Inside my copy of Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason is an envelope. On it 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?”
Oriana, I was unworthy of such a request, but unable to refuse you. And so I wrote this pamphlet, to show in detail how the current events in Europe have so abundantly proven you right.
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 Khomeini 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.
t. says
A great woman indeed!
Over thirty years ago, I foresaw the same current conquest and ever since, have been warning people about its coming. Unfortunately very few of them listened.
Margaret Talbot says
Read “The Rage and The Pride”
The west’s version of science vs. the use of science in Islam is much different…
Also, “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age” by Phillip Jenkins
You’ll get a better idea of the paintbrush flick raids of Islam’s forces and what they did to churches and Christians and how Europe began to fight back.
Much of Islamic prayer and faith is actually borrowed from the Abyssinian Church… the death cult part of Mid East culture.
Whatever the Crusaders may have done, it’s nothing compared to Muslims, and it’s documented here very well.
TH says
It is a hodge-podge, plagiarized from Rabbinic Judaism, heterodox Christianity, Arabian paganism, Zoroastrism and others. Besides, the copying was badly done. Just see how Biblical stories are misrepresented in the Koran.
Tracey Andrew says
Yes my mother also predicted The rise of Islam in Australia I remember hearing her discussing it often with an Egyptian Doctor friend of the family I was about 5 Im now 54 I know many others also could see the writing on the wall !
old white guy says
I am not prescient, but I do know that those who will not or cannot kill their enemies will be killed by those enemies.
Tikvah says
Being pro-Life,I saw the terrible IMBALANCE in society that was coming but I never saw the population jihad .It is much worse than we could have dreamed & there is no way we can make up for the NUMBERS.
Myron J. Poltroonian says
Well, turning certain parts of the Middle East into “Nukestan” (pronounced Nuke-Es-Stan) might help bring some numerical balance to the equation.
Moa says
Are you going to nuke London too ?
No, the way to destroy Islam to is to attack its ‘truth claims’. Islam’s claims about its origins are fiction, the whole ideology is false.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9lIuUjPs0
Unfortunately, too few Westerners know this truth – that Mohammed is a mostly mythological figure (as Robert Spencer also wrote about in his book “Did Mohammed Exist ?”).
The good news is, Al Mahdi is also fiction and will not arise to save Muslims from the other 5.3 BILLION people they are really annoying
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOULuQdve-M&t=2s
Patricia F Koenig says
Anyone who has studied history knows what will result from Muslim immigration: a Sharia Law take over. Islam spread by the sword and conquered two-thirds of Christendom in the 8th century. They are still bent on violence, perversion, deceit, and conquest.
Margaret Talbot says
Reference The New Yorker
The Agitator:
Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam.
“Yesterday, I was hysterical,” the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he’d allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci’s town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. “I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to,” she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981: “For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah of Iran, and Kissinger—all of whom had been the objects of her wrath—the people she described as interviewing ‘with a thousand feelings of rage.’ “
For two decades, from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the world’s most powerful figures: Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press,” said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company he’d be keeping as part of Fallaci’s “journalistic pantheon.” It was more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.
Fallaci’s manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence. It didn’t hurt that she was petite and beautiful, with straight, smooth hair that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails; melancholy blue-gray eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable Italian accent. During the Vietnam War, she was sometimes photographed in fatigues and a helmet; her rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body to the Italian Ambassador “if K.I.A.” In these images she looked as slight and vulnerable as a child. When she was shot, in 1968, while reporting on the student demonstrations in Mexico City, and then confined by the police with the wounded and the dying on one floor of an apartment building, the first impulse of the students around her was to protect her; one boy gave her his sweater, in order to cover her face from the drip of a sewage pipe. Her essential toughness never stopped taking people—men, especially—by surprise.
