It is not an exaggeration to say that this past election marked a true revolution in Italian politics. The New York Times or The Economist will quickly dismiss it as the same old story with the same old TV tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, who, for the third time, will serve as the Prime Minister of the Bel Paese. And they will be critical of this outcome, blaming it on Berlusconi’s subliminal abilities, as well as on the short-sighted Italians who voted for him. Blind as we are to the fact that he is rich, that he has a lot of power already, and that most of what he will do as Prime Minister will—so they claim in advance—border on conflict of interest. It is the same (alleged) conflict of interests, by the way, that the Left has been harshly criticizing for years without ever doing anything about it. They have preferred to keep things as they are in order to have what they deemed to be a powerful political weapon against Berlusconi. And they were wrong.
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People in Italy have become accustomed to hearing, in perfect and elegant Italian, Magdi Allam speak about the very difficult relationship between the West and the Muslim world. They also appreciate reading his editorials on Il Corriere della Sera devoted to the same topic. He is an extraordinarily popular figure in this country, one of the deputy directors (vice-director ad personam) of the leading Italian newspaper, and a man with a very fine intellect who tries to understand and to explain a situation, much more than a mere clash of cultures, that is getting worse by the hour. It is enough to look at his most recent contributions to Il Corriere della Sera (he was appointed vice-director in 2003) to get a clear idea of what kind of man he is and what kind of views he shares with his readers. Mr. Prodi has been extraordinarily busy lately. First, he went to Spain to visit with his friend Zapatero, and found nothing better to do there than complain with the local press about things Italian. Airing one’s dirty laundry in public is not the most elegant and diplomatic thing to do, but Mr. Prodi evidently, and in this case, did not care about elegance or diplomacy. Then, when in his office in Rome, he has been busy drafting the 2007 budget for Italy. It is a budget which, thanks to a huge tax increase, will bring the Italian middle class to its knees and has already prompted both Standard and Poor’s as well as Fitch to lower Italy’s rating to a historic low. Not content with all these frantic and (de-)constructive activities, Mr. Prodi (also known in Italy as Mr. Mortadella, a nickname which in the English translation reads Mr. Bologna—his hometown—or Baloney!) has found the time to state something seemingly sensible on the issue of the Islamic veil. Much to the chagrin of those terrorists who were hoping to be the ones to shut her up, Oriana Fallaci passed away peacefully in her beloved Florence, surrounded by her sister, her nephews, and very few close friends—those, that is, who did not repudiate the Italian intellectual after her well-known and courageous stance vis-à-vis the Islamic war on the Western world. The room in the downtown clinic, where she spent her last few days, overlooked both the Florence synagogue and Brunelleschi’s dome, two of the most powerful symbols of that Judeo-Roman legacy at the heart of the Western culture that Fallaci so strenuously and tenaciously defended. She loved Florence as much as she loved her adopted home, New York. There, she owned a town house on the Upper East Side where she had lived for many years. It was shortly after the 9/11 attack that, in her home in Manhattan, she wrote a powerful and hard-hitting editorial for Il Corriere della Sera. An outcry of civic courage as well as a rare example of journalism which tells it like it is, the article was a preview of what she was to discuss in her best selling book The Rage and The Pride, followed a few years later by The Force of Reason, and more recently by The Apocalypse. |
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