallaci was a truly remarkable woman. Fallaci was an extremely courageous individual of rare conviction and insight...her death is a great loss. I certainly shared her assessment of the growing threat of Islam and her books "The Force of Reason" and "The Rage and the Pride" are must reading. - jtf]

Oriana Fallaci, Incisive Italian Journalist, Is Dead at 77

By IAN FISHER
Published: September 16, 2006
The New York Times

ROME, Sept. 15 — Oriana Fallaci, a dissecting interviewer of the powerful and an iconoclastic journalist who became an icon herself, died Friday in her home city of Florence, Italy. She was 77.

Ms. Fallaci, who also had a home in Manhattan, was known to have suffered from cancer for the last decade. Paolo Klun, an official with the RCS publishing group, which carried Ms. Fallaci’s work, told The Associated Press that Ms. Fallaci had gone back to Florence days ago as her condition worsened and that she had died at a private hospital there.

Known in recent years for writing angrily against Islam, Ms. Fallaci became famous in the 1960’s and 70’s for her war journalism and her long, aggressive and revealing interviews with prominent people. She was once described in The Los Angeles Times as “the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no.” Among her subjects were Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian revolution; Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader; Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister; Indira Gandhi, the longstanding Indian prime minister; Nguyen Van Thieu, the South Vietnamese president during the war years; and Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of state.

Mr. Kissinger called his experience with Ms. Fallaci “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.” At the height of his power and celebrity in 1972, she had coaxed him to admit that at times he felt like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town.” Mr. Kissinger later wrote in his memoirs that the quotation harmed his relations with Nixon.

A glamorous figure with high cheekbones, a black curl of eyeliner and an ever-present cigarette, she believed that she had the right to ask or say anything, and did so in writings translated into more than 20 languages. In interviews she could be in turn incisive, flattering and blunt, taking her subjects by surprise.

“How do you swim in a chador?” she asked Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, not long after he came to power in Iran. His reply, she wrote in The New York Times, was that she was not obliged to wear one, because it was a garment for proper Islamic women. She tore off her chador, and Ayatollah Khomeini stalked off.

Her boldness earned her a new generation of admirers — and many detractors — after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, prompted her to end years of silence with warnings about Islam. In three books beginning with “The Rage and the Pride” (Rizzoli, 2002) and in many interviews, she sharply criticized not only Islamic extremists but also Islam itself. She accused the West of having become too complacent and tolerant to understand the threat she believed Islam presented.

The “sons of Allah breed like rats,” she wrote, condemning the growing immigration of Muslims in Europe, including her homeland.

“Europe is no longer Europe,” she told The Wall Street Journal in 2005. “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. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty.”

Her warnings endeared her to many conservatives and won her, a lifelong atheist, an audience with Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. But she was also accused of racism, and in Switzerland and Italy she was charged with violating laws against vilifying religion. In 2003, the left-wing Italian newspaper La Repubblica called her an “exhibitionist posing as the Joan of Arc of the West.”
Born June 29, 1929, in Florence, she was made a lookout for the Italian Resistance at the age of 10 by her antifascist father, Edoardo, a cabinet maker. The early brush with danger became a pattern.

As a journalist, she covered wars from Vietnam to Central Asia to South America. In Mexico City in 1968, days before the Summer Olympics were to begin there, she was shot three times, dragged down steps by the hair by soldiers and left for dead in clashes in which several hundred protesters were killed.

“Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does,” she told an interviewer in 2001. “Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.’’

But it was her interviews that made her famous and her books staples on college campuses around the world. Never married, she fell in love with one of her subjects, the Greek poet and activist Alekos Panagoulis, who was convicted of trying to assassinate Greece’s military ruler, George Papadapoulos, in 1967. Mr. Panagoulis was killed in 1976 in a car crash that Ms. Fallaci maintained was an assassination. Her novel “A Man” was a barely concealed story of his life.

Her other books included a collection of her interviews, “Interview with History” (1976); “If the Sun Dies” (1966), about the American space program; “Letter to a Child Unborn” (1976), a novel about a single woman’s conversation with a child she aborted; and “The Force of Reason” (2006), on Islam, Europe and the angry reaction to her post-Sept. 11 book “The Rage and the Pride.”

