La Fallaci, A prophet of decline passes from the scene

Many other bloggers have eulogized Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, a mentor to many of us who passed away two days ago in her home town of Florence, ironically, the epicenter of Western renaissance. There is not much that I can add that hasn’t been mentioned on many other sites, but I did feel compelled to make a post out of respect and to link to this article from today’s Wall Street Journal. A small sample:
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."

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