Category Archives: Italy

Italy: Mosques must recognize Israel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Italy may take its discriminatory practices to a new level, calling for measures to make mosque leaders quit unless they recognize Israel.

Action must be taken so that mosque supervisors recognize Israel, said European Affairs Minister Andrea Rochi. We must force those who do not recognize Israel to leave the mosques, he added, according to Italian news agency Il Tempo.

Press TV, 10 July 2008

Update:  Over at Atlas Shrugs mad Pamela Geller applaud’s Rochi’s statement: “How lucid and human  is that. Of course the jihad loving media is calling that “discrimination”. Ugh. Theeir hatred of the Jews infects everything they say, do — every position they take.”

Milan mosque ‘to be closed down’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A controversial mosque in the Italian city of Milan is to be shut down, the country’s right-wing government says.

The Jenner mosque attracts about 4,000 Muslims each week, with Friday prayers often spilling out on to the street. Now, after years of complaints from local residents, Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni has said he will close the mosque by August.

Mr Maroni, who belongs to the anti-immigrant Northern League, has said he will press ahead with plans to close the mosque, and that anybody found praying in the street will be issued with a ticket.

The local Muslim community is being offered the use of a nearby stadium, in which the Beatles once played. However, the council has said it can only be used four times each week and that each person will be charged on entry.

The president of the mosque, Abdel Hamid Shaari, has said he is happy to pay rent but that its members “won’t be treated like nomads”. “We are Milanese and we are not going to accept the solution that’s being offered,” he said.

The Catholic church has come out in support of the Muslim community. The Roman Catholic priest in charge of inter-faith relations in Milan, Monsignor Gianfranco Bottoni, said that only a fascist or populist government would resort to such dictatorial methods as closing a mosque.

BBC News, 8 July 2008

Italy rightists raze Verona mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Italy’s far-right, anti-immigrant Northern League party has started its mission in the new government with bringing down a mosque in the northern city of Verona.

“[The mosque destruction] reinforces Muslim fears of seeing the League in the ruling coalition,” Ali Abu Shwaima, the head of Milan-based Islamic Centre, told IslamOnline.net on Saturday, May 24.

Bulldozers brought down last week a building housing a Muslim prayer room in the city. “I never felt at ease with this mosque,” Elisonder Antonneli, the head of Verona city council, said. “This place will be turned into a park and a car parking space and will be named after (Italian writer) Oriana Fallaci.”

Fallaci, who died in 2006, was notorious for anti-Islam stances. Following the 9/11 attacks, the far-right writer published a book entitled “Rage and Pride” in which she ridiculed the Noble Qur’an. She has also authored another book “The Force of Reason” in which she warned that Europe was turning into “an Islamic province, an Islamic colony” and that “to believe that a good Islam and a bad Islam exist goes against all reason.”

The Northern League has four ministers in Silovio Berlusconi’s government, including the portfolio of the Interior. The League grabbed 8 percent of the vote in last month’s general elections, securing Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition a comfortable majority in the parliament. The party has nearly doubled its parliamentary strength from 4.5 percent two years ago.

The Northern League is widely accused of racism with many critics calling it the BNP of Italy, a reference to the British right-wing party. Its election campaign played on issues such as immigration crime and economic and cultural fears from immigration.

Abu Shwaima, the Muslim leader, said Italian Muslims will face hard times under the far-right league. He said Muslims in the city of Verona used to find spiritual comfort at the razed mosque. “The mosque destruction is sign of spiraling Islamophobia in many European countries,” he said.

Islam Online, 24 May 2008

Calderoli says T-shirt gesture misunderstood

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An Italian minister from an anti-immigrant party who wore a T-shirt that offended Muslims in 2006 said on Friday the gesture was misunderstood and his appointment should not damage relations with Libya.

Roberto Calderoli of the Northern League was appointed this week to the new government of Silvio Berlusconi, who was installed as prime minister for a third term. Berlusconi faced a diplomatic clash with Libya – and possible energy sanctions – after Tripoli made it clear it objected to Calderoli’s appointment.

He quit Berlusconi’s last government in 2006 after wearing a T-shirt showing a Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that angered Muslims worldwide. He was blamed for rioting that broke out at the Italian consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

Calderoli was asked by Italian television about Libya’s angry response to his appointment, and whether he regretted the T-shirt incident. He said he was sorry for the consequences of his act which he said was misinterpreted as anti-Islamic provocation. “Mine was a message of peace and rapprochement between the monotheistic religions but was misunderstood,” he said.

