Oriana Fallaci, combative journalist

ROME – Oriana Fallaci, a bold and abrasive journalist who used merciless grilling to make some of the world’s movers and shakers, from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Henry Kissinger, lower their guard, died on Friday in her native Florence.

The combative Fallaci (76), who had written about her long battle with breast cancer, returned to the Tuscan capital earlier this month from New York, where she had lived as a near-recluse for decades, to spend her final days, said Italian Red Cross officials who helped arrange ambulance transport to a private clinic in Florence after her flight. Virtually all of the literary energy and passion in her final years were consumed in vehement attacks on a Muslim world she judged to be the enemy of Western civilisation.POWERFUL WRITING After a decade-long absence from the publishing scene, she burst into the spotlight after the September 11 attacks with a series of blistering essays in which she argued that Muslims were carrying out a crusade against the Christian West.At the time of her death, she was on trial in northern Italy for defamation.A Muslim activist in Italy accused her of defaming Islam in a 2004 book, ‘The Strength of Reason’.She argued in the work that Europe sold its soul to what she called an Islamic invasion.A group in France unsuccessfully sought to stop distribution of another largely anti-Islamic book, ‘The Rage and the Pride’, which Fallaci wrote as a response to the terror attacks.An Islamic group expressed “relief” at her death.”It’s almost impossible to feel pity for somebody like Oriana Fallaci,” Dacia Valent, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Anti-Defamation League, told the Apcom news agency.So powerful was Fallaci’s writing that critics were among those praising her after news of her death.”I have to say that I didn’t agree with many of her analyses in her recent books,” centre-left Premier Romano Prodi was quoted as telling reporters in China on Friday where he was on a visit.”But they have always been insightful analyses which obliged us to think.”The daughter of an anti-fascist resistance fighter in Tuscany, she joined the fight as a teenager in the early 1940s.Her journalistic war resume included eight years covering the Vietnam war.When she was 61, she covered the Persian Gulf War, her last major reportage.Conservative Senator Renato Schifani expressed regret that Fallaci had never been made a senator for life, calling her “a true protagonist of the West, of our values, of our civilisation”.’TIGRESS OF TYPEWRITER’ When Fallaci was 16, and still in pigtails, she liked to recall, she began earning her living in journalism.She “burst onto the scene and made a name for herself at a time when women were not very popular or tolerated in newspapers,” veteran Italian journalist Vittorio Feltri told Sky TG24 TV.In 1954, she launched a 22-year-long relationship as a special correspondent for what were then two of Italy’s biggest weeklies, Epoca and Europeo.Two bullets pierced her body, one stopping just short of her spinal cord, in 1968, when she covered a Mexican army massacre of young protesters in Mexico City.The woman dubbed “the tigress of the typewriter” began interviewing Hollywood celebrities, but soon narrowed her subjects to those with the power to shape the world.”I want to know what the others are going to do with us,” Fallaci told this reporter in an interview with The AP in San Francisco in the early ’80s.”I don’t want to die in the Third World War.You’re not going to decide and not the man who just came to empty the ashtray,” said Fallaci, snuffing out one cigarette after another.Among those who submitted to her grilling was Khomeini, a month before the US hostages were taken in Tehran.”That’s enough.I’m tired.That’s enough,” the Iranian leader said at the end of the session.Fallaci’s interview with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in a tent in the desert lasted five days.Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, said of his session with Fallaci: “Why I agreed to it, I’ll never know.”When interviewed by Fallaci, Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was so scathing of India’s Indira Gandhi that a 1972 treaty between the two nations almost wasn’t signed, according to one account.”If they made me an ambassador, World War III would break out,” Fallaci once said.Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace prize for his work with the Polish Solidarity labour movement, recalled that he cut short her interview with him in the early 80s, saying she used journalistic tricks on him.”She was a great writer, a great journalist, but she used some sort of shortcuts in thinking,” Walesa said.The New Yorker wrote in a recent profile that Fallaci disarmed her subjects with “bald questions about death, God, and pity” and “displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence”.Fallaci once described journalism as “a moral commitment.It’s courage, it’s culture.”EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS She also wrestled with existential questions like why women decide to have children and turned her musings into best-sellers, including the 1975 ‘Letter to a Child Never Born’.When, in the early 90s, she had breast surgery in Milan, she had the surgeon show her the cancerous tissue so she could size up her latest adversary.She confessed frustration about what she called Americans’ lack of knowledge about life outside their borders when she toured the United States in the early 80s to promote her novel, ‘A Man’, which was about her lover, Alexander Panagoulis, who was imprisoned and tortured for unsuccessfully trying to assassinate Greek dictator George Papadopoulus.(Panagoulis died in a 1976 car accident that Fallaci maintained was the work of the right-wing military.) Still, Fallaci professed preferring life in America to that in Italy.She divided her time between Tuscany and a book-filled apartment in Manhattan and lectured on US campuses.While many in Europe were questioning US policy after the September 11 attacks, Fallaci made a stinging indictment of Muslim immigrants and Italian ambivalence toward America.She shocked many Italians by rallying to American’s defence and depicting Muslim culture as a danger to Western civilisation.In a front-page essay in September 2001, in Corriere della Sera, Fallaci wrote: “I don’t go around singing ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ in front of Mohammad’s tomb.”That essay was the basis for ‘The Rage and the Pride’, which sold more than 1 million copies in Italy.Offending some, Fallaci wrote that Muslims “multiply like rats” and another in which she said that “the children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day”.In the defamation indictment, the judge cited a passage from ‘The Strength of Reason’: “To be under the illusion that there is a good Islam and a bad Islam or not to understand that Islam is only one … is against reason.””I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all,” Fallaci told The Associated Press after the indictment.”She interpreted the discomfort of Western modernity, perhaps at times with tones you couldn’t share but certainly she interpreted it, and luckily there was someone to interpret it,” said Ferruccio De Bortoli, who was Corriere’s editor when it published the stinging essays.Fallaci took the Catholic Church to task for being what she considered too weak before the Muslim world.But she praised Pope Benedict XVI for urging Europe to value their Christian roots, and had a private audience with him at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.”I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true.”Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.Fallaci never married and had no children.Nampa-APVirtually all of the literary energy and passion in her final years were consumed in vehement attacks on a Muslim world she judged to be the enemy of Western civilisation.POWERFUL WRITING After a decade-long absence from the publishing scene, she burst into the spotlight after the September 11 attacks with a series of blistering essays in which she argued that Muslims were carrying out a crusade against the Christian West.At the time of her death, she was on trial in northern Italy for defamation.A Muslim activist in Italy accused her of defaming Islam in a 2004 book, ‘The Strength of Reason’.She argued in the work that Europe sold its soul to what she called an Islamic invasion.A group in France unsuccessfully sought to stop distribution of another largely anti-Islamic book, ‘The Rage and the Pride’, which Fallaci wrote as a response to the terror attacks.An Islamic group expressed “relief” at her death.”It’s almost impossible to feel pity for somebody like Oriana Fallaci,” Dacia Valent, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Anti-Defamation League, told the Apcom news agency.So powerful was Fallaci’s writing that critics were among those praising her after news of her death.”I have to say that I didn’t agree with many of her analyses in her recent books,” centre-left Premier Romano Prodi was quoted as telling reporters in China on Friday where he was on a visit.”But they have always been insightful analyses which obliged us to think.”The daughter of an anti-fascist resistance fighter in Tuscany, she joined the fight as a teenager in the early 1940s.Her journalistic war resume included eight years covering the Vietnam war.When she was 61, she covered the Persian Gulf War, her last major reportage.Conservative Senator Renato Schifani expressed regret that Fallaci had never been made a senator for life, calling her “a true protagonist of the West, of our values, of our civilisation”. ‘TIGRESS OF TYPEWRITER’ When Fallaci was 16, and still in pigtails, she liked to recall, she began earning her living in journalism.She “burst onto the scene and made a name for herself at a time when women were not very popular or tolerated in newspapers,” veteran Italian journalist Vittorio Feltri told Sky TG24 TV.In 1954, she launched a 22-year-long relationship as a special correspondent for what were then two of Italy’s biggest weeklies, Epoca and Europeo.Two bullets pierced her body, one stopping just short of her spinal cord, in 1968, when she covered a Mexican army massacre of young protesters in Mexico City.The woman dubbed “the tigress of the typewriter” began interviewing Hollywood celebrities, but soon narrowed her subjects to those with the power to shape the world.”I want to know what the others are going to do with us,” Fallaci told this reporter in an interview with The AP in San Francisco in the early ’80s.”I don’t want to die in the Third World War.You’re not going to decide and not the man who just came to empty the ashtray,” said Fallaci, snuffing out one cigarette after another.Among those who submitted to her grilling was Khomeini, a month before the US hostages were taken in Tehran.”That’s enough.I’m tired.That’s enough,” the Iranian leader said at the end of the session.Fallaci’s interview with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in a tent in the desert lasted five days.Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, said of his session with Fallaci: “Why I agreed to it, I’ll never know.”When interviewed by Fallaci, Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was so scathing of India’s Indira Gandhi that a 1972 treaty between the two nations almost wasn’t signed, according to one account.”If they made me an ambassador, World War III would break out,” Fallaci once said.Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace prize for his work with the Polish Solidarity labour movement, recalled that he cut short her interview with him in the early 80s, saying she used journalistic tricks on him.”She was a great writer, a great journalist, but she used some sort of shortcuts in thinking,” Walesa said.The New Yorker wrote in a recent profile that Fallaci disarmed her subjects with “bald questions about death, God, and pity” and “displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence”.Fallaci once described journalism as “a moral commitment.It’s courage, it’s culture.”EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS She also wrestled with existential questions like why women decide to have children and turned her musings into best-sellers, including the 1975 ‘Letter to a Child Never Born’.When, in the early 90s, she had breast surgery in Milan, she had the surgeon show her the cancerous tissue so she could size up her latest adversary.She confessed frustration about what she called Americans’ lack of knowledge about life outside their borders when she toured the United States in the early 80s to promote her novel, ‘A Man’, which was about her lover, Alexander Panagoulis, who was imprisoned and tortured for unsuccessfully trying to assassinate Greek dictator George Papadopoulus.(Panagoulis died in a 1976 car accident that Fallaci maintained was the work of the right-wing military.) Still, Fallaci professed preferring life in America to that in Italy.She divided her time between Tuscany and a book-filled apartment in Manhattan and lectured on US campuses.While many in Europe were questioning US policy after the September 11 attacks, Fallaci made a stinging indictment of Muslim immigrants and Italian ambivalence toward America.She shocked many Italians by rallying to American’s defence and depicting Muslim culture as a danger to Western civilisation.In a front-page essay in September 2001, in Corriere della Sera, Fallaci wrote: “I don’t go around singing ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary’ in front of Mohammad’s tomb.”That essay was the basis for ‘The Rage and the Pride’, which sold more than 1 million copies in Italy.Offending some, Fallaci wrote that Muslims “multiply like rats” and another in which she said that “the children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day”.In the defamation indictment, the judge cited a passage from ‘The Strength of Reason’: “To be under the illusion that there is a good Islam and a bad Islam or not to understand that Islam is only one … is against reason.””I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all,” Fallaci told The Associated Press after the indictment.”She interpreted the discomfort of Western modernity, perhaps at times with tones you couldn’t share but certainly she interpreted it, and luckily there was someone to interpret it,” said Ferruccio De Bortoli, who was Corriere’s editor when it published the stinging essays.Fallaci took the Catholic Church to task for being what she considered too weak before the Muslim world.But she praised Pope Benedict XVI for urging Europe to value their Christian roots, and had a private audience with him at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.”I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true.”Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.Fallaci never married and had no children.Nampa-AP