Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's best-known journalists who shocked the literary world with a vitriolic attack on Islam after the September 11 attacks on America, has died aged 77, Italian media reported today.
Fallaci, who died in her home town of Florence after battling cancer for several years, interviewed some of the most famous leaders of the 20th century.
They included Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. She set the pace for a daring life when she joined Italy's anti-fascist resistance during World War Two, then showed the same fearlessness as a war correspondent.
Kissinger later wrote that her interview with him was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press", after Fallaci needled him until he agreed that the Vietnam War was "useless". Fallaci divided her own public when she wrote "The Rage and the Pride" in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an angry book in which she described Islam as oppressive and Arab immigrants in Europe as dirty and bigoted.
In a later book, "The Force of Reason", she wrote that terrorists had killed 6,000 people over the past 20 years in the name of the Koran and said the Islamic faith "sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom".