Oriana Fallaci passed away from breast cancer at a private clinic in Florence, Italy, having returned to the Tuscan capital earlier this month from New York to spend her last days.

She was a vehement and outspoken critic of Islam and Europe’s dhimmitude. She was being sued by a muslim activist at the time of her death for her 2004 book, “The Strength of Reason”. Her main contention in that book was that Europe had sold its soul to Islam and political correctness, which would ultimately mean its demise.

The Islamic Anti-Defamation League expressed “relief” at her death.

“It’s almost impossible to feel pity for somebody like Oriana Fallaci,” Dacia Valent, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Anti-Defamation League, told the Apcom news agency.

From the Washington Post:

During her journalistic career she became known for challenging interviews with such world leaders as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Her work both interviews and books was translated across the world.

“Fallaci’s manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence,” The New Yorker wrote in a profile this year entitled “The Agitator.”

Fallaci’s recent publications including the best-selling book “The Rage and The Pride,” which came out weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks drew accusations of racism and inciting hatred against Muslims.

How about she was just telling the truth about an ideology that the advocates of ‘political correctness’ deny?

“The Rage and The Pride,” sold more than 1 million copies in Italy and found a large audience elsewhere in Europe. But Fallaci was also accused of racism.

“Racism”, a well-known leftist accusation to keep certain ideas out of the realm of political debate.

In the book, she wrote that Muslims “multiply like rats” and said “the children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day.”

Can anyone really debate the truth in the statement ‘multiply like rats’ when, for example, Osama Bin Laden is one of his father’s 54 children? How many people do you know who have 53 siblings?

A group in France unsuccessfully sought to stop distribution of the book, while two other associations have requested that it carry a warning notice.

Her next essay, “The Strength of Reason,” accused Europe of having sold its soul to what Fallaci described as an Islamic invasion. It also took the Catholic Church to task for being what she considers too weak before the Muslim world.

I have to agree with her, considering the picture that is being circulated regarding the pope on the jihadi message boards. (Picture courtesy Michelle Malkin et al from this post at her blog)

This article demonstrates what exactly Fallaci is talking about where the Catholic church and Islam is concerned. They’re simply too soft on terrorism and Islam, IMO. In response to the Pope’s speech on Tuesday, the jihadis have the nerve to begin a campaign calling for his head.

The script in red calls for the Pope’s beheading. The rest of the translation:

“Swine and servant of the cross, worships a monkey on a cross, hateful evil man, stoned Satan, may Allah curse him, blood-sucking vampire.”

The pope, however, has not come out like Bush has, declaring it’s a ‘religion of peace’. See more on the Pope’s position in Islam here. (I will put up a separate post on the Pope’s speech from Tuesday which apparently brought this on). After Friday prayers the muslims took to the street protesting what the Pope said, and the Vatican immediately issued an apology. So Fallaci was totally correct in her interpretation of the Catholic church’s actions in response to terrorist acts and propaganda. It’s a shame.

Describing Europe as “Eurabia,” Fallaci said the continent “has sold itself and sells itself to the enemy like a prostitute.”

“Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam,” she wrote.

She will be missed. She had no husband and no children. She told it like it is, which is no small feat.

From the Wall Street Journal

“La Fallaci,” as she liked to call herself–yes, immodestly; but Italian divas don’t do self-deprecation–became in her last years a fierce, even apocalyptic, critic of Islam. She feared the unassimilated–and, she believed, unassimilable–Muslim immigrants in the West, and she feared them to distraction. Above all, she despised Europe’s political and cultural elites who were responsible–in her view–for turning Europe into “a colony of Islam.” In a Spenglerian interview for this page last June, she told me: “The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.”