Daily Inspiration Quote by Oriana Fallaci

Fallaci’s line lands like a slap because it refuses the polite distance Europe often keeps from its own prejudices. “Disgusted” isn’t analytic; it’s visceral, moral, bodily. She’s not diagnosing anti-Semitism as a social pathology to be studied. She’s naming it as something that should trigger revulsion, and by doing so she tries to make indifference socially embarrassing.

The phrasing does a second, sharper thing: it provincializes the problem and then immediately expands it. Starting with “many Italians” risks the comforting fiction that bigotry is a local defect, a national quirk. The pivot to “many Europeans” denies that escape hatch. It’s a move designed to puncture Europe’s self-image as a postwar moral project purified by “Never again” rhetoric while quietly tolerating old resentments in everyday life, media, and politics.

Fallaci’s intent is inseparable from her persona: the combative journalist who treated public speech as a battlefield, not a seminar. That’s why “many” matters. It’s broad enough to indict a culture, careful enough to dodge the easy rebuttal (“not all Italians”). She frames anti-Semitism as mainstream-adjacent, not fringe spectacle.

Contextually, this sits in the long shadow of the Holocaust and in the churn of late-20th-century European politics: the rise of populist movements, the recycling of conspiratorial tropes, and a continent eager to see itself as enlightened while outsourcing its ugliest impulses to “extremists.” Fallaci is forcing a recognition: the scandal isn’t that hatred exists; it’s how easily it blends in.