Fallaci’s journalism, at first conducted for the Italian magazine L’Europeo and later published in translation throughout the world, was infused with a “mythic sense of political evil,” as the writer Vivian Gornick once put it—an almost adolescent aversion to power, which suited the temperament of the times. As Fallaci explained in her preface to “Interview with History,” a 1976 collection of Q. & A.s, “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.” In Fallaci’s interview with Kissinger, she told him that he had become known as “Nixon’s mental wet nurse,” and lured him into boasting that Americans admired him because he “always acted alone”—like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town.” Political cartoonists mercilessly lampooned this remark, and, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, the quote soured his relations with Nixon. (Kissinger claimed that she had taken his words out of context.) But the most remarkable moment in the interview came when Fallaci bluntly asked him, about Vietnam, “Don’t you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it’s been a useless war?,” and Kissinger began his reply with the words “On this, I can agree.”
Fallaci’s interview with Khomeini, which appeared in the Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”
Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.
In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, “At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview.” When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. “First he looked at me in astonishment,” she said. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ “
Fallaci recalled that she found Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.” And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God…
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/05/the-agitator
no_one says
I was aware of her work. I too foresaw this when I first heard a lot of Turks worked in Germany. And then again in early 2000 s when I heard people from former French colonies were moving to France.
Margaret Talbot says
Voltaire, John Quincy Adams,
Alexis de Tocqueville, French political thinker and historian, said about Islam: “I studied the Kuran a great deal … I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammed.”
C.S. Lewis & his mentor G.K. Chesterton, English.
Winston Churchill
Brigitte Bardot (born 1934), French former actress, singer, and fashion model, who later became an animal rights activist. During the 1990s, she generated controversy by criticising immigration and Islam in France, and has been fined five times for inciting racial hatred.
Salman Rushdie
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Bill Maher, American comedian and political chat show host
I mean the list is endless really
dumbledoresarmy says
Al-Hijra.
Ex-Muslim Sam Solomon’s book “Al Hijra: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration” together with his book “The Mosque Exposed” that zeroes in on the role of the mosque as a focus of every ummah colony and of the ummah as a whole, should be required reading for all non-Islamic politicians and generals.
*everyone* is affected by al-hijra: historically-non-Islamic countries in Africa are suffering exactly the same process as Britain and France. The Hijra, the immigration-invasion, quite deliberately carried out and following a game plan that Solomon shows is based in the foundation texts of Islam and the sunnah of Mohammed, is going on *world-wide* right now.
The smartest thing that any Infidel country that, at present, does NOT have a mosque or Muslims – and there are a few such! – or that only has a few as yet – could do for itself, is to pull up the drawbridges. NO mosques, NO Muslims. Period. Not as tourists or students or businessmen or immigrants or ‘refugees’. No nothing. And if there *are* some Muslims and some Mosques, but not many, then.. nip it in the bud. Iceland is in that situation, right now. They should seize their opportunity, level the mosque already a-building, rescind the residency of all Muslims currently present in Iceland and require them to Return to Sender, and then… slam shut the gates. Wailings and threats should be greeted with stony silence. Bribes – from rich Arab Muslim oil-states – should be thrown back in the bribe-offerer’s faces.
As for the rest of us… we can only work on increasing Islamowariness in the general population, hoping to get to a tipping point… and therefore a policy reversal, and 1/ a halt to the HIjra and 2/ a *reversal* of said hijra … in time. It will be more difficult for most of us because there are *more* Muslims inside the gates. But … Rome wasn’t built in a day. We can, I think, still save ourselves, if we do not lose heart.
c matt says
Bribes – from rich Arab Muslim oil-states – should be thrown back in the bribe-offerer’s faces
No, the money should be accepted/taken, and then whatever request attached to it ignored. Want your money back? Molon labe.
mortimer says
BRILLIANTLY TRUE: “Western societies were committing suicide by not taking up arms against the jihadis seeking to destroy them.”
Islam has become a fifth column within the West prepared to annihilate European civilization and turn those countries into carbon copies of all Islamic, dysfunctional, failed states such as Pakistan, Afghastlistan and Soddy Barbaria.
Michael Copeland says
” It is a fifth column and we will rise up one day and implement the Sharia.”
“Our campaign … will be “ Rotten Britain, and destroying the foundations of Western civilisation.”
Anjem Choudary
Keys says
The fifth column is the beast.
