Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci (born 29 June 1929; died 15 September 2006) was an Italian journalist, who after September 11 2001 wrote controversial books criticising Islam.[[1]]( Born into a working-class family, her father was leader of the underground movement in Florence during the second world war and he recruited Oriana, the eldest of his four daughters, as an assistant. She spent much of her childhood with him in the partisan bands, helping Allied soldiers escape through enemy lines.[[2]]( Fallaci was a successful war correspondent and interviewer whose subjects included Deng Xiaoping, Fidel Castro, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, Henry Kissinger, Ayatollah Khomeini and Muammar Gaddafi.[[3]]( "You ask me about the contrast between the two cultures? Well, to be honest, it annoys me even to talk about two cultures, to put them on the same plane," Fallaci wrote. "Let's be honest. Our cathedrals are more beautiful than the mosques and the synagogues." What readers got was far more than a cry of outrage. It was a rant that made no distinction between the terrorists responsible for 9/11 and the rest of the Muslim world. Corriere's publishing arm, Rizzoli") , turned the article into a book, La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride), and within little over a month it had sold 700,000 copies.[[4]]( Adel Smith") , president of the Muslim Union of Italy") , sued Fallaci on 8 April 2004,claiming that her book The Force of Reason advocated hate against Islam and Muslims, sometimes by allegedly distorting real historical facts and inventing others. In May 2005, judge Armando Grasso") ruled that she should face trial over the accusations.[[5]]( Canada very nearly hosted Fallaci's last public appearance. Public policy maven Patrick Luciani") , a personal friend, had hopes of organizing a private dinner for her this fall in Toronto. Fallaci agreed to address the invited guests briefly but take no questions. Before the event could be put together, however, time had run out for Cassandra. Her last actual public appearance was about ten months ago in New York, at an event chaired by David Horowitz , where she was introduced by the similarly outspoken though far more scholarly commentator, Daniel Pipes . "Wanted for a speech crime in her native country," said Dr. Pipes, "Europe's most celebrated journalist now lives in exile in Manhattan." It was no exaggeration, for Fallaci didn't feel that she could return to Italy until ten days before her death, when her medical condition made legal action against her unlikely.[[6]]( Oriana Fallaci was clearly strongly motivated to "go against the flow", as witnessed by the resistance "partisan" actions of her early life [[7]]( , and her uniquely intimate and challenging interview style [[8]]( and strenuous war correspondence.[[9]]( [[10]]( Her ideological position on her personal freedom of speech appears to have evolved in the same way as the thinkers of the American Right. [[11]]( As she voiced her fears regarding the changing legal and cultural landscape, she bore no regard to the possible detrimental effects that her freedom of speech may have on the freedoms of others. [[12]]( [ The European Arrest Warrant, in fact, was only to cover crimes such as terrorism, murder, kidnapping, the trafficking of drugs, sexual exploitation of children, child abuse, illicit trafficking in arms and nuclear or radioactive material. However, witness the event, eight days after the September 11th, the swing because of the discourse on terrorism : the ineffable European Commission will also add on the crimes of racism and xenophobia and blasphemy and racial discrimination. That is a crime of opinion that the Muslim-loving EU defines in those words...A heretic who, at any time, wherever he is, may be arrested as a delinquent. Arrested and extradited in handcuffs in the country that on the complaint of a Muslim or at the initiative of a Politically Correct magistrate issued the arrest warrant. Extradited and (says th