In Memory of Oriana Fallaci
Today is Sunday, 17 September 2006.
It is with great sorrow that the Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the death of Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), who died Friday past.
When she was ten, Oriana Fallaci became a lookout for the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Florence, joining her father. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, she became famous as a war correspondent and the pitbull of interviewers of political figures.
In Mexico City in 1968, when leftist students protested shortly before the Summer Olympics were to start there, and the PRI dictatorship massacred several thousands, she was left for dead after being shot three times.
She fell in love with Alekos Panagoulis, a Greek poet who tried to kill the Greek fascist military dictatorship leader, Papadapoulos. Panagoulis was assassinated in 1976 by Greek fascists.
HH began reading her work in high school, about 1968, and greatly valued and admired her work.
Who couldn’t help but love a journalist who could get Henry Kissinger to self-fawningly portray himself, in his own words, as “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town”.
She had battled cancer for the past ten years or so. I have no wish to be patronizing, but perhaps that is why she wrote things after 9-11 which were so uncharacteristic.
In a Wall Street Journal interview in 2005, she said: “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.”
This is nonsense.
Gradually, time will erase the nonsense, and all we will remember is the brave journalist.
It is with great sorrow that the Museum of the Bourgeois memorializes the death of Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), who died Friday past.
When she was ten, Oriana Fallaci became a lookout for the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Florence, joining her father. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, she became famous as a war correspondent and the pitbull of interviewers of political figures.
In Mexico City in 1968, when leftist students protested shortly before the Summer Olympics were to start there, and the PRI dictatorship massacred several thousands, she was left for dead after being shot three times.
She fell in love with Alekos Panagoulis, a Greek poet who tried to kill the Greek fascist military dictatorship leader, Papadapoulos. Panagoulis was assassinated in 1976 by Greek fascists.
HH began reading her work in high school, about 1968, and greatly valued and admired her work.
Who couldn’t help but love a journalist who could get Henry Kissinger to self-fawningly portray himself, in his own words, as “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town”.
She had battled cancer for the past ten years or so. I have no wish to be patronizing, but perhaps that is why she wrote things after 9-11 which were so uncharacteristic.
In a Wall Street Journal interview in 2005, she said: “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.”
This is nonsense.
Gradually, time will erase the nonsense, and all we will remember is the brave journalist.
posted by HH at 11:48 PM
2 Comments:
I am unwilling to accept the assertion that "this is nonsense," without further context. Ms. Fallaci's statement that you quoted, expressed in a vacuum is clearly intolerant and the terms "Bigot" and "Racist" leap to the fore.
However, if the context is that the cultural interaction generated by the influence of Islamic theocracy has produced a society in which the loss of civil liberties has been accelerated or in which a backlash reminiscent of a variety of medieval attitudes or political institutions has been created, then a forum for the further examination of the dynamics that she appears to be illuminating, has merit.
My apologies for the vagueness. Sadness sometimes trumps accuracy.
All theocracies are inherently racist and bigoted, and the enemies of human rights. That goes for the Christofascists of USA, the Islamofascists of Iran, the Buddhofascists of Sri Lanka, etc. Her error is extending the indictment to all believers in every diety. (She was rather a crank atheist, as some are crank Christians, Muslims, etc.)
The nonsense is that Europe has become the slave of Islam. That smacks of the Birchers asserting that Dwight Eisenhower was "a conscious agent of the Communist Conspiracy".
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