Guy Jones says
The Left claims to stand up for, and, celebrate, women. Yet, Leftist hypocrite-collaborators either ignore (at best), or, vilify/marginalize (at worst) women such as Oriana Fallaci, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brigitte Gabriel, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Pamela Geller and others who have fearlessly stood up to Islamic totalitarianism and its brutal treatment of women — at great personal risk — all while Leftists refuse to hold Muslims to account and engage in contemptible revisionist nonsense about how the hijab is a liberating conceit and Mohammed was the “first feminist.”
Thank you for this remembrance and tribute to Ms. Fallaci, Robert.
Kay says
Good post.
Matthieu Baudin says
Yes Guy, the contemporary Left deify abstractions; women are an abstraction for them – when a real and assertive woman comes along whose has thought outside of current intellectual fashions then they either don’t know what to do with them or feel that they ought to be crushed. They like to keep their social abstractions polished and ready for display and don’t let reality creep in and tarnish the dream in any way. The contemporary Left is highly evangelical and looks for the type of purity that characterises some of the more stubborn religious movements.
Phil Copson says
The wave of naked hatred that the Left displayed towards Margaret Thatcher was the perfect example of that. The fact that she had got to the top without pleading for special treatment on the grounds that “she was a woman”, or telling people to vote for her “because she was a woman”, or that “it was time that Great Britain had a woman Prime MInister” and all the rest of the demeaning, beside-the-point stunts that a Hillary Clinton would pull, didn’t fit their calculations.
The fact that a woman could get to the top on her own merits and be respected for it without needing any of their feminist apparatus was unbearable to them.
Margaret Thatcher wasn’t a “woman Prime MInister” – she was a Prime Minister who happened to be a woman, and there is a difference.
Guy Jones says
Precisely; well-stated, Matthieu.
Wellington says
Consider this contrast: Hillary v. Oriana.
See what I mean?
Keys says
Yes. Wish she could have interviewed Hillary for an hour.
no_one says
What is more amazing is that a western person was able to see this.
RichardL says
Her interview with Mohammed’s perfect successor was just amazing. It read more like a novel. I was reminded of Faust’s talk with the devil.
dumbledoresarmy says
I wonder what would happen if a large group of Islamoinformed Britons went into the middle of Trafalgar Square, right now, or onto London Bridge, or Westminster Bridge, with a copy of “The Rage and the Pride” and took out milk crates or folding chairs and sat down and… **read the book out loud**.
Follow up by reading “The Force of Reason” out loud, too.
Frankly, such a public reading – not sure how long it would take – with people taking turns to read clearly and with expression – would be a far more appropriate protest – and a far braver way of honouring the recently-Islamically-human-sacrificed dead of Manchester and London – than tears, tea-lights, flowers and teddy-bears.
Anne Smith says
They would probably meet the same fate that befell Paul Weston when he read the wise words of Sir Winston Churchill from his book “The River War”.
He was accused of Hate speech and carted away to the cells.
dumbledoresarmy says
Well, worth a try, perhaps, anyway.
Note that I said, “a large group”.
Not just one man, nor even three or four.
You would need 20 or 30 brave people who were prepared the face the possibility of being arrested; who, perhaps, had a few lawyers already recruited, just in case. A few readers, and a casually-gathering loosely-assembled crowd. Call it a Freedom Picnic.
*Bring* picnic baskets and do it in Hyde Park or wherever one is permitted to sit and picnic, now that the weather has warmed up sufficiently.
Maybe Gavin Boby’s Law and Freedom Foundation and/ or PEGIDA UK could use the idea.
Hint: read G K Chesterton’s “The Flying Inn”.
Paul says
I can’t help but wonder whether the self-hate and anti-semitism (really two sides of the same coin) of lapsed Christians are at the heart of this de facto surrender of liberal Westerners to the jihadis.
Always On Watch says
Mr. Spencer:
Interesting that you are writing about the great Oriana Fallaci! Yesterday, I went through my home library of books on Islam and pulled out Oriana Fallaci’s The Anger and the Pride/i> (also called The Rage and the Pride.
Yes, she was a prophet!
