She cast herself in the role of Cassandra during the last years of her life, but during the first part of her memorable career Rolling Stone magazine described Oriana Fallaci as "the greatest political interviewer of modern times." Younger readers may not remember the cocky Italian reporter who came from the New Left, but was headstrong enough to alienate mighty figures at both ends of the political spectrum. No Jane Fonda, in the end Fallaci became as unpopular in Moscow's corridors of power as in Washington's. She remained popular among book and newspaper publishers, though, who had no difficulty disposing of her copy.
By the end of her life, Fallaci was the author of 14 books, of which 12 had been translated into English. She published the first one in 1958, at the age of 28. Called The Seven Sins of Hollywood, it featured a preface by Orson Welles. Her last book, an anti-Islamist pamphlet entitled The Force of Reason, was published only this spring. Her 12 books in-between included a quasi-autobiographical novel, Penelope at War, about a young female journalist who refuses her boyfriend's entreaties to stay at home (1966); a hostile look at America's war in Vietnam, called Nothing, and So Be It (1972); and her magnum opus, Interview with History (1976).
It would be hard to think of a collection to equal Fallaci's Interview with History. Fiercely beautiful in her youth, she used her appearance as a key to gain access to her male interview subjects, as well as a challenge to provoke them. Men are notoriously incautious when baited or confronted by fierce beauties, and Fallaci made short shrift of the alpha males that tried to bully or impress her. She outwitted Henry Kissinger by flattery and cowed the Ayatollah Khomeini by a fine display of Italian temper, but reserved her greatest contempt for Yasser Arafat, whom she memorably described as "a massive trunk, huge hips, and a swollen belly ... summed up in a large mouth with red and fleshy lips."
There was something about the late PLO chief that particularly rubbed Fallaci the wrong way, and may have contributed to her eventual development as Cassandra. In 2002, after a silence of some 20 years, the enfant terrible of the 1960s and 1970s erupted on the stage of political journalism with a book-length tract. Originally commissioned by Milan's Corriere Della Sera shortly after the events of 9/11, it sounded shrill, intemperate, but not inaccurate warnings about "these sons of Allah" and their civilization overrunning Europe.
Called The Rage and the Pride, Fallaci's pamphlet sold a million copies in Italy, and became number one on non-fiction bestseller lists in France and Germany. It displayed an ego verging on the pathological, a terminal boastfulness, a surfeit of testosterone and a self-righteousness to rival the Ayatollah Khomeini's -- but it came coupled with a child's ability to see that the emperor had no clothes and also a child's courage of saying so. Christopher Caldwell described her book in Commentary magazine as "a philippic against Islamist terrorism and the cowardly Western elites who have permitted it to blossom in their midst." This was accurate, but Fallaci also seemed to posit a far more dubious equation: Islamism = Islam. It was probably untrue and minimally premature. Fallaci replied to such criticism that her message wouldn't be heard at all unless she roared it, anything more muted being drowned out by the chorus of what she called the "cicadas" of cultural and moral equivalence.
The "cicadas" certainly tried to silence Cassandra. After the publication of The Force of Reason this spring, Europe's mafiosi of political correctness found an Italian magistrate to indict the cancer-stricken journalist under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilification" of "any religion admitted by the state." For suggesting that the continent was on its way to being colonized by Islam, the 76-year-old Fallaci was facing two years' imprisonment in her native country. ("Let us give thanks for the First Amendment," commented The Wall Street Journal, reporting the story.)
There's no doubt that Fallaci could speak with considerable venom about Muslim immigrants in Italy. In one sequence of The Rage and the Pride, talking of a group of Somali Muslims who pitched a tent in Florence's Cathedral Square to protest Italy's reluctance to accept family-class immigrants, she described "the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery," adding that "Good heavens! They really take long shots, these sons of Allah!"
In the U.S. such outbursts have First Amendment protection, but not in Europe. Nor in Canada.
Canada very nearly hosted Fallaci's last public appearance. Public policy maven Patrick Luciani, a personal friend, had hopes of organizing a private dinner for her this fall in Toronto. Fallaci agreed to address the invited guests briefly but take no questions. Before the event could be put together, however, time had run out for Cassandra. Her last actual public appearance was about ten months ago in New York, at an event chaired by David Horowitz, where she was introduced by the similarly outspoken though far more scholarly commentator, Daniel Pipes. "Wanted for a speech crime in her native country," said Dr. Pipes, "Europe's most celebrated journalist now lives in exile in Manhattan." It was no exaggeration, for Fallaci didn't feel that she could return to Italy until ten days before her death, when her medical condition made legal action against her unlikely.
Fallaci passed away at the Santa Chiara clinic in Florence on the night of Sept. 14, and was laid to rest in the Evangelical Cemetery of Laurels at Galluzzo, yesterday, in the presence of a few old friends. A lifelong atheist, after a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI last year, she started referring to herself as a "Christian atheist." It would require another journey by her compatriot Dante to tell us whether her new address is in heaven, in purgatory or in hell.
© 2006 George Jonas
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