Free Republic

“We are gathered here tonight,” announced David Horowitz, “to honor a warrior in the cause of human freedom.” Oriana Fallaci, who received the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s Annie Taylor Award in New York Monday evening, has been a warrior for human freedom ever since she joined the anti-fascist resistance in 1944, at age fourteen. For over six decades, she has fought against those she has labeled “the bastards who decide our lives,” opposing all forms of tyranny and oppression, from Mussolini and Hitler to Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. She amassed a fearsome reputation as...

ROME (Reuters) - Pope Benedict has had a meeting with Oriana Fallaci, the Italian author of best-selling books that criticise Islam, local media reported on Tuesday. Italian news agency Ansa quoted Vatican sources as saying the private meeting took place on Saturday at the Pope's summer residence in Castelgandolfo, near Rome. The Vatican was not immediately available to comment, but one official, who declined to give his name, said such a meeting had been under discussion for a long time. Fallaci lives in New York and has regularly provoked the wrath of Muslims with her outspoken criticism of Islam and...

Vatican, Aug. 31 (CWNews.com) - Vatican officials have confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI (bio - news) met with the controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo on August 27. Although the meeting was not intended to be publicized, friends of Fallaci leaked news of the writer's meeting with the Pontiff, and the Vatican verified the reports. Fallaci has been an outspoken critic of immigration trends in Europe, saying that the demographic trend amounts to an "Islamic invasion." She currently faces charges in Italian courts for allegedly insulting the Islamic faith. Fallaci, who suffers from cancer,...

"The Enemy We Treat Like A Friend" (Part I) Rather than try to keep up with the body counts from the latest love offerings by the Religion of Peace or, more painfully, to listen to the latest outrages against human decency pouring forth from the lips of their apologists--pale of skin and heart--I've decided to give the floor to one of the very few people who has been consistently making sense ever since the Muslim war against our civilization came to New York on a September morning four years ago. From the Italian blog Eddyburg (via Romanwanderer) comes the latest...

On his deathbed, Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085) is reported to have said, "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile." Gregory's words might just as well be attributed to his fellow countryman Oriana Fallaci. Wanted for a speech crime in her native Italy, Europe's most celebrated journalist now passes her days in exile in an upper Manhattan townhouse. In May, Fallaci was indicted under a provision of the Italian penal code that criminalizes the "vilification of any religion admitted by the state." Specifically it is charged that her latest book The Force of Reason (due out...

PARIS, Oct. 9 (UPI) -- A second author Wednesday went to trial in Paris in as many months on charges of inciting racial hatred for a book that has denigrating passages on Islam. The latest case involves "Rage and Pride," a best-selling novel by Italian writer Oriana Fallaci. One plaintiff, the anti-racist group MRAP, wants the book banned from France altogether. Two others, including the Human Rights League, simply want disclaimers that its disparaging passages on Islam don't accurately reflect the Muslim religion. Fallaci, 72, who has cancer, was not present during the opening hearing. But her lawyer, Christophe Bigot,...

New York – Oriana Fallaci faces jail. In her mid-70s, stricken with a cancer that, for the moment, permits only the consumption of liquids — so yes, we drank champagne in the course of a three-hour interview — one of the most renowned journalists of the modern era has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy under provisions of the Italian Penal Code which proscribe the "vilipendio," or "vilification," of "any religion admitted by the state." In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year...

The liberals of Europe -- those champions of free-ranging Voltairean speech and scourges of fanatical religion -- are dragging journalist and author Oriana Fallaci into court for writing a book critical of militant Islam. Fallaci, who now lives in Manhattan, has been ordered to stand trial in her native Italy for The Force of Reason, a 2004 book which a mau-mauing Muslim activist has managed to convince an Italian judge skates too close to a law prohibiting "outrages against religion." Can Catholic activists in Italy invoke this law too? If so, the critics of Fallaci would find themselves in court...

Oriana Fallaci is 75 years old. The renowned Italian journalist lives in hiding because of death threats she received after the publication in 2001 of her book The Rage and the Pride. She is dying of cancer. And now she is going to go on trial for “defaming Islam.”

The 18 things you can't say about Muslims in Italy. Thanks to Ilario Vige, my indefatigable source of Oriana intel, I now have a pdf copy of an article from the Italian newspaper Libero, which reproduces the text of the complaint filed against Fallaci. How’s that for social capital in the internet age? (Ah, Prof. Putnam, there are more things in heaven and earth…) I don’t have time now to try to translate all of it, but eventually I hope to obtain copies of the cited code provisions so as to be in a position to understand the way the...

