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Another tribute here from Debbie Schlussel...

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.: Brave Fighter Against Nazis, Islamofascism

By Debbie Schlussel

Some of the best writer/researchers on the truth about extremist Islam and jihad didn't start out that way.

One is Joan Peters, who wrote "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine," an excellent book that answers Israel's critics. The book is so well done that Alan Dershowitz plagiarized Peters' research for his rehash of it in his "The Case for Israel." Peters originally set out to write an anti-Israel, pan-Arabist tome, but her research showed her the opposite view was the correct one.

Then, there is Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer. When I was growing up, Fallaci's unwavering leftism put her among Israel's most vocal, vicious non-Arab critics in journalism and one of the Islamists' best friends in the world of the printed word.

Oriana Fallaci, RIP
Then, one day, she finally saw the late--perhaps, way too late. But she certainly did try to make amends for it, in a couple of books and countless articles on extremist Islam.

Fallaci's essays, columns, and articles over the last several years were so spot on and well written that my father would constantly send them to me, even though we knew that before this new era of her enlightenment she was the Islamofascists' useful idiot in friendly interviews with the likes Yasser Arafat--she called the terrorist murderer "charming" (though, at least, in an interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, she attacked Islam's lack of women's rights). Fallaci's newer work was the truth she had denied for so long.

For that, Islamofascists repeatedly tried to silence her, stop the publishing of her material in countries like France, and she was put on trial. They don't have the free speech in Europe that we have here.

It's ironic because Fallaci--at the age of 10 in 1939--joined her father in the anti-fascist freedom fighter resistance against the Nazis. She lived to see them defeated early in her life. But she did not live to see the new Nazis--Islamofascists--defeated. And she warned that they may win, in her books, "The Rage and the Pride," and "The Force of Reason."

Unfortunately, in the era of her best work--her exposes on Islam's extremist takeover of Europe--Fallaci was not only on trial for her work, her health went through its own trial. She was struck with cancer.

Sadly, today, Oriana Fallaci passed away at 77. Oriana Fallaci, Rest In Peace.

Some snippets from the Times, LOL:
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Though her temperament was of the Left, the keystone of it was the value she placed on personal freedom, a trait which led her into an almost unquestioning admiration of the United States....

Two weeks after the attacks she wrote for an Italian newspaper a hostile critique of Islam — specifically, of the demands of Muslims to follow their cultural practices in the predominantly Christian West. The highly positive reception with which this met in her home country, one of the most homogenous and least multi-cultural in Europe, prompted her to expand it to book length, as La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride, 2002). It sold more than a million copies in Italy and several hundred thousand elsewhere in Europe.

Since its literary merits were slim, reading, as it did, as part memoir, part intemperate call-to-arms, its arguments rarely coherent, its success must be attributed to its having caught the mood of the times. Ironically, though one of Fallaci’s concerns was that what she saw as the servility of Europeans in the face of Islam’s imperial ambitions was caused by their having forgotten the lessons of the Second World War, the cheap potency of The Rage and the Pride recalls above all the rabble-rousing of the Fascist leaders.
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Twerps.