Oriana Fallaci: 1929-2006
by Eve Adams

Oriana Fallaci, author, revolutionary and continental grande dame of political reporting, died of breast cancer in her native Florence, Italy, on Friday. She was 77.

If the hard-bitten, hard-driven, chain-smoking, tireless, plucky "girl reporter" has become a caricature, it is still lovely and nostalgic to know that great journalists inspired it. Fallaci approached her subjects with jaw-dropping courage and steely commitment to the page, from Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Omar Khadafi to Federico Fellini, Sean Connery and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Fallaci was frequently excoriated by fellow journalists worldwide, harassed incessantly by paramilitary groups, and generally despised by many for what some considered fascist and racist sympathies. Fellini, among others, called her a bitch.

To be fair, she was as notorious for her vitriolic distrust of Muslims and sweeping hatred of European cultural pluralism as she was celebrated for her gutsy interviews, her impassioned diction, or even her chic Toscana beauty. She famously suggested that the Ayatollah Khomeini should have been aborted, called women who criticized her fat, categorically disliked Mexicans, and publicly voiced her intention to detonate a mosque near Siena. She also carried explosives for the Italian resistance in World War II when she was sixteen, was shot in the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, and sort of got Kissinger to apologize for the Vietnam War.

More than anything, Fallaci's personally heartbroken and furious reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks informed her loathing of what she termed Islamo-fascists. (This construction was rather prescient of her when one considers the present American dialogue on Islam and terrorism.) Her ferocious articulated response to the attacks, La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio (Anger and Pride), incited a feverish global debate on the nature of Islam, the definition of terrorism, the relative merits of democracy, the human right to culture, and the proper way to translate Italian. In the September 2001 Corriere della Sera article, Fallaci came down on the side of conservative Europeans who applauded "the heroic efficiency and admirable unity with which the Americans have faced this Apocalypse," proceeded to extrapolate a long paean to all things America and American, and threw in a wrathful denunciation of Muslims at large and European liberals. She was extremely sympathetic to American military strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq, criticizing the United States military only for doing too little against those countries' regimes. The Bush administration adored her work, and her work adored the Bush administration.

What does one say in memory of Oriana Fallaci? It is unfashionable to love America, still less so to defame Islam, and terribly gauche to use the gifts of an incisive mind, a steely tongue and a way with influential men to call people like Silvio Berlusconi things like "a fucking idiot." One thinks of a more sophisticated, less hysterical Ann Coulter. Still, her crackling nerve, sobering war stories and provocative screeds are ever-rare traits in the careful, diplomatic atmosphere of modern journalism — especially in America. Oriana Fallaci was, in essence, a brilliant punk with the stitches to prove it, an irritable riot-grrl and a nasty old-fashioned anarchist. In that wide-eyed tribute to America, she reminded us of the real reasons to love and defend our country:

Don't you realize that the Osama bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don't wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short-shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you fuck when you want and where you want and who you want? Don't you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it.

And she wrote in her preface to "Interview with History":

Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon ... I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.

If she did not always live up to such gorgeous ideals, she still published them. In so doing she inspired a new generation of foul-mouthed, well-dressed, whip-smart girl reporters of whatever political stripe, for which even this liberal rag feels honored to say: brava, Oriana, and addio.

E-mail Eve Adams at ultimaluz at gmail dot com.