Oriana Fallaci

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Oriana Fallaci (1987)

Oriana Fallaci (born June 29, 1929 in Florence , † September 15, 2006 ibid) was an Italian journalist and writer .

Life

Oriana's liberal father was a fierce critic of Mussolini and exerted a significant influence on the girl's development. When Italy entered World War II , Oriana Fallaci was ten years old. She helped her father, who worked for the resistance, by smuggling weapons to partisans and helping prisoners escape from German concentration camps in Italy. During the occupation of Florence her father was arrested and tortured, but released some time later. After the Second World War, Fallaci made a name for herself as a journalist and writer. She became the representative of an extremely confrontational interview style that was strongly linked to the personality of the journalist in question, which became popular in the 1970s.

In 1956 Oriana Fallaci reported on the Hungarian uprising in Budapest. In 1963 she moved to New York. In 1968 she was shot three times in the Tlatelolco massacre .

Fallaci's books have been translated into 20 languages ​​and published in 31 countries. Her first work, with which she became internationally known, was If the Sun Dies , in which she processed the interviews she conducted with the first astronauts . The work entitled Wir, Engel und Beasts , published in the form of a diary in 1969, describes her experiences as a war reporter in 1967 and 1968 in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War , where she flew on combat missions with the US Army and had a conversation with the legendary North Vietnamese General Giap led. In 1972 she interviewed the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie . She found an international response in the 1970s and 1980s with her books Letter to a Never Born Child (the book was published at the height of the global abortion debate ), Ein Mann (about her love for the Greek resistance fighter Alekos Panagoulis, who died in unexplained circumstances in 1976 ) and Inschallah (on the civil war in Beirut ).

Fallaci's tomb on the Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori in Florence

Oriana Fallaci has also worked as a journalist for renowned international newspapers, including the London Times , Life and the New York Times . When she wrote in the Italian weekly L'Europeo in 1975 that Pier Paolo Pasolini had been killed by a group of right-wing thugs, her refusal to give her witness earned her a four-month prison sentence in 1978. The punishment was later settled by amnesty .

Fallaci interviewed numerous well-known personalities, such as Yasser Arafat , Willy Brandt , Muammar al-Gaddafi and Deng Xiaoping . In 1968 she interviewed the Saigon Police Chief, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan , who became known worldwide for a photo in which he shot a captured Viet Cong fighter in the street with his pistol. Henry Kissinger described his interview with her as "the most catastrophic conversation I have ever had with a member of the press". Fallaci got him to admit that the Vietnam War was “useless” and that as a politician he was a “cowboy ” leading the “carriage track ” by going alone. In 1979 she was the first woman from the West to speak to Ayatollah Khomeini . In 1991 she reported on the beginning of the Second Gulf War from Iraq.

Most recently she lived mainly in New York City , where she also witnessed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 . Pope Benedict XVI received the atheist Fallaci on August 27, 2005 for a private conversation. Fallaci donated most of her books and manuscripts to the Papal Lateran University . On September 15, 2006, she succumbed to longstanding cancer.

Fallacis's sole heir was Edoardo Perazzi, son of Fallaci's sister, after a legal dispute over the authenticity of her will in July 2015. Perazzi announced that Fallacis would "protect the reputation and make his contribution to her spiritual legacy".

Works

The anger and the pride

Oriana Fallaci caused a worldwide sensation with her essays (now published in book form) on the attacks of September 11, 2001. Under the title La rabbia e l'orgoglio ( Anger and Pride ), the author confronts and describes the Western world with Islam this as an aggressive and expansive religion. She puts forward the thesis that the decadent West, which has become blind in its addiction to peace, first evoked Islamism through its liberal and indulgent behavior towards Islam ( appeasement ) . But Islamism is not the real problem, but Islam as an intolerant religion in itself. Ultimately, Islam strives for religious world domination. For Fallaci, it follows logically that Islam, where it already dominates itself, no longer tolerates any other religion as equal and equal.

She compares Osama bin Laden in his totalitarian claim with Hitler and Mussolini and accuses the Islamic world of being at war against Western civilization - and thus against Western culture shaped by Christianity . This war is carried out openly - through terrorism, for example through religiously motivated suicide bombings - but above all covertly, in that the Christian European countries in particular are to be infiltrated through Muslim mass immigration. This latent migration policy makes targeted use of the phenomenon of the youth bulge, especially described by Gunnar Heinsohn . The aim of this long-term strategy is to steadily increase the proportion of Muslims in the population - if necessary over a period of several generations - until the majority of the population has been reached in the individual countries; whereby “the cross can be replaced by the crescent moon” in a politically legal and democratic way. What the warlike conquests of the Ottoman Empire did not succeed in - namely the conquest of Western Europe and thus the subjugation of Christianity - is now to be made up for by the subtle method of “demographic conquest”. Bit by bit, Sharia would be introduced in a “ march through the institutions ”.

The work, which was designed for mass consumption, sold unusually quickly in Italy: within two weeks of its publication, over 700,000 copies of the Italian original were sold. The work received mixed reviews. The journalist Marco Belpoliti found it stylistically successful, as it sweeps the reader away and reminds him of the popular sermons of St. Bernard of Siena ; In terms of content, the pamphlet appeals to the "instincts" of nationalism , xenophobia and chauvinism . Lennart Laberenz, on the other hand, criticized the style in Literaturkritik.de as “pain-relieved stammering” and judged: “The distant written attacks against Islam and the glorification of patriotism in the USA are tangibly shaped by self-chosen emigration into intellectual dullness. "

The power of reason

The key message of Fallaci's book The Power of Reason , published in 2004, is that the danger of a gradual, creeping “ Islamization ” of Europe through the “demographic factor” - the constant increase in the Muslim population in Christian European countries - is real. In their opinion, however, there is still “hope” due to the “superiority” of Western thought: the power of reason . In this book, Islam is referred to and described as backward-looking, “ irrational ”, anti- democratic and misogynistic . As in her previous work, Oriana Fallaci received several death threats from Islamist organizations. The book has been criticized several times by representatives of the Islamic community and various media for anti-Islamic tendencies.

