Oriana Fallaci: The Rage and the Pride
From the Washington Post: "Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's best-known writers and war correspondents who goaded the world's great and issued a vitriolic assault on Islam after the September 11 attacks on the United States, died on Friday aged 77."
In the wake of last year's London terrorist bombings, a Fallaci essay entitled Il nemico che trattiamo da amico ("The Enemy We Treat As A Friend") appeared in Corriere Della Sera. In it, she named the enemy within and challenged Pope Benedict XVI to address the threat:
"In speaking of Londonistan, the section of London where some 700,000 Muslims live, the newspapers which at first gave comfort to the terrorists — going so far as to make excuses for their crime are now saying what I did when I wrote that in each one of our cities exists another city. A subterranean city; equal to Beirut when it was invaded by Arafat in the 70s. A foreign city that speaks its own language and observes its own customs; a Muslim city where terrorists go about their business undisturbed and, thus undisturbed, plan our deaths. The rest is now spoken of openly; even Islamic terrorism, something that was carefully avoided in order not to offend moderate Muslims. Yes it's true: Now, even the fifth columnists and the imams express their hypocritical condemnations, their mendacious loathing, their false solidarity with the relatives of the victims. Yes, it's true: Now, thorough searches are being made in the cases of the accused Muslims; suspects are arrested; perhaps it will even be decided to expel them. But in substance, nothing has changed. Does the matter of the One God really suffice to establish a concord of concepts, of principles, of values?!?"
It is tragic that Oriana Fallaci died during the week when the world is remembering 9/11, and it is a further tragedy that she is not here now to add her voice to the debate surrounding the Pope's address in Regensburg. Back in May, Margaret Talbot created a memorable portrait of Fallaci in the New Yorker. In The Agitator, Talbot writes that "Fallaci's virtues are the virtues that shine most brightly in stark circumstances: the ferocious courage, and the willingness to say anything, that can amount to a life force." We shall miss that life force.