The Italian best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci was ordered to stand trial in Italy on charges she defamed Islam in her best selling book. This is my quick review of the first paragraph of the article. Read More at the site

washingtonpost.com Fallaci charged in Italy with defaming Islam By Crispian Balmer Reuters Wednesday, May 25, 2005; 8:13 AM ROME (Reuters) - A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book. The decision angered Italy's justice minister but delighted Muslim activists, who accused Fallaci of inciting religious hatred in her 2004 work "La Forza della Ragione" (The Force of Reason). Fallaci lives in New York and has regularly provoked the wrath of Muslims with her outspoken criticism of Islam following the Sept. 11, 2001,...

Controversial Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci is to face trial for allegedly insulting the Muslim faith in her latest book, a court in Italy says. Ms Fallaci is being sued by the head of the Muslim Union of Italy, who says The Force of Reason is defamatory. The journalist caused an uproar with The Rage and the Pride, published two weeks after the 11 September attacks. In it, she said Western culture was superior to Islam and Muslim immigrants in the West had "multiplied like rats". Her lawyers have defended her right to express controversial opinions. "At the heart of her...

FALLACI TO GO ON TRIAL FOR DEFAMING ISLAM (AGI) - L'Aquila, Italy, May 24 - In Oriana Fallaci's book "The Force of Reason" there are expressions that are "unequivocally offensive to Islam and Muslims," said the Bergamo preliminary investigative judge, Armando Grasso, who accepting the Adel Smith's opposition to filing away the trial proposed by the prosecutor, ordered the prosecution to formulate the charge "according to article 406 of article 403 of the criminal code," for defamation of Islam. The well known author, therefore, will be put on trial. Adel Smith, president of the Italian Muslim Union, sued the writer...

On a recent afternoon, the telephone rang in Oriana Fallaci's Manhattan townhouse. The tiny, blue-eyed 72-year-old writer put down her cigarette and picked up the receiver. "Oh, it is you!" she said. She assured the caller she was all right, then thanked him and hung up. "He calls to see if I'm alive," she said, "to see if I need something." The caller was a police officer, who has been checking in on Ms. Fallaci since the publication of her most recent book, The Rage and the Pride, which she wrote in New York during the weeks following Sept. 11....

Wednesday, August 11, 2004 The Last Night Alive In the 50s sci-fi horror movie Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a Professor Thurgood Elson is sent down in a diving bell to investigate the approach of a prehistoric rhedosaurus on the East Coast of the United States so that the Armed Forces can prepare for its defense. Momentarily forgetting his military mission, Professor Elson succumbs to his academic curiousity and delays having himself hoisted to safety while he continues to describe the morphological wonders of the monster until a break in the transmission informs the audience that he has left it too...

ROME - Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist known for ruthlessly grilling her subjects, says she detests interviews but has granted one herself — to herself — because she is dying of cancer. The Milan daily Corriere della Sera published the slim volume, "Oriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci," as a supplement to its newspaper Friday. In the work, Fallaci, 74, asks herself why she agreed to the interview. "Because death is on my back. Medicine has issued the sentence: `Lady, you cannot get better. You won't get better,'" is the reply. Fallaci's battle with cancer began some 11 years ago. In...

Muslim Europe by Daniel Pipes New York Sun May 11, 2004 "Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione, or, "The Force of Reason." And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam. Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development. The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the...

Oriana Fallaci" is not a household name in the United States, but it cannot be uttered in Europe without generating a heated reaction. Even though her 2002 book, The Rage and the Pride, was translated into English (by Fallaci herself) and sold many copies in the U.S., it was on the other side of the ocean that intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens passionately debated the views of the celebrated Italian journalist. The Rage and the Pride is either loved or hated; the positions Fallaci takes in it leave no middle ground. Outraged by the events of 9/11, Fallaci criticizes both...

ROME (AP) -- A new book by controversial journalist Oriana Fallaci that hit bookstores here Monday accuses Europe of having sold its soul to what she describes as an Islamic invasion. Entitled "The Strength of Reason," ("La Forza della Ragione" in Italian), the book also accuses the Roman Catholic Church of being too weak before the Muslim world. "Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam. And Italy is an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony," the book says. "In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a...