Freedom Folks: Profiles In Courage & Dhimmitude

Oriana Fallaci.

Do you know who that is?

Oriana commenced her lifelong insurrection against totalitarianism early, fighting the Axis powers as part of the Resistance. For her actions, the fascists tortured her father, who defiantly refused to collaborate. The lesson stuck. Oriana smuggled weapons to anti-Hitler forces within Germany. After Mussolini received his just deserts, she became a journalist, acting as a war correspondent in Vietnam. In the following decades, she would earn a reputation as one of the world’s most probing interviewers.

After all this she settled into a semi-retirement only to be rudely jerked back into the all too real world by the events of 9-11. She immediately launched into a campaign against radical Islam, writing several books absolutely devastating to Islamo-fascism.

Her reward?

Her frank truthfulness was also too much for the sensibilities of unfree Europe. In 2002, she faced charges in France that her book The Rage and the Pride promoted “racism,” the plaintiffs apparently unaware “Muslim” is not a racial designation. (Fallaci supported Operation Iraqi Freedom to give Arabs the gift of self-determination.)

Two years later, she learned she would face similar charges in her native Italy, over the same book. In April 2004, an Italian leftist judge allowed the Muslim-instigated lawsuit to go forward on the grounds that her works were “without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who practice that religious faith.” However, FrontPage Magazine columnist Robert Spencer has examined the allegedly “offensive” passages that “defame Islam” – 18 in all – and found each one undeniably rooted in Islamic theology and history.