Inside my copy of Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason is an envelope, on which is written in Fallaci’s inimitable and elegant handwriting, “PERSONAL. For Robert Spencer from O. Fallaci.” Oriana included this request in the note inside the envelope: “Please don’t let somebody else write about ‘The Force of Reason’ and me. Do it yourself. Will you?”
Yes, Oriana, I will. And now the time has come for me to do so – when you have been so abundantly proven right. And so I wrote this pamphlet:
Here is a precis of the pamphlet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center:
Robert Spencer, the editor of the Center’s Jihad Watch Program and Fallaci’s personal friend in her last years, has written this pamphlet on the legacy of this great defender of the West and its values. The late Oriana Fallaci became a leading international journalist in the 1970’s and 1980’s with her interviews of figures such as Yasser Arafat and Indira Gandhi. She was always irreverent in the face of authoritarianism and once even angrily ripped off the chador she was required to wear to see the Ayatollah Khoumeni in the middle of their interview. But after 9/11, her Leftist allies turned on her one after another when she directed her anger toward radical Islam in a prophetic trilogy of books written just before her death. In them, Fallaci gave a final warning cry as to how Western societies were committing suicide by not taking up arms against the jihadis seeking to destroy them.
Now that this suicide is blazingly obvious, Oriana Fallaci deserves the gratitude of all free people for sounding the alarm, at immense personal cost.
Get the pamphlet here.