Italian writer Oriana Fallaci dies

updated 6:56 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2006

ROME - Oriana Fallaci, a journalist whose merciless questioning succeeded in making some of the world’s most powerful and inaccessible people lower their guard, from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Henry Kissinger, has died. She was 76.

Fallaci, who wrote about her long battle with breast cancer, died overnight at a private clinic in her native Florence, Paolo Klun, an official with the RCS publishing group said Friday. Fallaci, who lived in New York, had returned to the Tuscan capital days ago as her condition worsened, he said.

Virtually all of the literary energy and passion of her final years were consumed in vehement attacks on a Muslim world she judged to be the enemy of Western civilization.

After a decade-long absence from the publishing scene, Fallaci burst into the spotlight after the Sept. 11 attacks with a series of blistering essays in which she argued that Muslims were carrying out a crusade against the Christian West.

At the time of her death, she was on trial in northern Italy, accused of defaming Islam in her 2004 book, “The Strength of Reason.” In it she argued that Europe had sold its soul to what she called an Islamic invasion.

A group in France unsuccessfully sought to stop distribution of another book, “The Rage and the Pride,” which Fallaci wrote as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, she maintained Muslims “multiply like rats” and said “the children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day.”

An Islamic group expressed “relief” Friday at her death.

“It’s almost impossible to feel pity for somebody like Oriana Fallaci,” Dacia Valent, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Anti-Defamation League, told the Apcom news agency.

Even critics had compliments
So powerful was Fallaci’s writing, however, that even her critics had words of praise.

“I have to say that I didn’t agree with many of her analyses in her recent books,” center-left Premier Romano Prodi was quoted as telling reporters during a visit to China. “But they have always been insightful analyses which obliged us to think.”

Conservative Sen. Renato Schifani called Fallaci “a true protagonist of the West, of our values, of our civilization.”

The daughter of an anti-fascist Resistance fighter, she joined the movement herself as a teenager and started her career in journalism at 16. She spent eight years covering the Vietnam War, and at the age of 61, reported on the Persian Gulf War.

She “burst onto the scene and made a name for herself at a time when women were not very popular or tolerated in newspapers,” veteran Italian journalist Vittorio Feltri told Sky TG24 TV.

In 1954, she launched a 22-year-long relationship as a special correspondent for two of Italy’s biggest weeklies, Epoca and Europeo.

Two bullets pierced her body, one stopping just short of her spinal cord, in 1968, while she was covering the Mexican army’s killing of young protesters in Mexico City.

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