Orianna Fallaci RIP
Many remember the indefatigable Orianna Fallaci.
But we shouldn’t be in a hurry to bury her. For the moment, she’s still very much with us. All you have to do is look at the news of the day, replete with the grotesque distortions of Pope Benedict’s thoughtful speech in Germany. Those distortions are driven by one her pet peeves: the politically correct fear of offending Muslims, any Muslims, even those who want us dead and decapitated. She and Benedict evidently hit it off quite well, truly the odd couple, she the lifelong atheist (albeit, in her delightfully paradoxical formulation, a “Christian atheist”)and he the lifelong theologian.
And why not? After all, she was the only atheist to defend Christmas against the depredations of American secularists.
The Anchoress also remembers, and compares the fearless Fallaci to the farcical Rosie O’Donnell:
So great is my respect for Fallaci, that to mention Rosie O’ Donnell in the same post feels like dipping roses into a land-fill. Both are fragrant but one rises in graceful beauty and the other simply emits noxious gas.
But I must mention O’ Donnell, because while she claims herself a woman of the left, she is the polar opposite of Fallaci, and I cannot let Fallaci go without focusing for a second on how far the left as devolved. Where resistance-member Fallaci was intelligently confrontational, trendy-cause committed O’ Donnell is merely shrill. Where Fallaci dared to look at the effects of Christianity and Islam on civilizations and see real differences and moral distinctions, O’Donnell casts a vapid, bigoted glance and calls them all cake, declaring: “Radical Christianity Is Just As Threatening As Radical Islam.”
And an excellent In Memoriam from Michelle Malkin.
UPDATE:
Once more, the West has collided with the Muslim world; and once more, it is the West that is scrambling to soothe “the hurt.” Already, the Vatican has issued a statement that “it was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to . . . offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful.” Everyone, on tenterhooks, now waits to see if the pope himself will apologize (although the quote in question is something even the silkiest apologizer couldn’t possibly get around). So it is tempting to believe that, on Thursday night, Ms. Fallaci–peering through her hospital window at this latest circus of pieties and outrage–simply said to herself, “I really can’t take this any longer. I’m outta here.” . . .
Ultimately, it has to be said that her fear of Islam, and of Muslims, unhinged her. Or, more accurately, disconcerted her to the point where she became unable to distinguish the incendiary from the provocative. An expert diagnostician she may have been, but her bedside manner–her constant references to Muslim immigrants as “invaders,” to Europe as “Eurabia”–undermined her ability to achieve the goal she sought, which was to awaken the West to the very real dangers of cultural conflict in its midst.
Here’s an illustration of what I mean, from a letter she wrote to me in March of this year. (I have left what she described as her “Fallaci English” unedited.) “In the speech I gave at the Italian consulate in New York to accept one of the four golden medals I have received in the last two months, I told that I had drawn a cartoon on the Prophet and his nine wives including the 9 year old one and his sixteen concubines including the she-camel. But I had not published it because I had not been able to draw well the she-camel. (True). The author of the booklet which asks the Moslems to eliminate me in accord with four Suras of the Koran even sued me . . . Meaning now in Italy they even appeal to the Italian law to incriminate an Italian citizen for a ‘vilifying’ cartoon that nobody has seen.”
This is acid, bitter, marvelously funny. Oriana Fallaci was very brave. Perhaps a little too brave. But now is not the time to judge her by proportions.