| Oriana Fallaci: Anger and
Pride
(translated from the Italian by Chris and Paola Newman)
[Translators’ note: This piece, and the introduction that precedes it, appeared in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on September 29, 2001. The few translations we’ve seen since then since have struck us as too literal to properly convey the meaning and immediacy of Fallaci’s Italian prose to an American audience. We thought it worth a try. Comments on the translation can be sent to cmnewman99@hotmail.com.} Introduction by Ferruccio de Bortolo: With this extraordinary piece, Oriana Fallaci breaks a decade of silence. A very long silence. Our most celebrated female writer (she calls herself a writer and refuses to use the word “journalist” anymore) lives a good part of the year in Manhattan. She doesn’t answer the phone, opens the door rarely, and goes out even less. She never gives interviews. Everyone has tried, no-one has succeeded. Isolated. But history and destiny saw to it that the center of the modern apocalypse opened, like a Dantesque abyss, not far from her lovely and literary home. The shockwave of the morning of September 11 disturbed even Oriana’s hermit-like--and hermetically sealed--repose. She opens the door, seeming to marvel at the unfamiliar gesture... Her
glance is at once tender and ferocious. Oriana has been working for years
on a very important work, awaited by all the world, among piles of documents
in a disorder that only appears as such, with warriorlike fervor.
I asked her to write what she had seen, experienced, felt after that Tuesday,
and Oriana gathered a few pages of emotions and thoughts. “I leave shreds
of my soul on every experience,” she wrote some years ago. It’s still true,
very true. These are bracing thoughts. Explosive ones. Thoughts to reason
over and reflect on. On America, on Italy, on the Islamic world. On patriotism
(it’s
Part I (the attack, America and Europe) You ask me to speak, this time. You ask me to break at least this once
the silence I’ve chosen, that I’ve imposed on myself these many years to
avoid mingling with chattering insects. And I’m going to. Because I’ve
heard that in Italy too there are some who rejoice just as the Palestinians
of Gaza did the other night on TV. “Victory! Victory!” Men, women, children.
Assuming you can call those who do such a thing man, woman, child. I’ve
heard that some of the insects of means, politicians or so-called politicians,
intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, not to mention others not worthy
of the title of citizen, are behaving pretty much the same way. They say:
“Good. It serves
And I am very very, very angry. Angry with an anger that is cold, lucid,
rational. An anger that eliminates every detachment, every indulgence.
An anger that compels me to respond and demands above all that I spit on
them. I spit on them. Angry as I am, the African-American poet Maya Angelou Very well, I’ll start with that. I was at home, which is in the center
of Manhattan. At exactly nine o’clock I had a sensation of danger, of a
danger that perhaps would not touch me, but that undoubtedly concerned
me. It’s the sensation you feel in war, or rather in combat, when every
pore of your skin feels the bullet or the rocket as it approaches, and
you perk up your ears and yell at the person next to you: “Down! Get down!”
I pushed it away. It’s not like I was in Vietnam. It’s not like I
was in one of the many wars, those fucking wars that have tortured my life
since World War II. I was in New York for God's sake, on a marvellous September
morning in 2001. But the sensation still possessed me, inexplicably. So
I did
A short circuit? A small plane gone off course? Or an act of deliberate terrorism? I stayed there almost paralyzed, fixed on that tower, and while I fixed
on
By now it was quarter past nine. Don’t ask me what I felt during those
fifteen minutes. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I was a piece of ice.
Even my brain was ice. I don’t even remember whether certain things I saw
were from the first tower or the second. For example, the people who threw
themselves from the eightieth or ninetieth floor to avoid being burned
alive. They broke the glass of the windows, they climbed up and jumped
out like someone who jumps out of an airplane with a parachute on. They
came down so slowly, waving their arms and legs, swimming in the air. Yes,
they seemed to swim in the air, never arriving. Around the thirtieth floor
though, they sped up. They started to gesture desperately, penitently I
imagine, almost as though they
You know, I thought I’d seen everything in war. I’d considered myself
I also have to say that in war I’d always seen a limited number of deaths. Every battle, two or three hundred dead. Four hundred at most. Like at Dak To in Vietnam. And when the battle was finished, the Americans would gather up and count them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. In the massacre of Mexico City, the one where I caught a fair number of bullets myself, they gathered at least eight hundred dead. And when, thinking me dead, they stuck me in the morgue, the cadavers I soon found around and on myself seemed like a deluge. Well, almost fifty thousand people worked in the two towers. And very few had time to evacuate. The elevators didn’t work any more, obviously, and to go down on foot from the highest floors would have taken an eternity. Flames permitting. We’ll never know the number of dead. (Forty thousand, fifty thousand?) The Americans will never tell, so
as not to
Yesterday the mayor Guiliani sent more than ten thousand body bags. But they went unused. What do I feel for the kamikazes who died with them? No respect. No
pity. No, not even pity, I who always wind up giving in to pity. I’ve always A death that, in place of an Oscar or a ministerial seat or a medal,
will get them (they think) admiration. And, in the case of those who pray
to Allah, a
I can just imagine how Mr. Arafat would seethe with rage to hear me.