In recent years she was a private and solitary figure, working out of her townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and visiting Florence and a house she owns in Tuscany. She is survived by a sister, Paola, who was with her when she died, Italian news reports said.
For a woman who relentlessly prodded her interview subjects into self revelation, Ms. Fallaci said she did not like to talk about herself.

“To speak of oneself means to lay bare one’s own soul, expose it like a body to the sun,” she told an interviewer in 1979. “To lay bare one’s own soul is not at all like taking off one’s brassiere on a crowded beach!”


Related
Review: 'Inshallah' (Dec. 27, 1992)
Fallaci Directs Her Fury Toward Islam (newyorker.com)
The Rage and the Pride (italian.about.com)
Interview With Deng Xiaoping (english.people.com.cn)

Mark Steyn- Book Review: The Force of Reason by Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci

April 28, 2006

Celebrate tolerance, or you're dead

Oriana Fallaci appeals to Europe to save itself. Good luck

Maclean's- Canada's Weekly Newsmagazine

Over in Sweden, they've been investigating the Grand Mosque of Stockholm. Apparently, it's the one-stop shop for all your jihad needs: you can buy audio cassettes at the mosque encouraging you to become a martyr and sally forth to kill "the brothers of pigs and apes" -- i.e. Jews. So somebody filed a racial-incitement complaint and the coppers started looking into it, and then Sweden's chancellor of justice, Goran Lambertz, stepped in. And Mr. Lambertz decided to close down the investigation on the grounds that, even though the porcine-sibling stuff is "highly degrading," this kind of chit-chat "should be judged differently -- and therefore be regarded as permissible -- because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict."

In other words, if you threaten to kill people often enough, it will be seen as part of your vibrant cultural tradition -- and, by definition, we're all cool with that. Celebrate diversity, etc. Our tolerant multicultural society is so tolerant and multicultural we'll tolerate your intolerant uniculturalism. Your antipathy to diversity is just another form of diversity for us to celebrate.

Diversity-wise, Europe is a very curious place -- and I mean that even by Canadian standards.
In her latest book, The Force of Reason, the fearless Oriana Fallaci, Italy's most-read and most-sued journalist, recounts some of her recent legal difficulties with the Continental diversity coercers. The Federal Office of Justice in Berne asked the Italian government to extradite her over her last book, The Rage and The Pride, so she could be charged under Article 261b of the Swiss Criminal Code. As she points out, Article 261b was promulgated in order to permit Muslims "to win any ideological or private lawsuit by invoking religious racism and racial discrimination. 'He-didn't-chase-me-because-I'm-a-thief-but-because-I'm-a-Muslim.' " She's also been sued in France, where suits against writers are routine now. She has had cases brought against her in her native Italy and, because of the European Arrest Warrant, which includes charges of "xenophobia" as grounds for extradition from one EU nation to another, most of the Continent is now unsafe for her to set foot in. What's impressive is the range of organized opposition: the Islamic Centre of Berne, the Somali Association of Geneva, the SOS Racism of Lausanne, and a group of Muslim immigrants in Neuchâtel, just to name a random sampling of her Swiss plaintiffs. After the London bombings and the French riots, the commentariat lined up to regret that European Muslims are insufficiently "assimilated." But, in fact, at least in their mastery of legalisms and victimology, they're superbly assimilated. One might say the same of the imam who took my chums at The Western Standard to the Alberta Human Rights Commission over their publication of the Danish cartoons.

Racked by cancer, Oriana Fallaci spends most of her time in one of the few jurisdictions in the Western world where she is not in legal jeopardy -- New York City, whence she pens magnificent screeds in the hope of rousing Europe to save itself. Good luck with that. She writes in Italian, of course, but she translates them herself into what she calls "the oddities of Fallaci's English," and the result is a bravura improvised aria, impassioned and somewhat unpredictable.
It's full of facts, starting with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II celebrated with beheading and sodomizing, and some lucky lads found themselves on the receiving end of both. This section is a lively read in an age when most westerners, consciously or otherwise, adopt the blithe incuriosity of Jimmy Kennedy's marvelous couplet in his 1950s pop hit Istanbul (Not Constantinople):

Why did Constantinople get the works?