PS: I also pulled out my copy of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia. I read that book when it was first published. All the while I was thinking, “Some leader in Europe will put the brakes on all this when the situation ramps up.” No brakes have been applied, of course.
I now see that Eurabia is inevitable.
dumbledoresarmy says
Not inevitable.
Not 100 percent inevitable.
We had a rector years ago who said, “Under God [that is, the biblical God] the future is open”.
PRAY.
JawsV says
Everyone should read “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason.” La Fallaci is a brilliant lady.
patriotliz says
It is crystal clear from the history of Islam and the evil nature of Muhammad that Islam has always been at war w/ Western Civilization. Jihad wasn’t a recent invention but just found in recent times, a soft target for ANOTHER attempt at imperialistic expansion into a de-Christianized Europe. The Leftist multicultural suicidal tolerance that all cultures are “equal” greased the skids for Europe’s submission to the IslamoFascist colonization using Western freedoms, particularly freedom of religion– w/o qualification or distinction as to what is considered a “religion.”
dumbledoresarmy says
Not just *western* civilisation. ALL civilisation. The Muslims attacked the ‘non-western’ civilisation of Zoroastrian Persia, and basically annihilated it – the last remnants of the Zoroastrians mostly fled to India, where their descendants are the Parsees of today (Parsee = Farsi). The Muslims attacked and *laid waste to* India – from the 8th century onward. The Indians put up a *hell* of a fight but they were ground down relentlessly (look up Sita Ram Goel and K S Lal for some accounts of the ruin that Muslims wreaked in India; one estimate is that at least 80 million Buddhist and Hindu Indians – mostly helpless noncombatants killed *after* their warriors had lost battles – were slaughtered by triumphant Muslims). The great Buddhist university of Nalanda in India was totally destroyed by the damn Muslims, who burned all the books in its library.
Musilms have been waging war on *all* non-Islamic societies in *all* directions, *everybody* that they could get at, for 1400 years. In black Africa the Arab Muslims – and then those force-converted and Arabised, such as the Maures of Mauritania – have been killing, raping and enslaving non-Muslim Africans for twelve hundred years; the ruin Islam has wreaked on black Africa – both physical (as whole communities were destroyed in order to seize young people as slaves – the girls for the harems, where the children they conceived were often killed; the boys to become *eunuchs* for the harems, although nine out of ten of those who were castrated, *died*) and psychological is terrible.
The Islamic sharia criminalising of representational art [pictures of any living being, real or mythological], sculpture, almost all forms of music and song, alcohol, and .. **pet dogs** – places Islam at odds with the *whole* of the rest of non-Islamic humanity. Those in the west who self-flagellate about how our modern ‘decadence’ is supposedly ‘provoking’ Muslims need to get a grip and realize that Muslims are mortally offended just as much by the sight of some dear little old lady taking her pet dog for a walk in the park, as by any display of flesh by the likes of the Kardashians. They also need to realize that Muslims attacked the *Christian* ‘west’ – and the Christian East – unremittingly and ferociously at a time when ‘Christendom’ was far, far, far less visibly ‘decadent’ than today.
Michael Copeland says
“….constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever.”
Karl Marx
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com.es/2005/06/karl-marx-on-ottomanmuslim.html
Ed Lee says
It is interesting that you wrote, “She was always irreverent in the face of authoritarianism”. That reminded me of a Mark Twain quote, “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.”
Guy Jones says
From the 2005 Wall Street Journal:
Prophet of Decline
By Tunku Varadarajan
Updated June 23, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET
NEW YORK — Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids — so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview — one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the “vilipendio,” or “vilification,” of “any religion admitted by the state.”
In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year — and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe — called “The Force of Reason.” Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the “sons of Allah.” So, in a nutshell, Oriana Fallaci faces up to two years’ imprisonment for her beliefs — which is one reason why she has chosen to stay put in New York. Let us give thanks for the First Amendment.
It is a shame, in so many ways, that “vilipend,” the latinate word that is the pinpoint equivalent in English of the Italian offense in question, is scarcely ever used in the Anglo-American lexicon; for it captures beautifully the pomposity, as well as the anachronistic outlandishness, of the law in question. A “vilification,” by contrast, sounds so sordid, so tabloid — hardly fitting for a grande dame.