And do you know who the heroes are? The passengers of the flight that
was supposed to throw itself into the White House but instead crashed into
the woods in Pennsylvania because they fought back! There ought to be a
paradise for them, illustrious Mr. Arafat. The real problem is that you
are now a perpetual head of state. You play the monarch. You visit the
pope, announce that you disapprove of terrorism, send condolences to Bush.”
And
I prefer to talk about the invulnerability that many, in Europe, attributed
to America. Invulnerability? What invulnerability? The more democratic
and open a society is, the more it’s exposed to terrorism. The more a country
is free, not governed by a police regime, the more it risks hijackings
or
In those countries’ airports or airplanes I have always felt safe. Tranquil as a sleeping newborn. The only thing I was afraid of was being arrested because I used to write bad things about the terrorists. In European airports and airplanes, on the other hand, I always felt uneasy. In American airports and airplanes I actually felt nervous. Twice as nervous in New York. (Not in Washington DC, though. The plane at the Pentagon was a complete surprise to me.) In my opinion it was ultimately never an issue of “if”: it was always one of “when”. Why do you think that on Tuesday morning my subconscious felt that anxiety, that sensation of danger? Why do you think that despite my habits I turned on the TV? Why do you think that one of the three questions I was asking myself while the first tower was burning and the audio wasn’t working was that of a terrorist attack? Why do you think that when the second airplane appeared I immediately understood? Since America is the strongest country in the world, the richest, the most powerful, the most modern, almost everyone fell into that trap. The Americans did themselves, at times. But America’s vulnerability comes precisely from its strength, its wealth, its power and its modernity. It’s the usual story of the dog chasing its own tail. It comes from America’s multi-ethnic being, its liberality, its respect for its citizens and guests. Example: about 24 million Americans are Muslim-Arabs. And when a Mustafa or a Mohammed comes, say from Afghanistan, to visit his uncle, nobody tells him he can’t attend pilot training school to learn how to fly a 757 jet airplane. Nobody can keep him from enrolling in a University (something I hope will change) to study chemistry and biology: the two sciences necessary to wage bacteriological war. Nobody. Not even if the government fears that this son of Allah might hijack that 757 or that he might toss a vial full of bacteria into the reservoir and unleash a disaster. (I say “if” because this time the government knew absolutely nothing and the disgrace of the CIA and FBI goes beyond all bounds. If I were President of the United States I’d send them all packing for stupidity with well-placed kicks to the posterior.) Having said that, let’s go back to the original thought. What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity?
Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers,
And where did he strike them, the reverend Osama Bin Laden? In the skyscrapers and in the Pentagon. How? With airplanes, with science and technology. By the way: do you know what gets me the most about this wretched multi-millionaire, this AWOL playboy who instead of courting blonde princesses and running wild in the night clubs (as he used to do in Beirut when he was 20 years old) enjoys himself by killing people in the name of Mohammed and Allah? The fact that his endless wealth comes from the earnings of a corporation specializing in demolition, and that he himself is a demolitions expert. Demolition is an American specialty. When we met I found you almost stupefied by the heroic efficiency and
admirable unity with which the Americans have faced this Apocalypse. That’s
right. Despite all the shortcomings that always get rubbed in their face--that
I myself always rub in their face (though those of Europe, and of Italy
in particular, are even more serious)--America is a country with i They ought to come to him with bowed heads, or better with ash on their
heads, and ask him: “Signor Giuliani, sir, please tell us how it’s done.”
He doesn’t delegate his duties to others, no. He doesn’t waste his time
with bullshit and greed. He doesn’t split himself between the tasks of
a mayor and those of a minister or deputy (is anybody listening in the
three cities of
How he did it, I don’t know. He’s sick like me, the poor man. The cancer that comes and returns has got him, too. And, like me, he pretends to be healthy: he works anyway. But I work at a desk, for God’s sake, sitting down! He, on the other hand... He looked like a general who joins the battle in person. A soldier who charges with his bayonet: “Come on, people, come on!!! Let’s roll up our sleeves, move!” But he could do it because those people were, are, like him. People without airs and without laziness, my father would have said, and with balls. As for the admirable ability to unite, the almost martial compactness with which the Americans respond to disaster and to the enemy, well: I have to admit that then and there I was astounded as well. I knew, yes, that it had exploded at the time of Pearl Harbor, that
is when the people huddled around Roosevelt and Roosevelt entered the war
against the Germany of Hitler and the Italy of Mussolini and the Japan
of Hiroito. I had caught a whiff of it, yes, after Kennedy’s assassination.
