Oriana Fallaci Dies

The very brave and brilliant writer and resistance fighter Oriana Fallaci has died:

ROME -- Veteran journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci, a former war correspondent best known for her abrasive interviews and provocative stances, has died, Italian news reports said Friday. She was 76.

Fallaci, who had been diagnosed with cancer years ago, died in a Florence hospital, the Italian agencies ANSA and Apcom said. The reports said that she had been hospitalized for days.

Fallaci enraged the Muslims and leftists (but I am redundant) in Europe by speaking out about the Muslim threat to western ways. She also got the lefties in America worked up as well.

She was what journalists should be and will be missed.

You can read more about this incredible womans life here and here.

Update: Michelle Malkin has more.

Update 2: Judith at Kesher Talk links to this great New Yorker article:

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

...Upon leaving Khomeini’s house after her first interview, Fallaci was besieged by Iranians who wanted to touch her because she’d been in the Ayatollah’s presence. “The sleeves of my shirt were all torn off, my slacks, too,” she recalled. “My arms were full of bruises, and hands, too. Do believe me: everything started with Khomeini. Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.”

More from the same piece:

“Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”