That's nobody's business but the Turks.

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters: "If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer." I'll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah's not clear on that.

Kinky as this is, it has nothing on Fallaci's next circle of cultural diversity -- the weirdly masochistic pleasure European leaders get out of talking themselves down and talking Islam up. Beginning with the German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the 1983 Hamburg Symposium for the Euro-Arab Dialogue, Signora Fallaci rounds up a quarter-century's worth of westerners who've insisted that everything you know was invented by Islam: paper, medicine, sherbet, artichokes, on and on and on . . .

"Always clever, the Muslims. Always at the top. Always ingenious. In philosophy, in mathematics, in gastronomy, in literature, in architecture, in medicine, in music, in law, in hydraulics, in cooking. And always stupid, we westerners. Always inadequate, always inferior. Therefore obliged to thank some son of Allah who preceded us. Who enlightened us. Who acted as a schoolteacher guiding dim-witted pupils."

This, it seems to me, is the most valuable contribution of Oriana Fallaci's work. I enjoy the don't-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I'd rather Mohammed Atta was downriver in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he's not. And one reason why westernized Muslims seem so confident is that Europeans like Herr Genscher, in positing a choice between a generalized "Islam" and "the West," have inadvertently promoted a globalized pan-Islamism that's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, Germany has Turks, France has Algerians, Britain has Pakistanis, the Netherlands has Indonesians. Even though they're all Muslims, the differences between them have been very significant: Sunni vs. Shia, Arab Islam vs. the more moderate form prevailing in Southeast Asia.

Once upon a time we used to understand this. I've noticed in the last few years that, if you pull any old minor 19th-century memoir off the shelf, the en passant observations about Islam seem more informed than most of the allegedly expert commentary that appeared in the year after 9/11. For example, in Our Crisis: Or Three Months at Patna During the Insurrection of 1857, William Tayler wrote, "With the Soonnees the Wahabees are on terms of tolerable agreement, though differing on certain points, but from the Sheahs, they differ radically, and their hatred, like all religious hatred, is bitter and intolerant. But the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect, and that which principally concerns this narrative, is the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide."

Mr. Tayler, a minor civil servant in Bengal, was a genuine "multiculturalist." That's to say, although he regarded his own culture as superior, he was engaged enough by the ways of others to study the differences between them. By contrast, contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them. After all, if it's grossly judgmental to say one culture's better than another, why bother learning about the differences? "Celebrate diversity" with a uniformity of ignorance. Had William Tayler been around when the Islamification of the West got under way and you'd said to him there was a mosque opening down the street, he'd have wanted to know: what kind of mosque? Who's the imam? What branch of Islam? Old-school imperialists could never get away with the feel-good condescension of PC progressives.

Here's Tayler again: "The tenets originally professed by the Wahabees have been described as a Mahomedan Puritanism joined to a Bedouin Phylarchy, in which the great chief is both the political and religious leader of the nation."

Just so. In 1946, Col. William Eddy, the first U.S. minister to Saudi Arabia, was told by the country's founder, Ibn Saud: "We will use your iron, but you will leave our faith alone."

William Tayler might have questioned whether that was such a great deal. The House of Saud used the Americans' "iron" to enrich themselves and export the hardest, most unyielding form of Islam to the Balkans and Indonesia and Britain and North America.

This resurgent Islam -- promoted by a malign alliance between Europe and the Saudis -- is a much better example of globalization than McDonald's. In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it's put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office in Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of antitrust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom 'n' pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis' Burqa King version of globalization. If a 21st-century William Tayler is unlikely, perhaps Naomi Klein could step into the breach.

To comment, email letters@macleans.ca

Cathy Seipp: Bookstore Censors

Oriana Fallaci


The New York Post

March 11, 2006 -- A friend of mine took his daughter to visit the famous City Lights in San Francisco, explaining that this store is important because years ago it sold books no other store would - even, perhaps especially, books whose ideas many people found offensive. So, though my friend is no Ward Churchill fan, he didn't really mind the prominent display of books by the guy who famously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns."