But that had been followed by the war in Vietnam, the lacerating rift caused
by the war in
So, when I saw whites and blacks crying in each other’s arms--and I mean in each other’s arms--when I saw Democrats and Republicans arm in arm singing “God Bless America”, when I saw them drop all their differences, I was flabbergasted. Just as I was when I heard Bill Clinton (someone for whom I've never harbored much tenderness) declare: “We must stand behind Bush. We must have faith in our president.” I felt the same when those same words were forcefully repeated by his wife Hillary, now senator for the State of New York. And when they were reiterated by Lieberman, the ex-Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency. (Only the defeated Al Gore remained squalidly silent). I felt the same when Congress voted unanimously to accept war and punish those responsible. Oh, if only Italy would learn this lesson! It’s such a divided country,
Italy. So
And having said this, let me explain where the ability to unite that
It comes from their patriotism. I don’t know whether in Italy you saw
and understood what happened in New York when Bush went to thank the rescue
men (and women) who are digging in the ruins of the two towers
In a totalitarian country I’d have thought: ”Look how nicely organized
this was by the Powers That Be!” Not in America. In America you don’t organize
these things. You don’t manage them, you don’t command them. Especially
in a disenchanted metropolis like New York and with workers like
God! I was so moved to see those workers clenching their fists and waving
their flags and roaring USA-USA-USA, without anyone ordering them to. And
I felt a kind of humiliation. Because I can’t even begin to imagine Italian
workers waving the tricolor and roaring Italia-Italia. Oh, I’ve seen them
wave plenty of red flags in the marches and rallies. Rivers, lakes, of
red flags. But never very many tricolor flags. None at all, actually. Ill-led
or tyrannized by an arrogant left devoted to the Soviet Union, they always
left the tricolor flags to their adversaries. Not that the adversaries
made very good use of So the result is that today you see the Italian flag only at the Olympics if you happen to win a medal. Worse: you see it only in the stadiums, when there’s an international soccer match. Which is also, by the way, the only time you’ll ever hear a cry of Italia-Italia. Well let me tell you something. There’s a big difference between a country in which the flag is waved only by hooligans in a stadium and a country where it’s waved by the entire population. Waved, for example, by indomitable workers who dig in the ruins to come up with an ear or nose of the creatures slaughtered by the sons of Allah. Or to gather the ground coffee. The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to
envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth
et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul,
the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man
has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to
the idea of equality. It’s special
Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti-Americans of the good-it-serves-America-right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!) What’s more, it’s a special country, a country to envy, because that
idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers.
The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by
a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality.
The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were,
the These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin
like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still
are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato
in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied
the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day
studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.)
Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it “Toscano”.) He spoke and read
in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with
the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music
paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought
him multiple copies of a book written by a
As for the self-taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer,
editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered
the electric Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll
that is the cost of every war, they didn’t do it with the rivers of blood
of the future French Revolution. They didn’t do it with the guillotine
and massacres at Vandea. They did it with a piece of paper that, along
with the need of
And that piece of paper that we’ve all been copying well or badly from
the French Revolution on, or from which we’ve drawn our inspiration, is
still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know
why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them,
rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality,
to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did,
prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves,
to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary
kings. My father used to say, “Communism is a monarchic regime, and it’s
an Well, in my view America frees the plebes. Everyone is a plebe there.
White, black, yellow, brown, purple, stupid, intelligent, poor, rich. Actually
the rich are the most plebeian of all. Most of the time they’re such boors!
Crude, ill-mannered. You can tell immediately that they’ve never read Galateo,
that they’ve never had anything to do with refinement and good taste and
And they all got their skulls cracked by America: English, Germans, Mexicans, Russians, Nazis, Fascists, Communists. Even the Vietnamese got theirs cracked in the end, when they had to come to terms after their victory so that now when a former president of the United States goes there to visit they're in seventh heaven. “Bienvenu, Monsieur le President, bienvenu!” The problem is that the Vietnamese don’t pray to Allah. It’s going to be much harder to deal with the sons of Allah. Much longer and much harder. Unless the rest of the Western world stops peeing its pants. And starts reasoning a little and gives them a hand. I am not speaking, obviously, to the laughing hyenas who enjoy seeing
images of the wreckage and snicker good-it-serves-the-Americans-right.
I am speaking to those who, though not stupid or evil, are wallowing in
prudence and doubt. And to them I say: “Wake up, people. Wake up!!”
A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly
seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom
and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying,
our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing
and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t
want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves,
if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that
for better or worse we’ve managed to build, to change, to improve, to render
a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigotted--or even not bigotted
at all. And with
Christ! Don’t you realize that the Osama Bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short-shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you fuck when you want and where you want and who you want? Don’t you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it. For twenty years I’ve been saying it. For twenty years. With a certain meekness, not with this passion, twenty years ago I wrote an editorial on this subject for the Corriere. It was an article by a person used to being with all races and all creeds, a citizen used to fighting all forms of fascism and intolerance, a layperson without taboos. But it was also an article by a person indignant at those who failed to smell the stench of a coming Holy War and who were letting the the sons of Allah get away with a little too much. I made an argument that went more or less like this, twenty years ago: “What sense is there in respecting those who don’t respect us? What
sense is there in defending their culture or presumed culture when they
scorn ours? I want to defend ours and I am informing you that I prefer
Dante to Omar Khayan." The sky came crashing down. They crucified me: “Racist!
