Time & Perspective Quote by Oriana Fallaci

Fallaci’s line lands like a cigarette flicked into a puddle: quick, contemptuous, meant to hiss. “Every five minutes” isn’t a statistic, it’s a courtroom flourish - a way of turning political ambiguity into a personality defect. The punch comes from the petty setup of “what time it is,” a domestic, low-stakes question that makes alleged deceit feel pathological rather than tactical. She’s not arguing that Arafat is wrong; she’s arguing he’s constitutionally incapable of truth.

The subtext is larger than one man. Fallaci is staging a morality play about credibility, aimed at Western readers trained to treat negotiations as contracts and consistency as virtue. Arafat, in her telling, violates the most basic social glue: the expectation that language anchors reality. That’s why “double-cross” matters - it pulls him out of the realm of complicated liberation politics and drops him into the category of a stock villain, the untrustworthy operator.

Context sharpens the blade. Fallaci built her legend on high-voltage interviews where she pressed leaders into revealing either their grandeur or their evasions. Writing about Arafat in the late 20th-century swirl of Palestinian nationalism, terrorism discourse, and fragile diplomacy, she chooses to interpret strategic ambiguity as duplicity. The intent isn’t to illuminate the constraints of leadership under occupation or within factional politics; it’s to foreclose sympathy. Her cynicism performs authority: if she can brand him as a habitual liar, she positions herself - and by extension her audience - as the only adult left in the room.