The fiery Italian, once one of the world’s most uncompromising political interviewers, has stirred anger with The Rage and the Pride, a polemic on Islam and the September 11 attacks. She rarely meets the press herself, but has come out fighting after the failure of last month’s bid to ban her book in France.

“My rage hasn’t diminished,” she said. “I have contempt for a culture that puts my sisters under the burqa and cuts the hands off thieves. I would never have contempt for someone who says ‘I am a Muslim’, but I would ask ‘What kind of Muslim are you? Are you one of them?’ ”

By “them” she means “Islamo-fascists”, the admirers of Osama Bin Laden, whom she is determined to fight as bitterly as her father, a Tuscan resistance leader, fought Mussolini. “They are multiplying like protozoa,” she warns readers of her book. “There are millions and millions of extremists.”

Her views led the Movement against Racism in France to accuse her of inciting religious hatred. Its attempt to force the publishers to withdraw the book or insert a warning about its contents infuriated Fallaci.

“France guillotined thousands of people and subjugated Europe in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet it wants to forbid my freedom of expression,” she said.

The legal action failed on a technicality, convincing Fallaci that the decision to drop the action was political. The Rage and the Pride has sold more than 1m copies in Italy and topped bestseller lists in France and Germany. Its success has persuaded her that a politically correct elite is out of step with public opinion.

Fallaci declared war on political correctness before the term was invented. She was a war reporter in Vietnam and after she criticised the Americans she was lionised by peace campaigners and invited by the communists to visit north Vietnam. But when she denounced Stalinist repression there, “Hanoi Jane” Fonda and the left turned on her in fury.

“I judged Hanoi and Saigon with the same heart and brain. There is red fascism and black fascism. The roots of illiberality are the same,” she said.

The world’s most notorious leaders opened their doors to her, from General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. She admired Khomeini’s intelligence and made the severe cleric laugh by questioning him cheekily about a forbidden topic, the chador.

Even so, Fallaci is unforgiving: “You can be the most sympatico person in the world and be a bastard who kills us and destroys our civilisation. Everything started with him.”

Western culture is superior to that of the Arab world, she says — and she is angry with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, for backpedalling on this issue: “Not a single one of those countries has a drop of democracy. Our laws are superior. Our standards of living are superior. Our respect for women is superior.

“We are not beheaded if we cuckold our husbands. We don’t wear the burqa. This is superior, for Christ’s sake. In 1,400 years, Islam has never made an act of self-criticism. It is the immovable mountain.”

Fallaci never married her companion, the Greek resistance leader Alekos Panagoulis, who died in the 1970s, and to her lasting regret she miscarried a child. Now 73 and suffering from cancer, she lives alone in New York surrounded by her books and anti-fascist mementos from the 1930s. She had given up journalism for fiction until Al-Qaeda’s suicide pilots attacked her city.

She immediately declared war on Islamic fundamentalism. The Rage and the Pride, written in the weeks after the collapse of the World Trade Center, is a bitter and angry polemic. Muslim immigrants to Italy are denounced for urinating on Florence’s beautiful churches, for peddling drugs, pimping and turning its cities into casbahs. New York is depicted in a heroic glow, led by its mayor with the Italian name Giuliani.

The book was meant to be over the top, she insisted. “It’s an invective. I wrote it on the wave of a terrible trauma. If you ask me, do I repent what I have written, the answer is no.”

She condemns rampant anti-Americanism in Europe as suicidal. “America is us,” she writes in her book. “If America collapses, Europe collapses, the whole of the West collapses.”

The next edition of her book will be even more intemperate, she promises. “I don’t want the burqa. I want to stuff it in their throats.”

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