Racist!” It was these same progressives (who at the time called themselves
Again the sky came crashing down. “Racist! Racist!” In their blindness
they didn’t even want me to speak of the monstrosities that the sons of
Allah were committing on their POWs (they would cut off their legs and
arms, remember? A little vice in which they’d already indulged in Lebanon
with their Christian and Jewish prisoners.) They didn’t want me to say
it, no. And just to be progressive they would applaud the Americans who,
having lost their marbles in fear of the Soviet Union, were arming the
eroic-Afghan-people. They trained those bearded men, and among them
Away-with-the-Russians-in-Afghanistaaaaan! The-Russians-must-go-from-Afghanistaaaan! Well, the Russians left Afghanistan. Happy? And from Afghanistan the
bearded men of the most-bearded Osama Bin Laden arrived in New York
Some are neither happy nor unhappy. They couldn’t care less. America's
far away anyhow, there’s an ocean between America and Europe... Oh, no,
my dear friends. There’s a mere thread of water. Because when the destiny
of the West, the survival of our civilization is at stake, we are New York.
We are America. We Italians, we French, we English, we Germans, we Austrians,
we Hungarians, we Slovaks, we Polish, we Scandinavians, we Belgians, we
Spaniards, we Greeks, we Portuguese. If America falls, Europe falls. The
West falls, we fall. And not just in a financial sense, which seems to
be what worries you the most. (Once when I was young and naive, I said
to We fall in every sense, my friend. And we’ll find muezzin instead of
church bells, chador instead of miniskirts, camel’s milk instead of the
old shot of cognac. Don’t you grasp even this? Do you refuse to understand
even this?!? Blair understood it. He came here and brought the solidarity
of the English people. Renewed it, rather. Not a solidarity expressed with
chattering and whining: a solidarity based on hunting down the terrorists
and on military alliance. Chirac, on the other hand, didn’t. As you know,
last week he
A visit scheduled a long time ago, not prompted by events. He saw the
wreckage of the two towers; he learned that the death toll is incalculable
and unspeakable, but he sure didn’t overextend himself. During the interview
with CNN, my friend Cristiana Amanpour asked as many as four times in what
way and to what degree he intended to take a stand against this Jihad,
In spite of their fear of war, every country in Europe has found and
arrested some accomplice of Osama Bin Laden. In France, in Germany, in
England, in Spain. But in Italy, where the mosques of Milan, Turin and
Rome overflow with scoundrels singing hymns to Osama Bin Laden and terrorists
waiting to blow up the Cupola of Saint Peter’s, not a one. Zero. Zilch.
Nada. Please
Part II (Islam and the West: contrasts) Christ! I don’t deny anyone the right to be afraid. Anyone who’s not afraid of war is an idiot. And as I’ve written a thousand times before, anyone who acts as though he’s not afraid of war is both an idiot and a liar. But in Life and in History there are times when one is not permitted to be afraid. Times when being afraid is immoral and uncivilized. And those who evade this tragedy out of weakness or lack of courage or habitual fence-straddling strike me as masochists. Masochists, yes, masochists. Why? Do you want to talk about what you
call the Contrast-between-the-Two-Cultures? Well, if you really must know,
it bothers me to even talk about two cultures: to put them on the same
plane as though they were two parallel realities of equal weight and equal
measure. Because behind our civilization we have Homer, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Phydias, for God’s sake. We have ancient Greece with its Parthenon
and its That tortured me and burned me a thousand times at the stake. That oppressed
me for centuries, that for centuries forced me to sculpt and paint only
Christs and Madonnas, that almost killed Galileo Galilei. Humiliated him,
shut him up. But it also made a great contribution to the History of Thought:
Yes or no? And then behind our civilization we also have the Renaissance.
We have Leonardo Da Vinci, we have Michaelangelo, we have Raphael, we
I am still alive, for now, thanks to our science. Not Mohammed’s. A science that has invented marvellous machines. The train, the car, the airplane, the spaceships with which we’ve gone to the Moon and Mars and soon will go who knows where. A science that has changed the face of this planet with electricity, the radio, the telephone, the TV, and by the way: is it true that the gurus of the left don’t want to say what I have just said?!? God, what pricks! They will never change. And now the fatal question: what is behind the other culture? Damned if I know. I search and search and find only Mohammed with his
Koran and Averroe with his scholarly merits (The Commentaries on Aristotle,
et cetera.) Arafat also finds numbers and math. Again yelling in my face,
again covering me with spit, he told me in 1972 that his culture
Your grandparents, my illustrious Mr. Arafat, left us nothing but a
few beautiful mosques and a book they’ve been breaking my balls with for
the past thousand four hundred years like not even the Christians do with
their Bible or the Jews with their Torah. And now let’s see just what are
the positive features that distinguish this Koran. Positive, really? Ever
since the
So what do we do with the whole Eye-for-an-Eye-Tooth-for-a-Tooth business?
