Friday saw the death of a courageous woman, Oriana Fallaci, of cancer at the age of 77. What a life she did lead. Interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeni in Tehran, making Henry Kissinger look unprepared, and capturing the odiousness of Yasser Arafat. To being beaten and shot in 1968 during student protests in Mexico. Being threatened with violence by radical Islam for her books calling upon Europe and the West to wake up. But I think the absolute zenith of her thought provoking journalism has to have been when Switzerland wanted to put the handcuffs on her and arrest her for what she has written. Shades of the Inquisition there, practiced by the Swiss no less.
With such writing she joins the ranks of such as Socrates I think. As she herself admits, it matters not if a writer is popular while still alive; will the writer still be remembered long after the writer is dead that is the true test. And even in that comment is a further challenge to the West. Oriana Fallaci, Plato, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and others will not be remembered if the West falls, the culture of the West will be swept aside and destroyed like the time when Islamic forces conquered Alexandria and burned for the fourth and final time the famed Library of Alexandria.
Wake up world. Though a brave woman has laid down her pen, there are many more who need to pick up their own weapons to defend all that is good in Western civilization. Or all that our ancestors have striven for will have been in vain. They did not falter at Poiters or Vienna, lets not falter now when we have the likes of Oriana Fallaci to show the way.
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