But it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed English translation of Oriana Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason," might finally be available, and that, because Fallaci's militant stance against Islamic militants offends so many people a store committed to selling banned books would be the perfect place to buy it. So he asked a clerk if the new Fallaci book was in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Just savor the absurd details of this for a minute. City Lights has a long and proud history of supporting banned authors - owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was indicted (and acquitted) for obscenity in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and a photo in the store's main room shows Ferlinghetti proudly posing next to a sign reading, "BANNED BOOKS." City Lights also has been featured in the ACLU's annual Banned Books Week events.

Yet the store won't carry Fallaci - who is being sued in Italy for insulting religion because of her latest book, and also continues to fight the good fight against those who think that the appropriate response to offensive books and cartoons is violent rioting.

It's particularly repugnant that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by a snotty San Francisco clerk.

Strangest of all is the scenario of such a person's disliking an author for defending Western civilization against radical Islam - when one of the first things those poor persecuted Islamists would do, if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the United States, is crush suspected homosexuals like him beneath walls.

Yet those most oppressed by political Islam continue to defend it, even (perhaps especially) in the wake of the Danish cartoon furor. I've heard that in Europe this phenomenon is now called the Copenhagen Syndrome and that some of its arguments really are amazing.

For instance: "Freedom of speech is not absolute. It has to be in the service of something, like peace or social justice," a young British Muslim woman named Fareena Alam wrote in The (U.K.) Observer in mid-February.

While it's true that freedom of speech is not absolute - laws against libel and making violent threats are stronger in Britain than here - Alam has it exactly wrong. Free speech doesn't have to be in the service of anything but its own point of view. If it did, it wouldn't be free speech.

The attitude isn't only evident in women's defending the faith of their fathers. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about media bias at USC a few days after the first cartoon riots had broken out. At the end, one woman in the audience stood - as so often happens at these events - to use the question-and-answer time to get up on a soapbox. She began by announcing that her father had been in five concentration camps, so she knows about the Holocaust. Then she segued into a long, rambling position statement about how little we understand the Muslim world.

The truth is by now we understand the Muslim world all too well. For those who manage to remain perplexed, there are many helpful news photos of placards ("Behead Those Who Disrespect Islam," "Get Ready for the Real Holocaust"), often carried by religiously shrouded women, that can clear up their puzzlement.

Back to City Lights, which indeed has no plan to sell any book by the "fascist" free-speech defender Oriana Fallaci. The store's Web site proudly declares that the place is "known for our commitment to freedom of expression," in which case you might assume such commitment includes supporting those whose free expression puts them in real danger. But although "The Force of Reason" is expected to reach the United States this spring, a City Lights clerk said when I called they had no plans to carry anything by Fallaci and that they have never sold any of her work.

"You're welcome to buy her book elsewhere, though," my friend was told helpfully when he visited. "Let's just say we don't have room for her here."

OK, let's just say that. But let's also say that one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it.

Catherine Seipp writes the "From the Left Coast" column for National Review Online.

FrontPage Magazine's Woman of the Year: Oriana Fallaci

By FrontPage Magazine
December 30, 2005

After spending most of the last century fighting against fascism, Oriana Fallaci continues to demonstrate the enduring grip of Orwellianism: she is to be tried in Italy for thought-crime. For spending her childhood fighting Hitler and Mussolini, and for dedicating the last four years of her life to rousing the West to the danger posed by Islamofascism, she more than merits designation as FrontPage Magazine’s Woman of the Year.

Oriana Fallaci has rebelled against fascism most of her life. She is not an ideologue, bound to implement any given ideology. Hers is a defensive mission. She is, by her own designation, neither a conservative nor a leftist, finding defects with both. Like FrontPage Magazine, her main concern is fighting encroaching totalitarianism, not advancing a narrow partisan agenda ruled by either orthodoxy.

