Oriana Fallaci dead.

New York -- A few days after Pope Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg, Florentine author and journalist Oriana Fallaci died at the age of 77. Her obituary was buried in the back pages of Italian papers because of the polemic raging around the Pope. But the thoughts and ideas of Fallaci were on the minds of many Italians as the controversy unfolded.

Oriana Fallaci was born in 1929 in Florence. A young girl during World War II, she assisted her father in the resistance movement and was decorated for her efforts against the Nazi occupation at the age of 14. She went on to become a journalist and during the course of her career, she reported from the front lines of battle-fields and interviewed some of the most influential people of our age.

In these years, Fallaci belonged to the Radical Party, hung around with Pier Paolo Pasolini and his circle, and proclaimed herself an atheist and very anti-clerical. Her books sold well and she lived half her time in Florence and half in New York.

In 1990 she stopped writing and maintained a 10-year silence until 2001, when she started writing about radical Islam. In her interview, titled "Rabbia and Orgoglio," the Florentine raised an alarm regarding Europe's incapacity to defend itself against the Islamicization of the West. She lauded the patriotism of the Americans to bond together in the face of threats and contrasted it with the internal squabbling that was weakening Europe.

Her subsequent book, The Force of Reason, followed up the first warnings with a red alert that Europe had already succumbed to Islam. Coining the term "Eurabia," she denounced the forced conversions, the treatment of women and other aspects of Islamic culture, and claimed that Europe was on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam.

Fallaci's rough language and frank words soon got her into trouble. She was indicted in 2005 for the crime of "vilipendio" (vilification) of religion and faced trial and imprisonment. (It is interesting to note that her accuser, Adel Smith, is the same man who sued to remove all public crucifixes in Italy a few years back.)

Fallaci remained in New York, primarily because she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. In the United States, Fallaci began to speak out on questions that one would associate more with Catholic journalists than with a self-described "atheist anti-clerical."

She denounced the starvation of Terry Schiavo, praising George Bush for his attempt to save her life. She also wrote opposing homosexual "marriage." In August 2005, Fallaci went to Rome to meet with the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.

The contents of the meeting were not made public, but Fallaci spoke frankly of her admiration for Joseph Ratzinger. She said, "I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger."

It seems odd that Fallaci isn't here to comment on the events of these days, but a headline in the Roman newspaper Il Messagero sums it all up with "Oriana was Right! (Zenit, Sept. 21)."