Oriana Fallaci
Sep 21st 2006
From The Economist print edition
Oriana Fallaci, journalist and fighter, died on September 15th, aged 77
(AP) Faint Hearts may prefer not to say that the West is at war with terror. But Oriana Fallaci, Italy's fiercest and most famous journalist, had no doubt at all. She felt it “at nine o'clock on the dot” on the morning of September 11th 2001, in her brownstone house in the middle of Manhattan, before she had heard or seen anything she could put a finger on: “the sensation one feels in war, as a matter of fact in combat, when with every pore of your skin you feel the incoming bullet or rocket, and your ears perk up and you scream to those next to you: ‘Down! Get down!’”
Years of experience had primed her for this moment. Her teenage work as a resistance fighter in and around Nazi-occupied Florence, codename “Emilia”, carrying messages and explosives. Reporting from war zones in South America, the Middle East and Vietnam, where a note on her rucksack instructed that her body should be sent to the Italian ambassador “if KIA”. Near-death in the Mexico City massacre of 1968, shot and left lying among heaps of dead beside an “execution wall”. Her waif-like body, with perfect cheekbones and hair sometimes plaited like a schoolgirl's, suggested that she lacked the strength for this sort of life. But she was a tiger.
Anyone who doubted that had only to be interviewed by her. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s she sought out the powerful, collecting such a string of famous pelts that in the end they jostled to be asked. At first she played feminine and demure; then, pouncing and insulting, she would rip out the innards of her victims. She made Henry Kissinger admit that he saw himself as a lone cowboy leading the herd, and drew from Pakistan's Zulfiqar Bhutto such words about India that peace between the two countries was held up for a time. Meeting Ayatollah Khomeini, she appeared barefoot and in a chador; but before long that “medieval rag” was flung boldly off, sending him scuttling away.
Men of this sort, “abusers of power”, both fascinated and repelled her. She dwelled on Yasser Arafat's swollen belly and his red, fleshy lips; she thought Khomeini the most handsome old man she had ever seen. As she talked to Werner von Braun, a former Nazi who was then directing America's space programme, she realised that his sweet-sour smell was the same lemon disinfectant soap used by the Nazis in Florence.
She could always sniff out tyranny, and after that September morning in Manhattan, she knew definitively where it lay. Suddenly she was in the front line again, solid with her adored America against the Muslim enemy. “Duty to her culture” required her to write for hours at a stretch in furious isolation, living on cigarillos and on her nerves, to produce books called “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason”, her “weapons of truth”.
The real enemy
It was a strange sort of truth. On every page, legitimate fears for democracy and liberty were laced with nonsense and bile. Moderate Islam, she wrote, did not exist. Islam was “a pool that never purifies”. All Muslims were bent on invading Europe and turning it into a “Eurabia” of veiled women and sharia law. Assimilation was a delusion; they did not want it. Already Miss Fallaci had heard the wailing of imams in the hills of Tuscany, and had seen Somali urine staining the Baptistery in Florence. Soon, she supposed, Muslim men would “shit in the Sistine Chapel”.
Anti-racism groups flew to indict her; defenders of free speech somewhat cautiously embraced her. Right-wing mayors of Italian towns gave her gold medals. Her books sold in the millions, and when she died she was delightedly facing trial for defaming a religion. Although she was an atheist, she had found a “soul-mate” in Pope Benedict XVI, and would have revelled in his unwise words about Islam.
For her, the enemy was always essentially the same: “fascism”, whether in the shape of Mussolini's black-shirts or Islamist suicide-bombers. But tyranny also appeared in another guise. Her real obsession, she admitted, was death.
They had tussled for a long time. Her great love, Alex Panagoulis, a leader of Greek resistance to the colonels, died in 1976 in a car crash possibly rigged by his enemies. She had lost his child in pregnancy. At 16 she chose a writer's life because typed words did not die, like talk, but stayed on the paper. She reported wars to express her hatred for man's mortality.
Her fight against “the Other One”, as she called her cancer, was a war like no other. She forbade her doctors to mention death; they were to talk to her about life. Reduced to taking only fluids, she would drink champagne. Nothing was allowed to diminish her energy for writing, cooking and leaping from her chair with a scream of “Mamma Mia!” at the folly of the world.
Yet her own death was not her chief concern. She mourned the slow death of Western civilisation, its lack of pride and self-esteem, its cowardice before the Muslim “hordes”. If terrorists were prepared to die for Islam, she would have the passion to oppose them. Her words carried the ring of deliberate provocation, challenging the Islamists to put a fatwa on her and raise a sword to behead her. In which case, before the bastards dared, she would toss back her hair, fix them with a glare and declare, in her best Italian snarl, “Fuck you.”