* * *
“When I was given the news,” Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, “I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I’ve written is true.” An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch. The complainant, one Adel Smith — who, despite his name, is Muslim, and an incendiary public provocateur to boot — has a history of anti-Fallaci crankiness, and is widely believed to be behind the publication of a pamphlet, “Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci,” which exhorts Muslims to “eliminate” her. (Ironically, Mr. Smith, too, faces the peculiar charge of vilipendio against religion — Roman Catholicism in his case — after he described the Catholic Church as “a criminal organization” on television. Two years ago, he made news in Italy by filing suit for the removal of crucifixes from the walls of all public-school classrooms, and also, allegedly, for flinging a crucifix out of the window of a hospital room where his mother was being treated. “My mother will not die in a room where there is a crucifix,” he said, according to hospital officials.)
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.” 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).
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci’s. She is in a black gloom about Europe and its future: “The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.” There is about her a touch of Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher and prophet of decline, as well as a flavor of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations. But above all there is pessimism, pure and unashamed. When I ask her what “solution” there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. “How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It’s like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did?” She then says “Phwah, phwah,” and gestures at slashing her wrists. “He committed suicide!” Seneca was accused of being involved in a plot to murder the emperor Nero. Without a trial, he was ordered by Nero to kill himself. One senses that Ms. Fallaci sees in Islam the shadow of Nero. “What could Seneca do?” she asks, with a discernible shudder. “He knew it would end that way — with the fall of the Roman Empire. But he could do nothing.”
* * *
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. “Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don’t, for Christ’s sake. They don’t know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don’t even know who Cavour was!” — a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. “In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour — Europe needs a Cavour.” Ms. Fallaci describes herself, too, as “a revolutionary” — “because I do what conservatives in Europe don’t do, which is that I don’t accept to be treated like a delinquent.” She professes to “cry, sometimes, because I’m not 20 years younger, and I’m not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics somehow.”
Here she pauses to light a slim black cigarillo, and then to take a sip of champagne. Its chill makes her grimace, but fortified, she returns to vehement speech, more clearly evocative of Oswald Spengler than at any time in our interview. “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 wellbeing, 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.” The force with which she utters the word “dead” here is startling. I reach for my flute of champagne, as if for a crutch.
* * *
“I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.” I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.”
Ms. Fallaci, who made her name by interviewing numerous statesmen (and not a few tyrants), believes that ours is “an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century.” Of George Bush, she will concede only that he has “vigor,” and that he is “obstinate” (in her book a compliment) and “gutsy . . . Nobody obliged him to do anything about Terri Schiavo, or to take a stand on stem cells. But he did.”
But it is “Ratzinger” (as she insists on calling the pope) who is her soul mate. John Paul II — “Wojtyla” — was a “warrior, who did more to end the Soviet Union than even America,” but she will not forgive him for his “weakness toward the Islamic world. Why, why was he so weak?”
The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on his successor. As a cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI wrote frequently on the European (and the Western) condition. Last year, he wrote an essay titled “If Europe Hates Itself,” from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: “The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.”
“Ecco!” she says. A man after her own heart. “Ecco!” But I cannot be certain whether I see triumph in her eyes, or pain.
* * *
As for the vilipendio against Islam, she refuses to attend the trial in Bergamo, set for June 2006. “I don’t even know if I will be around next year. My cancers are so bad that I think I’ve arrived at the end of the road. What a pity. I would like to live not only because I love life so much, but because I’d like to see the result of the trial. I do think I will be found guilty.”
At this point she laughs. Bitterly, of course, but she laughs.
Mr. Varadarajan is the editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
Valkyrie Ziege says
; Enoch Powell saw it first 20 April 1968, in his ”River of Blood” speech, and it cost him his career as a politician. Here is a person reciting that speech. https://youtu.be/3MtIF6tw-Io
Schrödinger says
It’s a great pity Oriana Fallaci’s two, immensely powerful, magnificent polemics against islam, written shortly post 9/11 (The Force of Reason and The Rage and the Pride) are out of print and so difficult to obtain nowadays. Neither appears available as an eBook and that’s hardly surprising; Dhimmi Apple iBooks wouldn’t dare go near either and as much as the Jeff Bezos’ of this world like to make money, they’re both too controversially forthright if emotional about islam and it’s deplorable impact upon Europe and this world for these companies not to take the far easier option in censoring them.
