- guardian.co.uk, Sunday June 2 2002 01.56 BST
Fallaci has broken a decade of silence in the wake of 11 September to savage Muslims as 'vile creatures who urinate in baptistries' and 'multiply like rats'.
In a book which has become a runaway bestseller in Italy and Spain and has just been published in France, she denounces Europeans who sympathise with the Palestinians as anti- Semites who would sell their own mothers to a harem to see Jews once again in the gas chambers and ovens of Dachau.
The 71-year-old veteran of the Italian resistance and chronicler of wars in Vietnam and Lebanon was at home in Manhattan when the planes crashed into the World Trade Centre.
'They say: "Good. It serves America right." And I am very, very, very angry. Angry with an anger that is cold, lucid, rational. An anger that eliminates every detachment, every indulgence. An anger that compels me to respond and demands above all that I spit on them. I spit on them.'
Human rights watchdogs accused Fallaci, who suffers from cancer, of playing into the hands of Osama bin Laden's fanatics by using provocative language to stir religious hatred.
Last week, the Brussels-based European Observatory on Racism deplored the 'violent and insulting tone' and content which was 'explicitly anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-immigrant'. The writer was placed in the same category as Umberto Bossi, the xenophobic leader of Italy's Northern League.
After the Milan daily, Corriere della Sera, coaxed an article from Fallaci last September, the Italian publisher Rizzoli persuaded her to write a book, Anger and Pride, which was published at Christmas. It has been reprinted five times in Italy and unauthorised translations swiftly appeared on pro-Israeli websites. So too has Fallaci's latest article which lambasted European anti-Semites.
Jewish leaders such as Amos Luzzatto and conservative politicians such as Antonio Martino, Italy's Defence Minister, have praised her for having the courage to defy political correctness.
Revered in Italy for resisting the Nazis in Florence when aged only 14, she depicted Europe as infested with anti-Semites who made Jews afraid to walk the streets.
'I find it shameful and see in all this the rise of a new fascism, a new Nazism,' she wrote.
