by Scott Italiaander

The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci passed away a few weeks ago at age 77.  It is worth mentioning it not because she was a terrific writer and prodigious author for many decades, or even because she was an unrepentant leftist supporter and apologist for most of her career before undergoing an astonshing about face.  It is because in completely disavowing the leftist causes she championed for so long, most particularly the "Palestinian" efforts against the Israeli "occupation," she showed the kind of moral courage and open-mindedness that many of us, left or right, rarely display.  In other words, her mind was facile enough to allow new facts in, even if those facts contradicted a lifelong worldview that found expression in a lifetime of work.

Her repudiation of the Palestinian cause in particlular came in 2002 in a "scorching essay on antisemitism," according to Jason Maoz of The Jewish Press.  It seems that post-9/11, Fallaci came to believe that the left-wing, especially on the Continent, was the fount of a new anti-semitism and anti-Israel propaganda that used the "occupation" as a prop.  According to Maoz, Fallaci found all this "shameful" and "disgusting" and a blight on her countrymen and fellow Europeans.

In her recent book "The Force of Reason" Fallaci took up the Islam question and lamented the degree to which Islam "sows hatred in place of love and slavery in place of freedom."  For this she received harsh condemnation by the left, for any attempts to reveal the Islamist idelology is seen by them as an attack on Muslims worldwide.

Much more could be said, but the bottom line is it could not have been easy for a journalist so identified with the political and mulit-cultural left to abandon her friends and colleagues merely for the sake of truth.  But she did it, and accordingly she should be remembered as courageous and brave.