What do we do with the chador, or better with the veil that covers the
faces of Muslim women so that in order to glance at the person next to
them the poor wretches have to peer through a close-meshed net at eye-level?
What do we do with polygamy and the principle that women count less than
camels, that they can’t go to school, they can’t go to the doctor, they
can’t have their pictures taken, etc.? What do we do with the veto on alcohol
and the death penalty for those who drink it? This is in
So here’s my answer to your question on the contrast-between-the-Two-Cultures: I say in this world there’s room for everyone. In your own home you can do whatever you want. And if in some countries the women are so stupid as to accept the chador, or rather the veil you peer out of through a close-meshed net at eye level, that’s their problem. If they are such birdbrains as to accept not going to school, not going to the doctor, not having their pictures taken, that’s their problem. If they are such idiots as to marry some asshole who wants four wives, that’s their problem. If their men are so silly as not to drink beer or wine, ditto. Far be it from me to stand in their way. I was raised with the concept of liberty, I was, and my mother used to say: “Variety is what makes the world beautiful.” But if they presume to impose the same things on me, in my home... And they do presume it. Osama Bin Laden says that the entire planet Earth must become Muslim,
that we must convert to Islam, that he will convert us by fair means or
foul, that this is why he massacres us and will continue to do so. And
this can’t be pleasing to us. It can’t help but make us itch to turn the
tables and kill him. But this thing won’t end, won’t die out with the death
of Osama Bin Laden. Because there are tens of thousands of Osama Bin Ladens
by now, and
It works like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a malice comparable
only to the faith and malice of Torquemada when he led the Inquisition.
The This is coming from one who has known this type of fanaticism rather
well in Iran, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, in Saudia Arabia, in Kuwait,
in Lybia, in Giordania, in Lebanon, and at home. That is, in Italy. Known
it, and had it chillingly confirmed through a number of trivial episodes--or
rather, grotesque ones. I’ll never forget what happened to me at the Iranian
Embassy in Rome
Nor can I forget what happened in Qom, Khomeini’s holy city where as
a woman I was turned away from all the hotels. To interview Khomeini I
had to wear chador, to put on the chador I had to take off my jeans, to
take off my jeans I had to find a secluded place. Naturally, I could have
performed
You’re-crazy, you’re-crazy, you-get-shot-in-Qom-for-doing-something-like-that. He preferred to bring me to the former Royal Palace where a merciful custodian took us in and let us use the former Throne Room. I actually felt like the Virgin Mary who has to take refuge with Joseph in the barn heated by the donkey and the ox to give birth to Baby Jesus. But the Koran forbids a man and a woman not married to each other to be alone behind a closed door, and alas, all of a sudden the door opened. The mullah in charge of Morality Control barged in screaming shame-shame, sin-sin, and there was only one way not to wind up being shot: get married. Sign the temporary (four months) marriage certificate the mullah was fanning in our faces. The problem was that the interpreter had a Spanish wife, a woman by the name of Consuelo who was not at all disposed to accept polygamy, and I didn’t want to marry anyone. Least of all an Iranian with a Spanish wife not at all disposed to accept polygamy. At the same time I didn’t want to be shot, that is, miss my interview with Khomeni. As I was debating what to do in this dilemma… You’re laughing, I’m sure. These seem like jokes to you. In that case,
I won’t tell you the rest of this episode. To make you cry I’ll tell you
about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of
the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with
After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah-akbar, Allah-akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones. Oh, I could go on ad infinitum. Tell you things never told, things to
make your hair stand on end. About that dotard Khomeni, for example,
who after our interview held an assembly at Qom to declare that I had accused
him of cutting off women’s breasts. He extracted a video from this assembly
that was shown for months on Teheran television so that, when I returned
to Teheran the next year, I was arrested as soon as I got off the plane.
It looked bad for me, you know, very bad. This was the period of the American
hostages… I could tell you about Mujib Rahman, who,
Or about that Palestinian named Habash who held me for twenty minutes
with a machine gun pointed at my head. God, what people! The only ones
I’ve had a civil relationship with remain poor Ali Bhutto, the first prime
minister of Pakistan, who was hanged because he was too friendly to the
West, and the most excellent king of Jordan: King Hussein. But those two
were as Muslim as I am Catholic. Anyway I want to get to the point of my
argument. A point that will not please many, given that defending one’s
own
I don’t go pitching tents at Mecca. I don’t go singing Our Fathers and
Hail Marys in front of Mohammed’s tomb. I don’t go peeing on the marble
of their mosques; I don’t go shitting at the feet of their minarets. When
I find myself in their countries (something from which I never derive pleasure),
I never forget that I am a guest and a foreigner. I am careful not to offend
them with clothing or gestures or behavior that are normal for us but impermissible
to them. I treat them with dutiful respect, dutiful courtesy, and I excuse
myself when through mistake or ignorance I infringe some rule or superstition
of theirs. And the images I’ve had before my eyes while writing this scream
of pain and indignation haven’t always been those of the apocalyptic scenes
I started with.
