Oriana Fallaci

The New Yorker this week has posted Margaret Talbot’s article about Oriana Fallaci from its June 5, 2006 issue.  It includes a couple anecdotes particularly relevant now, and a chilling conclusion. 

The first anecdote relates to Fallaci’s interview with Khomeini in 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution:

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. . . . 

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. . . .  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. . . .

The second anecdote contains this description of her views about radical Islam, and what may now appear to have been a historic meeting a year ago:

Today, Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has written three short, angry books advancing this argument. . . . These books have brought Fallaci, who will turn seventy-seven later this month, and who has had cancer for more than a decade, to a strange place in her life. Much of the Italian intelligentsia now shuns her. . . . Yet Fallaci’s recent books, and the specious trial that she is facing as a result . . . have also made her a beloved figure to many Europeans. The books have been best-sellers in Italy; together they have sold four million copies. . . .  In September, she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger.

Near the conclusion of the article, Fallaci grows passionate:

Fallaci sees the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She told me, “I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing.” She elaborated, in an e-mail . . .  I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

Anne Lieberman has an excellent post about Fallaci, with useful links, as does Pamela Geller Oshry.