Oriana Fallaci has died

The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci has died after a long battle with cancer. I'm trying to find a better write-up, but here's the one from Reuters (as reprinted in The Scotsman), and here's the notice at the BBC. Her age is being listed as 76 in some reports, and 77 in others.

Saturday update: I was plagued with Internet troubles yesterday and kept running into roadblocks on updating this. So, here goes. I had mixed feelings about Fallaci, based on what little I knew about her. She had a tendency to shred her interview subjects, which I don't like. But when she was interviewing the Ayotollah Khomeini, she managed to find an opening in the conversation to remove the chador she'd been forced to put on. (Now, that's gutsy.) She was an outspoken atheist. But she seemed genuinely pleased whenever she and the Pope seemed to agree on something. She was a leftist. But she was a thinking leftist. The list goes on. Above all, she was clearly trying her best to warn her beloved Europe of what it was walking into by ignoring the rising Islamist threat. I was trying to think yesterday where I'd read about Fallaci over the years, and The Anchoress came to mind. Sure enough, The Anchoress has a tribute and a round-up to other posts. It's not entirely family friendly, I should warn you. But it's obviously heartfelt, and a good comparison, I think, of what the Left used to stand for (and how it used to stand), and the sad drift downward in recent years.