Neptunus Lex

Heard a funny anecdote yesterday when an NPR reporter - who had clearly been a fan - talked about Oriani Fallaci. Fallaci, who died yesterday in Florence was a heroic investigator and war correspondent who became “controversial” by asking pointed questions of the umma, and drew pointed conclusions when those questions went unanswered.

Fallaci had scored an interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, shortly after the triumph of his Islamic Revolution. Asked to wear a chador for the interview, Fallaci complied but asked increasingly direct questions about why an Italian woman, or any woman at all for that matter, must be obliged to cover her hair because of someone else’s faith. Eventually enraged by the Ayatollah’s pat answers, she ended up ripping off the chador right in front of the astonished Ayatollah, who stalked out of the room, effectively ending the interview.

She managed to calm herself down, and extracted a promise from Khomeini’s handlers to conclude the interview on the following day, subject to the condition that she ask no more questions about the chador.

Sitting across from the old man at her next interview, her first question was on the issue of the chador.

I don’t care what you think about women’s rights, you have to admit to her courage.

After 9/11 and infuriated by the European intellectual elite’s conclusion that the US “had it coming,” she broke a ten-years’s silence to pen a lacerating denunciation of such thinking, a passionate defense of Western culture, and a critical - some labelled it “racist” - catalogue of Islam’s faults in her book, “The Rage and the Pride.”

From an Amazon.com review:

She mocks the liberals of Europe who treat all the Muslim emigrants flooding their lands as “poor little things.” And to the bin Ladens and their admirers, she is unsparingly blunt. She envisions the Muslim fanatics coming after the artwork of her beloved Florence, as they did to the Bamiyan Buddhas or the World Trade Center:

“And should the poor-little-things destroy one of those treasures, only one, I swear: it is I who would become a holy-warrior. It is I who would become a murderer. So listen to me, you followers of a God who preaches an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I was born in the war. I grew up in the war. About war I know a lot and believe me: I have more balls than your kamikazes who find the courage to die only when dying means killing thousands of people. Babies included. War you wanted, war you want? Good.”

It is perhaps a mark of her perspicacity that her book, written after 9/11, but before Madrid and London, was so widely villified abroad: France, that 21^st century bastion of liberalism, considered banning it. Now it seems more and more prescient
Michael Ledeen knew her, and eulogizes her eloquently:

She was a freedom fighter to her core, having descended from a proud line of such people. She had an anarchist grandfather and an anti-fascist father (once scheduled for execution) and a mother tough as nails. Oriana ran secret missions for the anti-fascist resistance inTuscany, while still a teenager. I have no doubt that she spent her entire adult life carrying out a very well defined mission to prove herself worthy of her name. She certainly succeeded. She was one of the all-time great nonconformists, she fought tyranny wherever she saw it and she challenged evil, especially in the hands of hypocrites, as soon as she detected its rotten odor. She had a rare mixture of that amazing feminine sixth sense for phonies, and a ruthless objectivity that forced her to recognize positive qualities in even the most evil people, as when she spotted a kind of elegance and brilliance in the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Those who know Italy will recognize Oriana as the quintessential Tuscan, right out of the texts: tough, intellectually brutal, brilliantly and eloquently disparaging of anyone who doesn’t meet impossibly high standards, utterly loyal to “the cause.” Tuscans were the worst fascists and the worst communists, uncompromising, cruel and dogmatic. Happily for us, Oriana’s cause was the pursuit of truth, whatever the political and social consequences. Once considered a fashionable leftists, she positively reveled in her ostracism in later years by her old admirers. She immersed herself in the words of her critics much more than in those of her allies, because she wanted to be able to demolish the criticism. I once spent half a day in her Manhattan town house, deconstructing the attacks against her in the Italian and French press. When we’d been through it all, she laughed happily, and raced to the kitchen to cook lunch.

What a loss!