CHRISTINE M. FLOWERS | THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ORIANA

Philadelphia Daily News, PA
Posted on Fri, Sep. 22,

WHEREVER SHE is now, Oriana Fallaci must appreciate the irony.

The brash and bombastic journalist, feared and revered in equal
measure, died last week after a long battle with cancer. But the
illness didn’t dim her prodigious intellect, or stop her from
launching the literary firebombs that made her the most celebrated
female journalist of the last half-century. Splitting her final years
between post-9/11 Manhattan and her native Florence, Fallaci produced
three books that detailed her disgust with an increasingly violent
strain of Islam that threatens to destroy the west.

In the first of the trilogy, "The Rage and the Pride," she wrote that
"there are moments in life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and
speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical
imperative from which we cannot escape."

Fallaci wrote those words as prologue to her tirade against a religion
that she felt preached death and violence and the destruction of
innocents. She was a modern Cassandra, and radical Islam was her Trojan
Horse. She received death threats for speaking out, and was charged
with the crime of "vilifying religion" in Italy and Switzerland.

And that’s why she must be winking at us from that place where atheists
go when their earthly days are done. Nothing escaped her notice,
so she must be aware of the furor caused by Pope Benedict’s remarks
in Germany last week, where he quoted an obscure and politically
incorrect emperor from the 14th century to prove that reason, not
violence, would save the world from ultimate destruction.

As if on cue, the violent protests began. Benedict was burned in effigy
in Pakistan. Christian churches were firebombed in Palestine. Turkey,
that bastion of human rights (just ask the Armenians who escaped the
genocide), compared the pope to Hitler and Mussolini.

Honestly, you’d think the cartoonists were at it again.

But the pope, like Fallaci, had attacked the inclination of so many
followers of Islam to try to impose their worldview on the rest of
us. It’s the same spirit that motivated the kidnappers of a Fox news
reporter and his cameraman, forcing them to convert to Islam at the
point of a gun. It animated the men who beheaded Nicholas Berg and
Daniel Pearl, who murdered aid worker Margaret Hassan, who firebombed
churches and synagogues.

It’s the same poison that ran in the veins of the Somalian monsters
who shot a Catholic nun in the back three times in retaliation for
the pope’s speech. They killed in the name of their god; she forgave
them in the name of hers.

Which brings us back to Fallaci. Her courage was both physical and
emotional.

As a younger woman in Mexico City, she was shot three times during
a protest and left for dead. She covered wars in Vietnam and South
America, and defied the Ayatollah Khomeini by ripping off the veil
she’d been forced to wear in front of him.

She may not have believed in God, but she saw his stamp on human
beings and fought for their dignity.

And that’s why she criticized the evil that she saw in radical Islam.

The world is diminished because she’s left it. At a time when people
are so worried about giving offense, we need to hear her unvarnished
truths.

It may not be diplomatic to say that Islamofascism is an evil that
crosses borders and threatens the security of Christians and Jews, and
those Muslims who reject the fanaticism of their wild-eyed brothers.

It may not even be safe to say these things. But it is necessary,
unless we decide that placating one religion is more important than
protecting the welfare of all people, believers and atheists alike.

Fallaci understood this, and was vilified for it in, of all places,
Italy. But she didn’t hold a grudge.

In fact, she went home to die in her beloved Tuscany, where she had
been, as a child of 10, a lookout for the antifascist resistance
during World War II.

She knew what it was like to live in a state of fear and repression,
and saw no difference between the secular fascism of her youth and
the religious fascism of the present.

We shouldn’t, either. Rest in peace, Oriana.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer. E-mail cflowers1961@yahoo.com.