This is, in fact, her second honor from FrontPage Magazine. David Horowitz bestowed the Center for the Study of Popular Culture's prestigious Annie Taylor Award upon Oriana in a special ceremony in New York last month. In his speech, he called the Italian firebrand author and journalist “a warrior in the cause of human freedom.”

How right he was.

Oriana commenced her lifelong insurrection against totalitarianism early, fighting the Axis powers as part of the Resistance. For her actions, the fascists tortured her father, who defiantly refused to collaborate. The lesson stuck. Oriana smuggled weapons to anti-Hitler forces within Germany. After Mussolini received his just deserts, she became a journalist, acting as a war correspondent in Vietnam. In the following decades, she would earn a reputation as one of the world’s most probing interviewers.

Over her career, she met with the world’s leading figures – for good or ill – interviewing everyone from Kissinger to Qaddafi. She examined a rage-filled Yasser Arafat, who revealed to her that he liked little boys. She sat down with the Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini (separately, of course) – the latter so infuriating her that during one of his rants, she ripped off the headscarf she was forced to wear in his presence. After making an international impact in her chosen field, she retreated into semi-retirement.

Then after a lengthy hiatus, Oriana Fallaci found herself lured from a self-imposed exile by the clarion call of 9/11.

She spoke and wrote forcefully about the peril a free, pluralistic, democratic, and secular society faced at the hands of an Islamic jihad. She condemned terrorism everywhere and called out the Euro-leftists who marched in solidarity with Palestinian terrorists – including some elements of the Vatican. Straining against the vivid memories of a war correspondent and every inclination of her heart, she supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, writing of her anguish:

I hate [war] as the pacifists in bad or good faith never will. I loathe it. Every book I have written overflows with that loathing, and I cannot bear the sight of guns…When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It's suicide.

It was in this period that she committed her unpardonable sin: she published “the trilogy” of books examining the threat of jihad in detail: The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason, and The Apocalypse.

The cancer-stricken 75-year-old woman was promptly demonized by the Islamic world, by the European Left, and even demonized as a racist by Newsweek.

Her crime? She exposed the threat of Islamic jihad – from without and within. Europe, she wrote, is becoming “an Islamic province, an Islamic colony.” Describing increasingly Muslim Europe, she wrote, “In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran.” When Shari’a rules certain areas of Christendom’s ancient home continent, and French girls cannot go through certain Parisian neighborhoods without wearing a burqa without fear of being raped, few could argue with her insight.

She frankly says she is against Islam, not because she opposes religious freedom, but because she believes in it. As she has said, after 9/11, “they want to come impose it on me, on us.” She calls herself “a Catholic atheist,” and she realizes the world cannot survive half-secular and half-theocratic, anymore than it can survive half-slave and half-free.

Unlike Daniel Pipes, she has written that there is no moderate Islam, that radicalism is ingrained in the religion itself, but that does not mean there aren’t any moderate Muslims. However, she recognizes some Muslims have risen above (or ignored) a literal interpretation of the Koran, as adherents of Judaism and Christianity did before them. In this, she is echoing both Muslim apostates and Muslim fundamentalists, each of whom insist jihad is the truest expression of the religion of Mohammed, and those who shun that path are displaying infidelity to the Prophet. As with Salman Rushdie, a fatwa was soon issued for the septuagenarian.

Her frank truthfulness was also too much for the sensibilities of unfree Europe. In 2002, she faced charges in France that her book The Rage and the Pride promoted “racism,” the plaintiffs apparently unaware “Muslim” is not a racial designation. (Fallaci supported Operation Iraqi Freedom to give Arabs the gift of self-determination.)

Two years later, she learned she would face similar charges in her native Italy, over the same book. In April 2004, an Italian leftist judge allowed the Muslim-instigated lawsuit to go forward on the grounds that her works were “without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who practice that religious faith.” However, FrontPage Magazine columnist Robert Spencer has examined the allegedly “offensive” passages that “defame Islam” – 18 in all – and found each one undeniably rooted in Islamic theology and history.

The plaintiff, Adel Smith, president of the Muslim Union of Italy, could as easily be charged by the loose anti-religious discrimination statute that has snared Fallaci. He calls on fellow believers in the Religion of Peace to “eliminate” and “die with Fallaci.” He also refers to Christianity as a “criminal association” and has demeaned the Crucifix as a “miniature cadaver.”