Sometimes I see another image instead, a symbolic (and therefore infuriating) one: the huge tent with which the Somalian Muslims disfigured and befouled and profaned the Piazza del Duomo at Florence for three months last summer. My city. A tent put up in order to beg-condemn-insult the Italian government that hosted them but wouldn’t give them the papers necessary to rove about Europe and wouldn’t let them bring the hordes of their relatives to Italy. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, pregnant sisters-in-law, and if they had their way, their relatives’ relatives as well. A tent situated next to the beautiful palazzo of the Archbishop on whose sidewalk they kept the shoes or sandals that are lined up outside the mosques in their countries. And along with the shoes or sandals, the empty bottles of water they’d used to wash their feet before praying. A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors. A tent, finally, furnished like a sleazy little apartment: seats, tables, chaise-lounges, mattresses for sleeping and for fucking, ovens for cooking food and plaguing the piazza with smoke and stench. And, thanks to the customary irresponsibility of ENEL, which cares about our works of art about as much as it cares about our landscape, furnished with electric light. Thanks to a radio tape player, enriched by the uncouth wailing of a muezzin who punctually exorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells. Add to all this the yellow streaks of urine that profaned the marble of the Baptistry. (My, these sons of Allah sure have a long range! However did they manage to hit the target when they were held back by
a
You’re well aware because I’m the one who called you, begged you to
talk about it in the Corriere, remember? I also called the mayor, who,
I admit, came politely to my house. He listened to me, he agreed with me:
“You’re right. You’re quite right.” But he didn’t remove the tent. He forgot
or he wasn’t able. I also called the Foreign Minister, who was a Florentine,
indeed
But he didn’t lift a finger to remove that tent, and as for the sons
of Allah who urinated on the Baptistery and shat all over San Salvatore
al Vescovo, he moved quickly to appease them. (I understand that
the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and
cousins and pregnant sisters-in-law are now where they wanted to be. That
is in Florence and in
Well, being more intelligent than the others, in the space of a few hours he got rid of it. In place of the tent there remained only an immense and disgusting stain of filth. It was a Pyrrhic victory, though. Because it had no effect on the other
atrocities that for years have wounded and humiliated what used to be the
capital of art and culture and beauty. It did nothing to discourage the
other arrogant guests of the city: the Albanians, the Sudanese, the Bengalese,
the Tunisians, the Algerians, the Pakistani, the Nigerians who contribute
with so much fervor to the drug trade and prostitution which, it appears,
are not prohibited by the Koran. Oh yes: they’re all right where they were
before my policeman took away the tent. In the courtyard of the Uffizi
Galleries, at the foot of Giotto’s tower. In front of the Loggia dell’
Orcagna, around the Loggie del Porcellino. Opposite the National
Library, at the entrances to the museums. On Ponte Vecchio where every
so often they kill each other with
(That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: municipal funding.) In the churchyard of San Lorenzo where they get drunk on wine and beer And God forbid that a citizen protest, God forbid that someone tell
him to take-those-rights-of-yours-and-go-exercise-them-at-home. “Racist,
racist!” God forbid that a pedestrian brush up against a presumed Bernini
sculpture while trying to walk through the merchandise that blocks the
way. “Racist, racist!” God forbid that a metro cop should walk up to him
and dare to say, “Signor son of Allah, Your Excellence, would you mind
moving over a hairsbreadth to let people get by?” They’d eat him alive.
They’d go after
The same thing happens in other cities, I know. At Turin, for example.
That Turin that created Italy and now doesn’t even seem like an Italian
city. It seems like Algiers, Dacca, Nairobi, Damascus, Beirut. At Venice.
