Oriana Fallaci
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Oriana Fallaci (June 29 1929 – September 15 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former antifascist partisan during World War II (meaning that she started the struggle at age 10), she had a long and successful journalistic career. She died September 14, 2006, in her native Florence, Italy. She was 77 years old and had been suffering from breast cancer for some 15 years.
She was called "Italy's most celebrated female writer" by Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera.[1][2] Decades ago, the Los Angeles Times described her as "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no."
As a young journalist, she interviewed many internationally known leaders and celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Lech Wałęsa, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Omar Khadafi, Federico Fellini, Sammy Davis Jr, Deng Xiaoping, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Alexandros Panagoulis, Archbishop Makarios, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu, Haile Selassie and Sean Connery.
After retirement, she wrote a series of articles and books, critical of Islam and Arab culture, that have roused significant controversy.
She spent the last years of her life in New York, where she fought a prolonged battle against breast cancer, which she referred to as "the Other One" in her most recent works. She returned to Italy before succumbing to cancer in a hospital in her native Florence on the night between the 14th and the 15th of September 2006.[3] [4]
Career
Fallaci was born in Florence. During World War II she joined the resistance despite her youth, in the democratic armed group "Giustizia e Libertà".
Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It was during this period that Fallaci was first exposed to the atrocities of war.
Fallaci began her journalistic career in her teens, becoming a special correspondent for the paper Il mattino dell'Italia centrale in 1950.
Since 1967 she worked as a war correspondent, in Vietnam, for the Indo-Pakistani War, in the Middle East, and in South America. For many years, Fallaci was a special correspondent for the political magazine L'Europeo, and wrote for a number of leading newspapers and Epoca magazine.
During the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre prior to the 1968 Summer Olympics, Fallaci was shot three times, dragged down stairs by her hair, and left for dead by Mexican armed forces. Later, her recollection of the events would shift. According to The New Yorker, her former support of the student activists "devolved into a dislike of Mexicans."[5]
In the 1970s, she had an affair with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship. He had been captured, violently tortured, and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt against dictator and ex-Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos. Panagoulis died in 1976, under controversial circumstances, in a road accident. Fallaci maintained that Panagoulis was assassinated by remnants of the Greek military junta, and her book Un Uomo (A Man) (ISBN 0-671-25241-0) was inspired by the life of Panagoulis.
During her infamous 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger, Kissinger agreed that the Vietnam War was a "useless war" and compared himself to "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse." Kissinger later wrote that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."
Fallaci has twice received the St. Vincent Prize for journalism, as well as the Bancarella Prize, 1971 for Nothing, and So Be It; Viareggio Prize, 1979, for Un uomo: Romanzo; and Prix Antibes, 1993, for Inshallah.. She received a D.Litt. from Columbia College (Chicago).
In previous years, she had lectured at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.
Fallaci’s early writings have been translated into 21 languages including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Swedish, Polish, Croatian and Slovenian.
Controversy
A journalist from Florence, Tiziano Terzani, expressed disagreements with her approach in an open letter to her in Corriere della Sera while David Holcberg at the Ayn Rand Institute supported her cause with a letter to The Washington Times.[6]
Fallaci has received support from rightist political parties and movements such as the Lega Nord in Italy, where her books have sold over 1 million copies alone, but also from individuals and organisations in the rest of the world. [7][8][9]
At the first European Social Forum, which was held in Florence in November 2002, Fallaci invited the people of Florence to shut up every shop and stay in the houses and compared the ESF to the Nazi occupation of Florence, but despite her worries nothing happened and all the demonstrations were peaceful. Sabina Guzzanti, a popular leftist comic, mocked at her during the Forum.[citation needed]
Italian pacifist singer Jovanotti implicitly mentioned Fallaci in a song, Salvami, where she is described as "the journalist and writer who loves war/because it reminds her of when she was young and beautiful".[10]
In 2002 in Switzerland the Islamic Center and the Somal Association of Geneva, SOS Racisme of Lausanne and a private citizen sued her for the supposedly racist content of The Rage and The Pride. In November 2002 a Swiss judge issued an arrest warrant for violations of article 261 and 261 bis of the Swiss criminal code and requested the Italian government to either try or extradite her. Roberto Castelli, Italian minister of Justice mentioned this fact in an interview broadcasted by Radio Padania affirming that the Constitution of Italy protects Freedom of Speech and thus the extradition request had to be rejected, the episode is mentioned in her book The Force of Reason [11][12][13]
In 2003 the MRAP (Movement against racism and for the friendship among peoples) sued to have The Rage and The Pride banned in France. A French court rejected the request, as well as the group's request for a disclaimer to be placed in each book.[citation needed]
In May 2005, Adel Smith, president of the Union of Italian Muslims, launched a lawsuit against Fallaci charging that "some of the things she said in her book The Force of Reason are offensive to Islam." Smith's attorney, Matteo Nicoli, cited a phrase from the book that refers to Islam as "a pool that never purifies." Consequently an Italian judge ordered her to stand trial set for June 2006 in Bergamo on charges of "defaming Islam." A previous prosecutor had sought dismissal of the charges. The preliminary trial began on 12 June in Bergamo and on 25 June Judge Beatrice Siccardi decided that Oriana Fallaci should indeed stand trial beginning on 18 December.[14]
On June 3, 2005, Fallaci published on the front page of the Italian daily newspaper a highly controversial article entitled "Noi Cannibali e i figli di Medea" ("We cannibals and Medea's offspring") inviting women not to vote for a public referendum about artificial insemination that was held on June 12 and 13, 2006.[15]
On August 27, 2005, Fallaci had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo. Although an atheist, Fallaci had mentioned her great respect for Pope Benedict XVI and her admiration for his 2004 essay titled "If Europe Hates Itself". [16]
In the June 2006 issue of Reason Magazine, libertarian writer Cathy Young wrote:
Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci’s 2002 book The Rage and the Pride makes hardly any distinction between radical Islamic terrorists and Somali street vendors who supposedly urinate on the corners of Italy’s great cities. Christopher Hitchens, who described the book in The Atlantic as “a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam,” correctly notes that Fallaci’s diatribes have all the marks of other infamous screeds about filthy, disease-ridden, sexually threatening aliens.[17]
Awards
On November 30, 2005, Oriana Fallaci received the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s Annie Taylor Award in New York. The writer was honored for her "heroism and valor" that made of her "a symbol of struggle against oppression and fascism". Since 9/11, Fallaci had dedicated herself in the fight against "the greatest threat to Western civilization since the Cold War, Islamofascism".[18]
On December 8, 2005, the writer received the Ambrogino d'oro, the most prestigious award of the city of Milan. The prize was considered a politically-motivated act of the right-wing administration of Gabriele Albertini, and criticised by Nobel laureate Dario Fo, representative of Italian Jewish culture Moni Ovadia, left-wing of politics and catholics, and caused some other award-winners to refuse theirs in protest.[19]
On December 14, 2005, she was awarded, upon proposal of Education