However, Europe is Europe, and now for refusing to live according to Shari’a law, a woman who helped free Italy from Il Duce is on trial for speaking her conscience about the next impending, Islamofascist threat.

Since the trial, she has taken refuge in Upper Manhattan, during what she openly anticipates will be the final year of her life, estranged from the people she loves and the land she helped free. Yet in her exile, she has rallied another democracy in danger of slouching into pre-9/11 complacency. She tells all the American anti-terror crowds she can that the media are collaborating with America’s enemies. America faces an implacable enemy out to impose an all-encompassing legal code upon the entire infidel world, and the media continue to portray the jihadists as poverty-stricken victims of Yankee imperialism, someone with whom to enter into a dialogue. This is blurring the West’s vision of the true nature of the enemy and obscuring the stakes if we fail.

The media, though, are not the all-important problem. Most importantly in her view, Americans have lost their passion for freedom. They have specifically lost The Rage and the Pride, the patriotism that comes from being a believer in liberty and the burning desire to protect our “Shining city upon a hill” at all costs. That’s what she’s trying to stir, and the world will be safer in 2006 if it catches spark from her flame.

Previous honorees:
2004: John O’Neill
2003: Col. Allen B. West

Robert Spencer: Jihadism and the Qur'an

Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 8, 2005

Last week in New York, Oriana Fallaci stated that the Qur’an was the Mein Kampf of the Jihadi movement. She pointed put out that Islam’s holy book demands the annihilation or subjugation of the other, and that it wants to substitute totalitarianism for democracy.

Her statement, as you may imagine, has caused considerable controversy. A few of the statements I have seen:

"Calling the Koran Mein Kampf is muddle headed and hysterical.....deserves a rebuttal."

"There are moderate Moslems.....I lived among them in Turkey while my Bulgarian relatives went to concentration camps..."

"Tarring the whole religion is counterproductive.....Arab Moslems are terrorists in training but many non Arab Moslems are not jihadists....."

"If there are no moderate muslims, as Fallaci says, then we are doomed.....Is it not better to call them Islamofascists or Jihadists?"

"The Koran is 'Mein Kampf'.....oh come on...."

"In order to be a moderate Moslem does one have to renounce the Koran? I think that as usual, Oriana goes too far."

There is a muddle in these comments that needs sorting out. Fallaci said that there was no moderate Islam; she did not say that there were no moderate Muslims. This is a crucial distinction.

As Ibn Warraq has said, "There may be moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate." In other words, there are manifestly peaceful people who have no intention of working by violent or subversive means to impose Sharia on the West, and who identify themselves as Muslims. This simple fact does not mitigate the other fact, that some high-profile moderates, such as Cleveland Imam Fawaz Damra, who signed the recent Fiqh Council of North America's fatwa against terrorism, turned out to be deceivers.

No one can claim that all peaceful Muslims are deceivers without being able to look into the soul of each one -- although I know that some ignorant and intemperate writers on Islam have made just such a claim. And to say that the Qur'an is the Mein Kampf of the jihad movement is not to deny the reality that many, if not most, people who identify themselves as Muslims are primarily interested in living ordinary lives, making a living, providing for their families, etc.

How could it be that the Qur'an could be the Mein Kampf -- that is, the inspiration and guidebook, the motivating force -- of the jihad movement, and yet there could be peaceful Muslims? In the first place, because jihadists themselves routinely invoke it as the justification for their acts of violence, and as a means to recruit other Muslims into their movement. Hundreds of photos are available online of jihad terrorists brandishing the Qur'an, often along with rifles or other weapons. And any cursory glance at the statements of jihadists shows them to be filled with Qur'an quotes and appeals to other Muslims that they represent "pure Islam."

