Saturday, September 16, 2006

Obit:Oriana Fallaci 77, Italy's Controversial Journalist

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Oriana Fallaci, was a world renown  respected journalist, author, and interviewer until she became a xenophobe and Islam basher.

Her Biography below is from Wikepedia.

 

Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci (June 2, 1929 -September 15, 2006) was an Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer. A former antifascist partisan during   World War II, 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 cancer for some 15 years.

She was called "Italy's most celebrated female writer" by  Feruccio DeBertoli, former director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. 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 Khomeni, Lech Walesa, Wily Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Conkrite, Omar   Khadafi, Frederico 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.

Career

Fallaci was born in Florence. During World War II she joined the resistance despite her youth, in the democratic armed group "Giustiza e Liberta".

Her father Edoardo Fallaci, a cabinet maker in Florence, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of  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 " Li mattino dell'Italia centrale" in 1950.

Since 1967 she worked as a war correspondent, in  Viet Nam 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'Europa" 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."

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) ( 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.

Controversy

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.

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".

In May 2005, the  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  beginning on December 18, 2006.

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.

Books by Oriana Fallaci

  • A Man , a novel telling the biography of Alexandros Panagoulis, who fought against the Regime of the Colonels in Greece. It's a story about a hero who fights alone for freedom and for truth, never giving up, and so he dies, killed by all. (1979)
  • The Seven Sins of Hollywood  Longanesi (Milan), 1958.
  • The Useless Sex: Voyage around the Woman Horizon Press (New York City), 1961.
  • Penelope at War (1962).
  • Limelighters (1963)
  • The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews (1963)
  • Quel giorno sulla Luna (1970)
  • Inshallah, a fictional account of Italian troops stationed in Lebanonin 1983
  • If the Sun Dies, about the US space program.
  • Interview with History (1976, a collection of interviews with various political figures Liveright)
  • Letter to a child never born, a dialogue between a mother and her unborn child.
  • Nothing, and so be it, report on the Vietnam war based on personal experiences.
  • Oriana Fallaci intervista Oriana Fallaci, Fallaci interviews herself on the subject of "Eurabia" and "Islamofascism". (Milan: Corriere della Sera, August 2004).
  • The Rage and the Pride (La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio, 2001) 
  • The Force of Reason (La Forza della Ragione, 2004)
  • Oriana Fallaci intervista si stessa - L'Apocalisse (in Italian). An update of the interview with herself. A new, long epilogue is added. Publisher: Rizzoli, November 2004.

Fallaci has also written essays and novels revolving around news events.

 

The ANNOTICO Reports

Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net