ROME, Sept 15: The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who in recent years became better known for diatribes against Islam than for her record as a war correspondent, died on Thursday night after a long illness.
Oriana Fallaci, who was 77, died at a clinic in her native city of Florence. She had been ill with cancer for several years. Ms Fallaci was born in June 1929 in Florence.
After a career spanning over half a century during which she covered most of the planet’s major wars and interviewed a string of world leaders, Ms Fallaci hit headlines for very different reasons following the attacks of Sept 11, 2001.
Her book, ‘The Rage and the Pride’, was an all-out assault on Islam as a religion, which she saw as inherently responsible for the ideas of extremist groups.
Typical of her outspoken attacks was an article she wrote for the Corriere della Sera newspaper in July last year, where she described the religion both as ‘an enemy in the house’ of the West and ‘incompatible with democracy’.
“We are at war: do you accept that, yes or no?” she wrote, adding that the integration of Muslims into western society was a ‘nightmare’.
After becoming a professional journalist while still in her teens, she was to plunge into war reporting from 1967. After Vietnam she reported on the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the Middle East wars.
Among world leaders she interviewed, sometimes to devastating effect, were the Israeli premier Golda Meir, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, both the Shah of Iran and his nemesis Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.—AFP
ROME, Sept 15: The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who in recent years became better known for diatribes against Islam than for her record as a war correspondent, died on Thursday night after a long illness.
