Today I read about the death of one of my favorite outspoken, opinionated feminists. She was one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era, provocateur Oriana Fallaci. I have been a fan of hers since I was a high school student in the early 1970's. Although I haven't always agreed with what she says, and at times certainly disagree vehemently, I have always respected her bravery for speaking her mind regardless of the outcome.
From her obit in the NY Times:
ROME, Sept. 15 - Oriana Fallaci, a dissecting interviewer of the powerful and an iconoclastic journalist turned icon herself, who in recent years wrote angrily about the threat of Islam, died today in her home city of Florence, the hospital reported. She was 77.
She became famous in the 1960's and '70's for her war reporting and long, aggressive and revealing interviews with prominent people. Ms. Fallaci was once labeled "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no." Among others, she interviewed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni,Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Nguyen Van Thieu and Henry Kissinger.
Mr. Kissinger, President Nixon's secretary of state, called the experience "the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press." She had coaxed him to admit, at the height of his power and celebrity in 1972, 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."
A glamorous figure with high cheekbones, a black curl of eyeliner and an ever-present cigarette, Ms. Fallaci believed she had the right to ask or say anything - and did just that in writings translated into more than 20 languages.
"How do you swim in a chador?" she asked Ayatollah Khomeni in 1979, not long after he came to power in Iran in 1979.
That trait earned her a new generation of admirers - and many other detractors - after she ended years of silence following the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. In three books beginning with "The Rage and the Pride" (Rizzoli: 2002) and many interviews after the world-changing events, she attacked not only Islamic extremists but Islam itself, as well as a West that she said had become too complaisant and tolerant to realistically understand the threat.
Saying that the "sons of Allah breed like rats," she strongly condemned the growing immigration of Muslims in Europe, including her native Italy.
"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," she told the Wall Street Journal in 2005. "Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty."
Ms. Fallaci's warnings endeared her to conservatives - and won her an audience in 2005 with Pope Benedict XVI, although she was a lifelong atheist - but she also faced accusations of racism.
She was charged in Switzerland and Italy for violating laws against vilifying religion, and in 2003, the left-wing Italian newspaper called her an "exhibitionist posing as the Joan of Arc of the West."
Born on June 29, 1929 in Florence, she was made a lookout for the Italian Resistance at only 10 years old by her anti-fascist father, Edoardo, a cabinet-maker. That early brush with adventure and war proved a pattern.
As a journalist she covered wars from Vietnam to Central Asia to South America. In Mexico City in 1968, she was shot three times, dragged down steps by the hair and left for dead in clashes between the police and student demonstrators in which several hundred protesters were killed days before the Summer Olympics held there.
"Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does," Ms. Fallaci 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. To understand human beings, ultimately war serves a writer better than any other experience - or should one use the word adventure?"
But it was her interviews that made her famous, her books staples on college campuses around the world.
For a woman who mercilessly 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!"
[oriana fallaci, journalist]
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