Oriana was a great journalist who more than once risked her life in getting her interview or story. Although it’s cancer that did finally take her, she of course had multiple fatwas for daring to be so perceptive, honest and effective in her observations and condemnation of the destructive impact of the evil that is islam upon Europe and her own Italy in particular. There are many equally, perhaps even more factually informative books on islam. However to this day, hers have more powerfully resonated with me on an emotional level than any other book/s about this God forsaken Death Cult I’ve ever read.
Though not a Christian herself (neither am I), she acknowledged and appreciated it’s influence upon Europe’s heritage, while despairing of it’s decline, also writing that if she ever were to have found herself about to be slaughtered at the hands of some rabid jihadi, she would have still quickly made the sign of the cross then met her fate as a martyr.
Rest in Peace, Saint Oriana.
JawsV says
Her books can be ordered on amazon. I just checked. Plenty new and used. Prices very affordable.
Jack Diamond says
“Who is supposed to get integrated, us or them?”
It is 2017. Where are the English translations of The Apocalypse (the follow-up to the Force of Reason) and A Hat Full of Cherries, her final novel?
We all miss la Fallaci.
Cornelius says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8HoMF75NTE
UNCLE VLADDI says
While I admire Fallaci’s writings, ANYONE with a basic understanding of human nature could have foreseen what is happening in Europe today:
And of course “our leaders” don’t want us to know how bad it is – because right now, their evil world conquest plan can still be stopped!
The MUSLIMs are simply the shock-troops of the globalist oil-money BANKSTERS who want to destroy ALL sovereign nations so they can more easily run the world!
It should be clear by now that government’s #1 duty is to protect and defend the country’s citizens from disasters, both natural and man-made (aka crimes) BUT those we hire (‘elect’) are in fact only the most ambitious criminals who like all criminals want to have more rights and less responsibilities than others, and the only way to achieve this goal is to enslave and control all others by offloading their own responsibilities onto their victims, by depriving them of their rights.
So the government, courts, cops, lawyers, media and education system are NOT what we expect them to be, not what they seem: they are really ever only the “CONTROLLED OPPOSITION” to the globalist oil-banksters who OWN THEM ALL at our direct expense.
As with actors on TV, they are all merely puppets, not real people!
The left’s message these days is: “Any president who doesn’t want to give free stuff to foreigners and wants to make America great again should be murdered immediately!”
For what, for acting like the president of the country he was elected to run, and for standing up to foreign globalists?
Obviously, these little snowflakes’ minds have been brainwashed by global oil-money banksters!
Because none of their rants and emotions make sense from an evolutionary self-interested nationalist point of view – they all embrace suicidal masochism!
All criminals are hypocrites, and all hypocrites are criminals – advising suicidal masochism as the highest moral virtue in their victims, while reserving the false “right” to attack others first for their own good for them selves.
All criminals MUST always defend their chosen stance of perpetual habitual greed by blaming their own victims!
All criminals posit they are the real victims, and their victims are the real criminals!
And the very best way for criminals to attack their victims is to pretend they were always victims, and that there are no crimes nor criminals because the criminals are really only ever victims, too!
Re: “The greatest trick the Devil ever played, was to pretend that he didn’t exist” – BY PLAYING THE VICTIM!
Hypocrites will never make sense because to them, their feelings always trump the facts!
The chosen “belief” of all hypocritical criminals (both muslims and liberals included) is that their subjective feelings (of slanderous paranoia, that they are always the victims, and everyone else is always an oppressor out to get them) trump the real objective facts, (that their psychopathic choice of “belief” in their own idolatrous victimology self-image extortion syndrome, actually defines them selves as the predatory criminal aggressors, and those they slander with their paranoia, as their innocent victims) every time!