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Orianna Fallaci: She Hated, But She Was Hot
17 September 2006
Consider the words of a "provocative" woman, so-called by obituaries around the world: "Jews breed like rats." "If you put a pistol against my head and ask which I think is worse, Jews or Mexicans, I'd have to think a moment, then I'd say the Jews, because they've broken my balls." "In the same way that the Jews would like us all to become Jews, they [the 'gay lobby'] would like us all to become homosexuals.”
Charming, isn't she, "La Fallaci," as the journalist Oriana Fallaci, dead at 77, called herself. "She was glamorous, fearless and always provocative," starts the Los Angeles Times' remembrance. The NY Times is just a little tougher, calling her "an iconoclastic journalist turned icon herself, who in recent years wrote angrily about the threat of Judaism..."
Is the nation's press really so neutral on the subject of anti-Semitism? Of course not. I've simply performed the old stink-test of substituting "Jews" for the group actually named, in this case, Muslims. I've left her opinions of Mexicans and gays as she stated them. What's startling here is how ambivalent mainstream media is about Fallaci's gross bigotry. Partly, this is out of respect for a career that included some of the great interviews of modern history. But one can't read the the dozens of obituaries that bury her racism, to which she devoted her last three books, bestsellers in Italy, without wondering how many editors out there think that Fallaci had a point, if perhaps too strongly stated?
Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit. Maybe they ignore or downplay Fallaci's hate-mongering because she used to be hot. "Glamorous" is the word that appears in most of the tributes. "High cheekbones" are also noted as part of her journalistic method.
Imagine La Fallaci as, say, Joe Fallaci, a big, bald, sweaty guy at the diner who insists on smoking in the no-smoking section and yammering on about dirty Arabs ruining America and the goddamn Mexicans. Joe Fallaci is quite the free thinker -- last time a gay couple stopped in for burgers Joe decided to do a mincing imitation.
Provocative, no?
Let's recall just a few more words from Orianna before we let her rest. No substitutions this time. This one's verbatim: "I am angry at the Jews for many things… If you want to take the example of America, how they hold the power, the economical power in so many ways, and the press and the other kind of stuff… I never realized how it happened and they came to control the media to that point.”
--Jeff Sharlet
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