Read this:

"I have been months and months and months of best-seller No. 1," Ms. Fallaci said in her strong Florentine accent. "I do not say this to make self-congratulations. I say this to underline my thesis-that the moment was mature! That I have put the finger on the nerve of something: the Muslims' immigration, which grows and grows without inserting itself in our way of life, without accepting our way of life and, on the contrary, trying to impose on us its way of life .... And people in Europe are so exasperated by the arrogance of most of these 'invaders' and being blackmailed with the unfair term 'racist' when they protest, that there was a kind of thirst for a book like this .... There is no other explanation for the book's success! I have written better books than this. I have written beautiful books over my life's work. This is a scream rather than an essay-a book written in two weeks, c'mon. Why? It was not the book itself. It was the thirst, the hunger.

"You know in the turning of history there are, at times, a brusque turn," she said. "Consider all the steps of history. I'm afraid that we are now at one of those turns. Not because we want it. Because it is imposed on us. It is not this time a revolution, like the American Revolution or the French Revolution .... It is a counterrevolution! Alas. And it is against us. I am kind of happy not to have ahead of me a very long future which will confirm my prediction. But you will live all of it."

The West, she said, is under assault and doesn't realize it.

When she gets phone calls threatening her life, she said, she lets them talk. "Then I say, 'Do you know where it is your mother and your wife and your sister and your daughter are right in this moment? They are in a brothel of Beirut. And do you know what they're doing? They are giving away their'-I don't tell it to you, but I tell it to them-'and you know to whom? To an American. Fuck you!'"

How did she feel about President Bush?

"We will see; it's too soon," she said. "I have the impression that Bush has a certain vigor and also a dignity which had been forgotten in the United States for eight years."

She doesn't like it, however, when the President calls Islam a "religion of peace."

"Do you know what I do each time he says it on TV? I'm there alone, and I watch it and say, 'Shut up! Shut up, Bush!' But he doesn't listen to me.

"I adore his wife," she said. "You wouldn't believe it: Laura Bush has the face of my mother when my mother was young. The face, the body, the voice. The first time I saw on TV Laura Bush, I got frozen because it was as if my mother was not dead. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'Mama.'"

Last April, she said, Ariel Sharon phoned her to praise an article she had written in the weekly Italian publication Panorama about the problem of European and Arab anti-Semitism.

She said she answered the phone and said, "'Hey, Sharon! How are you? Are you as fat?' Because I know him. Sharon said, 'Oriana, I called you to say, "Damn, you have guts; damn, you are courageous; damn, do I thank you."' I said, 'Ariel, you thank me-I apologize with you. I was too tough to you 20 years ago.' And he was, as usual, a gentleman."

The night before the phone call, there had been an attack on a kibbutz.

"I said, 'Listen, dear, I know what happened last night in that kibbutz. Will you please permit me to express to you and to your people my condolences?' Sharon started crying. I don't know, I didn't see the tears. But the voice was of a crying man, and he started to shout: 'Oriana! You are the only one who says the word condolences! Do you know, these bloody heads of states, I just spoke with the British and the Americans'-meaning Blair and Bush-'they did not say that word to me.' And then with broken voice he said, 'Do you know who were the dead last night? One was the grandmother who was in Dachau and who still had the number on her arm. The second one was her daughter, who was seven months pregnant. And the third one was the child of the daughter, who was 5 years old. And they are all dead! All dead! All dead!' He was crying."



Now read this:

An Italian author who wrote an attack on Muslims, calling their culture rotten and backward and saying "the sons of Allah are multiplying like rats", was accused of inciting racial hatred in Paris yesterday.

Oriana Fallaci, 73, an Italian journalist now living in New York, was unable to attend the court hearing as she has cancer. She first published her polemic against Islam, titled The Rage and the Pride, in an Italian newspaper but such was its impact that it was turned into a best-selling book.

If successful, the case against her will set a precedent in French law. Up to now, only the public prosecutor or official anti-racist associations have been allowed to bring cases alleging incitement to racial hatred. Ms Fallaci's accusers are 11 young Muslim men from the Lyons suburbs.

"When a victim is clearly designated, the sons of Allah, why should I, a Muslim, not feel victimised?" asked their lawyer, Gilles Devers. "I have as strong a claim as the associations."

Fallaci doesn't give a damn about political correctness. She says it like she sees it. It's immensely refreshing. Reminds me of him.