That And here’s something I really don’t understand. Instead of sons of Allah,
in Italy they call them “foreign laborers.” Or else
And then there’s something else I don’t understand. If they’re really
so poor, who’s giving them the money for the voyage by ship or rubber dinghy
that brings them to Italy? Who gives them the ten million lira a head (at
least ten
Well, even if he’s not the one giving them money, the situation bothers
me. Even if our guests are absolutely innocent, even if there’s no-one
among them who wants to destroy the Tower of Pisa or the Tower of Giotto,
wants to put me in chador, wants to burn me at the stake of a new Inquisition,
their presence alarms me. It makes me uncomfortable. And whoever takes
this
Part III (immigrant-invaders and the Resistance) Not long ago I happened to catch a phrase uttered by one of the thousand
prime ministers that have honored Italy with their presence over these
past few decades. “Well, my uncle was an immigrant too! I can remember
him leaving for America with his little cardboard suitcase.” Or something
along those lines. No, my friend. No. It’s not the same thing at all. And
it’s not for The Americans even made a movie about it. That one with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and what struck me about it was the ending. The scene with the poor souls running to plant a little white flag on the piece of land they want to claim as theirs, so that only the youngest and strongest are able to make it. The rest wind up with diddly squat and some of them die in the process. To my knowledge, there was never any act of Parliament in Italy inviting
or rather urging our present guests to leave their countries. Come-come-we-really-need-you,
if-you-come-we’ll-give-you-a-little-farm-in-Chianti. They came to
us on their own initiative, with their accursed dinghies and in the teeth
of the customs officers who tried to send them back. What occurred was
not an immigration, it was more of an invasion conducted under an emblem
of
I’ll never forget the way these stow-aways filled the piazzas of Italy
with assemblies last year to clamor for visas. Those distorted, savage
faces. Those raised fists, threatening. Those baleful voices that took
me back to the Teheran of Khomeni. I’ll never forget it because I felt
offended by their bullying in my home, and because I felt made fun of by
the ministers who told us: “We’d like to deport them but we don’t know
where they’re hiding.” Bastards! There were thousands of them in those
piazzas and they sure as hell weren’t hiding. To deport them all they had
to do was put them in line,
The second reason, my dear nephew of the uncle with the little cardboard
suitcase, is one even a schoolboy could understand. It requires only two
elements to expound. One: America is a continent. And in the latter half
of the 1800’s when the American Congress gave the green light to
Italy, on the other hand, is a very old country. Its history goes back
at least three thousand years. Its cultural identity is thus very precise--and
let’s not beat around the bush: that identity has quite a bit to do with
a religion called Christian religion and a church called the Catholic Church.
People like me And I grew up in that music, in that landscape. And it was through that music and that landscape that I learned what architecture is, what sculpture is, what painting is, what art is. It was through that church (which I later rejected) that I began to ask myself what is Good, what is Evil, and by God... There: you see? I wrote “by God” again. With all my secularism, all
my atheism, I am so imbued with Catholic culture that it’s even part of
my way of expressing myself. Oh God, my God, thank God, by God, sweet Jesus,
good God, Madonna mia, here a Christ, there a Christ. These words come
so spontaneously to me that I don’t even realize I’m speaking or writing
them. And you want me to lay it all out? Even if I’ve never pardoned Catholicism
for the infamies it inflicted on me for centuries, starting with the Inquisition
that burned even my grandmother--poor grandmother!--even if I’ve never
gotten along well with priests and have no use for their prayers,
In fact I have a thing for icons. I also love monasteries and convents. They give me a sense of peace, and sometimes I envy those inside. And then let’s admit it: our cathedrals are more beautiful than mosques and synagogues. Yes or no? They’re also more beautiful than Protestant churches. Look, my family’s cemetery is Protestant. It accepts the dead of all religions but it’s Protestant. And one of my great-grandmothers was Walensian. One of my great-aunts, Evangelist. I never knew my Walensian great-grandmother. But I did know the Evangelist great-aunt. When I was a little girl she would always take me to her church functions in Via de’ Benci at Florence, and... God, how bored I was! I felt so alone with those faithful who did nothing but sing psalms, that priest who wasn’t a priest and did nothing but read the Bible, that church that didn’t seem like a church and apart from a little pulpit had nothing but a big crucifix. No angels, no Madonnas, no incense. I even missed the smell of incense, and would rather have been in the
nearby Basilica di Santa Croce where they had these things. The things
I was used to. And I’ll say more: in my country house, in Tuscany, there
is a tiny little chapel. It’s always closed. No one goes there since my
mother died. But I go there sometimes, to dust, to make sure the mice haven’t
made a nest, and
Good God! (Here we go again.) I’m telling you that we Italians are not
in the same position as the Americans: mosaic of ethnic and religious groups,
hodgepodge of a thousand cultures, at once open to every invasion and able
to stave it off. I’m telling you that, for the very reason that our cultural
identity is so precise and defined by so many centuries, it cannot sustain
a wave of
I am Italian. The fools who think I’m an American by now are wrong.
I’ve never asked for American citizenship. Years ago an American ambassador
offered it to me on Celebrity Status, and after thanking him I replied:
“Sir, I’m very tied to America. I’m always arguing with it, always telling
it off, but I’m still profoundly tied to it. For me America is a lover--no,
a husband--to
The gesture seems so generous, so affectionate. I also remember that
America has always been the Refugium Peccatorum for people without a
Apart from the stadium hooligans, that is. I have a white red and green flag from the 1800s. It’s full of stains,
stains of blood, all pink from mice. And despite the fact that it has the
coat of arms of the House of Savoy in the center (though without Cavour
and without Victor Emmanuel II and without Garibaldi who bowed to that
coat of arms we would never have unified Italy), I hold onto it like gold.
I treasure it as a jewel. Christ! We died for that flag! Hanged,
shot, decapitated. Killed by the Austrians, by the Pope, by the Duke of
Modena, by the Bourbons. We carried out the Risorgimento with that flag.
And the unification of Italy, and the war in Carso, and the Resistance.
