Much sadness today as news of the passing of the incendiary Oriana Fallaci matriculates across the Atlantic. And as unlikely as she will receive the eulogies that were heaped upon lesser lights, like Betty Friedan, by American “feminists” who could not care less about understanding what a real journalist or what a real woman is. Her most recent crusade railing against the moral paralysis of Eurabia being but one example of the relentlessly provocative territory she claimed.

Italy’s loss is our loss. Fallaci died the way she lived and wrote – without fear:

Small, beautiful, and extraordinarily tough, Fallaci was an Italian resistance fighter who became a war correspondent in the 1950s and 1960s, covering the Vietnam War and conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America. She was shot three times and beaten by Mexican police covering student riots in 1968.
But it was her one-on-one interviews with politicians, generals and religious leaders, conducted, as she said “with a thousand feelings of rage” that were translated and published all over the world, often with extended transcripts showing the full extent of her blunt, acerbic inquiries.

From the WaPo:

“Fallaci’s manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence,” The New Yorker wrote in a profile this year entitled “The Agitator.”

Take that Katie Couric. Christiane Amanpour. And the rest who couldn’t fill her journalistic bra with all the Kleenex from a thousand Barbara Walters interviews.

Beth at MyVWRC as a round-up on the passing of one of the most influential and underappreciated woman of our time.

Robert Spencer at JihadWatch is understandably moved.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn reflects on Fallaci’s last work in a way that only he can:

Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam – for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that.

Kinky as this is, it has nothing on Fallaci’s next circle of cultural diversity – the weirdly masochistic pleasure European leaders get out of talking themselves down and talking Islam up.
[...]
If I had to choose, I’d rather Mohammed Atta was down river in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the window of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he’s not.

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