Oriana Fallaci -July 29, 1929 - September 15, 2006

Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's best-known writers and war correspondents who issued a vitriolic assault on Islam after the September 11 attacks on the United States, died on Friday aged 77. Fallaci died in her home town of Florence after battling cancer for several years, a hospital official said.

Aggressive and provocative to the end, Fallaci made her name as a tenacious interviewer of some of the most famous leaders of the 20th century. She became so enraged with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Kohmeini during an interview, she ripped off her Islamic robe. She compared Henry Kissinger to a cowboy, and argued with Yassir Arafat. She was volatile, outspoken, and one of the best Journalists of this century.

Ironically, she claimed that she hated to write, and concerning reporting, she described it as wearing handcuffs.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Ariana Fallaci, a renowned journalist of brutal honesty whose interviews with the world’s leading personalities left few unscathed, wrote an article, that would lead to a best-seller, entitled "The Force of Reason" (2005), a hostile critique of Islam and their demands of Muslims to follow their cultural practices in the predominantly Christian West.

"Look and search, search and look, I can only find the Prophet with his sacred book that sounds preposterous even when it plagiarizes the Bible and the Gospels and the Torah and the Helenistic thinkers. I only find Averroe with his indisputable merits of scholar, (Aristotle’s Commentaries and so on), Omar Kayyam with his fine poetry, plus a few beautiful mosques. No other achievement in the field of art and in the garden of Thought. No accomplishment in the domain of science, of technology, of welfare…" - Oriana Fallaci, The Rage And The Pride, p 92-93

Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "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. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." __Oriana Fallaci

Such words-"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).

"You cannot survive if you do not know the past. We know why all the other civilizations have collapsed--from an excess of welfare, of richness, and from lack of morality, of spirituality." (She uses "welfare" here in the sense of well-being, so she is talking, really, of decadence.) "The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." ____Oriana Fallaci

She refused to candycoat her criticisms of Islam. She refused to submit to jihadi thugs. Her books, her life, her rage and her reason serve as fiery inspirations in an era of flinching dhimmitude._Michelle Malkin