My maternal great-great-grandfather Giobatta fought for that flag at Curtatone
and Montanara and was
In the ranks of Justice and Liberty, with the battle name Emilia. I was fourteen. The next year when they discharged me from the Volunteer Italian Army Corps of Liberty, I felt so proud. Jesus and Mary, I had been an Italian soldier! And when I found out that along with the discharge went 14,450 lire, I didn’t know whether to accept it or not. It seemed wrong to accept it for doing my duty to the Patria. Then I did accept it. None of us had shoes at home. And with that money I bought shoes for myself and my little sisters. Obvioiusly my homeland, my Italy, is not the Italy of today. The scheming,
vulgar, fat-dumb-and-happy Italy of Italians whose only concern is getting
their pensions by 50 and whose only passions are foreign vacations and
soccer matches. The rotten, stupid, cowardly Italy, of little hyenas who
would sell their daughter to a Beirut whorehouse in order to shake the
hand of a Hollywood divo or diva but if Osama Bin Laden’s kamikazes reduce
thousands of New Yorkers to a mountain of ashes that seem like ground coffee
they snigger contentedly good-it-serves-America-right. The squalid, faint-hearted,
soulless Italy, of presumptuous and incompetent political parties that
don’t know how to win or lose but know how to glue the fat
The still-Mussolinesque Italy of black and red fascists that make you think of Ennio Flaiano’s terrible joke: “In Italy there are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists.” Nor is it the Italy of the magistrates and politicians who in their ignorance of proper verb tense commit monstrous errors of syntax while pontificating on television screens. (You don’t say, “If it was,” you animals! You say “If it were.”) Nor is it the Italy of young people who, having similar teachers, are drowning in the most scanadlous ignorance, the most excruciating superficiality, drowning in emptiness. So that they add errors of spelling to errors of syntax and if you ask them who the Carbonari were, who the liberals were, who Silvio Pellico was, who Mazzini was, who Massimo D’Azeglio was, who Cavour was, who Victor Emmanuel II was, they look at you with dulled pupils and dangling tongues. They know nothing or at most they know how to play the comfortable role
of aspiring terrorists in a time of peace and democracy, how to wave black
flags, hide their faces behind ski masks, the little fools. Inept fools.
And even less is it the Italy of the chattering insects who after reading
this will hate me for having written the truth. Between one bowl of spaghetti
and another
Woe to anyone who robs it from me or invades it. Because whether the
invaders are Napoleon’s French or Francis Joseph’s Austrians or Hitler’s
Germans or Osama Bin Ladin’s comrades, it’s all the same to me. Whether
they invade it using cannons or rubber dinghies, ditto. And with that I
bid
© 2001 Oriana Fallaci |
(OMED:
some of the language below is coarse. Parts of the text leave you
with the impression she is Ernest Hemingway The piece is very long
and in places absolutely brilliant. It was sent in by our regular book
reviewer, Peggy Whitcomb, who found it on an internet forum. It's one hell
of a read. Miss Fallaci was born in 1929, so the photo would have
been taken during the fifties or sixties)
roared
the other day: “Be angry. It’s good to be angry, it’s healthy.” And I don’t
know whether it’s healthy for me. But I know that it won’t be healthy for
them, I mean those who admire Osama Bin Laden, those who express comprehension
or sympathy or solidarity for him. Your request has triggered a detonator
that’s been waiting too long to explode. You’ll see. You also ask me to
tell how I experienced this apocalypse. To give, in other words, my testimony.
turned
toward the second tower like a bomber who draws a bead on a target and
then hurls himself at it. That’s when I understood. I also understood because
in that same moment the audio came back on and transmitted a chorus of
primal screams. Repeated and primal. “God! Oh, God! Oh, God, God, God!
Gooooooood!” And the plane went into that second tower like a knife
going into a stick of butter.
them,
I’d say. Nor did they waste them either, thank God. And those who go to
Mass, ditto. As for that yahoo with the green shirt and tie, he
old-school
monarchy. Because it cuts off men’s balls. And when you cut off a man’s
balls, he’s no longer a man.” He also used to say that instead
Arthur
Miller: “Americans measure everything with money, they only think of money.”
And Arthur Miller replied: “You don’t?”)
Normandy
to kick the Nazis out of France?” Not that I see any Richard Lionhearts
among the other Europeans either, apart from Blair. Certainly not in Italy
where the government has yet to single out, let alone arrest, a single
accomplice or suspected accomplice of Osama Bin Laden. For God’s sake,
Mr. Knight-of-Labor, for God’s sake!!
Rossini
and Donizetti and Verdi and Company. That music without which we could
not live and which is prohibited in their culture or supposed culture.
God forbid you should whistle a tune or hum the chorus of Nabucco. And
finally we have Science, for God’s sake. A science that has understood
a lot of diseases and that cures them. (Painting: Raphael's
School of Athens)
never
forget that if he hadn’t kept an eye on the Soviet Union, today I’d speak
Russian. I care about him and I like him. I like for example that when
I