Nor are these jihadists misrepresenting, twisting, or hijacking what the Qur'an says. Indeed, they are fiercely literalistic, taking the book's many martial verses at face value. There are over a hundred verses in the Qur’an that exhort believers to wage jihad against unbelievers. “O Prophet! Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell, an evil refuge indeed” (Sura 9:73). “Strive hard” in Arabic is jahidi, a verbal form of the noun jihad. This striving was to be on the battlefield: “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Qur’an 47:4). This is emphasized repeatedly: “O ye who believe! Fight the unbelievers who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you: and know that Allah is with those who fear Him” (Qur’an 9:123).

This warfare was to be directed against both those who rejected Islam and those who professed to be Muslims but did not hold to the fullness of the faith: “Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate” (Qur’an 9:73). This warfare was only part of the larger spiritual conflict between Allah and Satan: “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil: so fight ye against the friends of Satan” (Qur’an 4:76). “Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful” (Qur’an 9:5). The “poor-due” in this verse is zakat, which is a central obligation for Muslims. Thus the verse is saying that if the “idolaters” become Muslims, leave them alone.

Jews and Christians were to be fought along with “idolaters”: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).

Jihad is the highest duty of Muslims: “Do ye make the giving of drink to pilgrims, or the maintenance of the Sacred Mosque, equal to the pious service of those who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and strive with might and main in the cause of Allah [jihad fi sabil Allah]? They are not comparable in the sight of Allah: and Allah guides not those who do wrong. Those who believe, and suffer exile and strive with might and main, in Allah’s cause [jihad fi sabil Allah], with their goods and their persons, have the highest rank in the sight of Allah: they are the people who will achieve salvation” (Qur’an 9:19-20). In Islamic theology, jihad fi sabil Allah refers specifically to taking up arms for Islam.

Paradise is guaranteed to those who “slay and are slain” for Allah: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth” (Qur’an 9:111).

One may attempt to spiritualize such verses, but there is no doubt from the historical record that Muhammad meant them literally. They are also backed up by numerous passages of Islamic tradition and law. Nonetheless, the fact that warfare against unbelievers is not a twisting of Islam, but the Islamic mainstream, and is repeatedly affirmed in the Qur’an, Hadith, example of Muhammad, and rulings of every school of Islamic jurisprudence, still does not make every Muslim a terrorist.

There are several principal reasons for this. One is that because the Qur’an is in difficult, classical Arabic, and must be read and recited during Muslim prayers in that language only, a surprisingly large number of those who identify themselves as Muslims actually have scant acquaintance with what it actually says. Although the media establishment continues to use the words “Muslim” and “Arab” as if they were synonymous, most Muslims worldwide today are not Arabs. Even modern Arabic, much less classical Qur’anic Arabic, is foreign to them. They often memorize the Qur’an by rote without any clear idea of what it actually says. A Pakistani Muslim once proudly told me that he had memorized large sections of the Qur’an, and planned one day to buy a translation so that he could find out exactly what it was saying. Such instances are common to a degree that may surprise most non-Muslims.

Other cultural factors have up until recent times also militated against Muslims, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, acting on or even knowing much about Islam’s actual teachings on how to deal with unbelievers. However, that is changing: in those areas and elsewhere around the world, Muslim hardliners, though not always financed by Saudi Arabia, have made deep inroads into peaceful Muslim communities by preaching violent Islam as the “pure Islam” and calling Muslims back to the full observance of their religion. And they are doing it by means of the Qur'an.

So is the Qur'an the Mein Kampf of the totalitarian, supremacist movement that is the global Islamic jihad? If we take seriously the words of the book itself and how they are used by jihadists, then it clearly is their inspiration and justification. Are we to ignore the jihadists' clear statements on this because they offend contemporary sensibilities? The challenge for genuinely peaceful Muslims today is to confront this fact, rather then deny it as Islamic apologists in the West so often do, and try to formulate strategies for a large-scale rejection of literalism in the Islamic community in America and worldwide, so that Muslims can coexist peacefully as equals with non-Muslims without the continuing recrudescence of this supremacist impulse.

Can it be done? The odds against it are prohibitive. But we do not do genuine Muslim reformers any favor whatsoever by denying that there is any work they need do with the Qur'an and Islamic tradition, or by pretending that the source of the problem is other than what it is.

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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.