Parenting & Family Quote by Oriana Fallaci

“Kidnapped” is the kind of word Fallaci chose when she wanted the reader to feel grabbed by the collar, not invited into a seminar. It’s coercion language: abrupt, bodily, unmistakably violent. In four words she frames Islam not as a faith, a civilization, or even an argument, but as an event that seized her agency. The phrasing “this Islam business” does extra work: it’s dismissive, deliberately undignified, reducing a vast, internally diverse tradition to a “business” - a racket, an enterprise, a problem one gets dragged into. That rhetorical downsizing is the point. It signals that she’s not entering as a neutral reporter; she’s entering as a combatant who believes she’s been forced onto the battlefield.

The intent is less to understand Islam than to justify obsession. Fallaci’s late-career polemics after 9/11 cast Europe as soft, self-deceiving, and on the verge of cultural capitulation. “Kidnapped” turns her fixation into a moral alibi: she didn’t choose to wage this argument; history did it to her. It also preempts criticism about bias. If the topic is a kidnapping, then anger is not only acceptable, it’s required.

Subtext: fear recoded as clarity. The quote invites readers to share a sense of violated normalcy and to treat complexity as evasion. Context matters here: in the post-9/11 media ecosystem, provocation became a currency, and Fallaci - a journalist famous for confrontational interviews and blunt moral certainty - sharpened her voice into a brand of civilizational alarm. The line works because it’s a personal anecdote masquerading as historical diagnosis, compressing geopolitics into a gut-level grievance.