In Italy, she was eventually sued by the President of the Muslim Union of Italy - Adel Smith - who incited violence against Fallaci and wanted to see her "brought before the law of Allah". The seriously ill faced a two-year prison sentence (June 2005) for denigrating a religion . She said in an interview: “I will not honor the judges with my presence, this is an unacceptable, inadmissible, unforgivable cause. Shame on you! ”( The power of reason ).

reception

Fallaci's journalistic work has generated mixed feedback. She was celebrated as a champion of European culture, referred to by others as a " hate preacher ".

Shortly after her death, the citizens' initiative “A street for Oriana Fallaci” was founded in the city of Imola . The organization later began to award the Oriana Fallaci Prize annually . The winners include Filip Dewinter (2008), Geert Wilders (2009), Tommy Robinson (2012), Vittorio Feltri (2015), Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump (2016), and most recently Marcello Foa (2018).

In 2007, the city of Milan named a small green space in Oriana Fallaci Park . Streets named after her exist in Grosseto , Pavia , Colleferro and Segrate, among others . The northern Italian municipality of Oppeano honored Fallaci's work in 2008 by naming the Piazza Oriana Fallaci . The community bought the property for the square for 70,000 euros and demolished a building that had previously been used as a mosque. In addition, the public libraries of the Lombard communities Magenta and Saronno are named after Fallaci.

Publications

literature

  • Tjark Kunstreich , Horst Pankow: The song of the cicadas. On the death of OF and on what German commentators shouted at and after her , in: Konkret 11/2006, p. 30f.
  • Liriam Sponholz: Religion as a media conflict material. Islam in the polemics of Thilo Sarrazin and Oriana Fallaci. In: Christoph Bultmann, Antje Linkenbach (Ed.): Translating Religions. Clichés and prejudices in the religious discourse. (Lectures of the Interdisciplinary Forum Religion of the University of Erfurt, Vol. 11) Aschendorff, Münster 2015, pp. 117–138.
  • Christina De Stefano: Oriana Fallaci. A woman's life . Translation from the Italian by Judith Schwaab . Munich: btb, 2016

Web links

Databases
Wikiquote: Oriana Fallaci  - Quotes
Commons : Oriana Fallaci  - collection of images, videos and audio files


Content

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christopher Stolzenberg: Life on the front line. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 15, 2006.
  2. ↑ Dirk Schümer : The Rebel: To the death of Oriana Fallaci. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 15, 2006.
  3. ↑ Oriana Fallaci is dead. In: Focus , September 15, 2006.
  4. ↑ Pasolini ucciso da due motociclisti? November 14, 1975, books.google ; E 'stato un massacro November 21, 1975, books.google
  5. ↑ Fallaci: Condannata per reticenza durante processo Pasolini , adnkronos.com ; Fallaci based her refusal to testify on the journalistic professional secrecy according to Art. 2 of Law No. 69 of February 3, 1963 Ordinamento della professione di giornalista , La Giustizia Penale , Volume 87 (1982) p. 2597 books.google
  6. ^ Oriana Fallaci: la mia veritá negata sulla morte di Pasolini. , La Stampa, March 12, 2005 (Italian, Flash Player required, accessed July 3, 2015)
  7. ^ Die Zeit August 16, 1968, reprint 2011: online
  8. ↑ Daniel Pipes : A Tribute to Oriana Fallacis. In: danielpipes.org , September 18, 2006.
  9. ↑ Persia: Beautiful Hands. ( Memento from September 16, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) In: Der Spiegel from October 1, 1979, accessed on September 27, 2018
  10. ↑ Why Oriana Fallaci was with the Pope. In: kath.net , September 9, 2005.
  11. ↑ Fallaci bequeathed her books to the Lateran University. In: kath.net , October 24, 2006.
  12. ↑ Testamento di Oriana Fallaci caso archiviato: nipote unico erede , ilgiornale.it, accessed December 23, 2018
  13. ^ A b Marco Belpoliti : The Fallacies of St. Fallaci . In: Foreign Policy . tape 130 , 2002, pp. 84-87 , JSTOR : 3183494 .
  14. ↑ Lennart Laberenz: The axis of the stupid: Oriana Fallaci understands the world of George W. Bush as cultural chauvinism. In: literaturkritik.de. May 2003, accessed October 12, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Dirk Schümer : What Allah has to listen to. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 13, 2006.
  16. ^ Barbara Villiger Heilig: Hate Preacher. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 15, 2006.
  17. ^ Marion Le Pen: “Uniamoci contro l'invasione”. A sua zia Marine il Premio Oriana Fallaci , thankyouoriana.it, accessed December 23, 2018
  18. ↑ Memorial Oriana Fallaci, Premiato Marcello Foa. In: il Giornale of September 16, 2018, accessed on September 27, 2018 (Italian)
  19. ^ "Piazza Oriana Fallaci al posto della moschea" , in: La Repubblica of May 18, 2008
  20. ↑ Italy apologizes to this critic of Islam , in: Die Welt, November 25, 2015.
  21. ^ Biblioteca Civica “Oriana Fallaci”. Website of the municipality of Saronno, accessed on September 27, 2018 (Italian)
personal data
SURNAME Fallaci, Oriana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian journalist, writer and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Florence
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 2006
Place of death Florence