Since the T-shirt incident, Calderoli has continued to offend Muslims in Italy by protesting at the construction of new mosques and threatening “pig day” protests to defile them. He once walked his own pet pig over a site intended for a mosque.

Reuters, 9 May 2008

Berlusconi to appoint far right Islamophobe to cabinet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Roberto_CalderoliRoberto Calderoli, 52, a senior member of the Northern League, enraged Muslims two years ago during the row over a set of Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed. He appeared on television wearing a T-shirt printed with one of the cartoons. The Italian consulate in Libya was set on fire and 11 people died in riots.

Mr Calderoli has also threatened to defile the proposed site of a mosque in Padua by walking a pig over the ground. When Italy beat France in the 2006 World Cup, he said France had “sacrificed its identity by fielding niggers, Muslims and communists”.

Despite the controversies, which forced him to resign as a minister for reform in 2006, Mr Calderoli is likely to get another job when Mr Berlusconi picks his cabinet because of the strong results obtained by the Northern League in the general election.

Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2008

See also “Muslims feel under siege as Italian Right sets up town vigilante groups” in the Times, 3 May 2008

Terrorism in the name of Jesus? Everybody ignore

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Certainly he has not the fascinating look of a bin-Laden and does not live in the mysterious caves of the Hindu Kush, surely he has not the media appeal and the anchorman vocation which the ‘Master of Terror’ has shown to have in the last seven years; yet Roberto Sandalo (alias Robby the Mad or Commandant Franco) has more terrorist credentials than ‘Sheik Osama’. Roberto Sandalo, allegedly the leader of a Christian anti-Islamic terrorist movement called Fronte Combattente Cristiano or ‘Fighting Christian Front’. The mysterious group has been responsible, in the last year, for bomb attacks against Islamic centres and mosques as well as death threats to Muslims….

“To tell the truth, I thought that news about the first Christian anti-Muslim terrorist group would have attracted international attention and fostered new debates. Think, indeed, if the terrorist’s name instead of Roberto was something like Muhammad; imagine the titles, the talks, the politicians’ words and the special legislations proposed. Well, we do not have very much to imagine, we need only to open a British newspaper.

“But the news about a self-defined Christian terrorist and a Christian (mainly Catholic) terrorist organization has attracted virtually no attention. Nothing can be found, (at the moment in which I am writing) on the BBC (even BBC Europe) or the main British newspapers or the US. Furthermore, even those Italian newspapers which have dealt with the story, have not called the attacks, before often dismissed as the work of immigrants’ rackets and mafia, Christian terrorism, or referred to Mr Sandalo as a Christian terrorist (despite his own claim!).”

Gabriele Marranci at Islam, Muslims and an Anthropologist, 14 April 2008

Scholar denounces Muslim baptism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Allam BaptismA Muslim scholar involved in high-level dialogue with the Vatican has denounced the Pope’s baptism on Saturday of a prominent Italian Muslim convert.

Aref Ali Nayed, the head of Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, called the baptism of journalist Magdi Allam a deliberate and provocative act. The Vatican has not yet commented, but its official newspaper said the gesture aimed to promote religious freedom.

In a stinging rebuke of Saturday’s televised ceremony, Mr Nayed denounced what he called “the Vatican’s deliberate and provocative act of baptising Allam on such a special occasion and in such a spectacular way”. Mr Nayed said Pope Benedict XVI’s actions came “at a most unfortunate time when sincere Muslims and Catholics are working very hard to mend ruptures between the two communities”.

The Jordanian scholar has been at the forefront of an initiative gathering more than 130 Muslim scholars who recently wrote to the Pope and other Christian leaders calling for greater dialogue and good will between Muslims and Christians.

BBC News, 26 March 2008

Pope makes another positive contribution to Christian-Muslim relations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pope 2Pope Benedict has baptised Magdi Allam, a Muslim-born journalist who has converted to Catholicism, during an historic Easter mass. A statement released by the Vatican less than an hour before the start of the Saturday ceremony confirmed Mr Allam’s conversion, adding: “For the Catholic Church, each person who asks to receive baptism after a deep personal search, a fully free choice and adequate preparation, has a right to receive it.”

After baptising Mr Allam – who was born in Egypt – Pope Benedict said a homily reflecting on the meaning of the procedure. “We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another,” he explained. “Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close.”

Muslim commentators have said Mr Allam’s baptism was his own decision but have criticised the high profile his conversion was given by the Vatican.

In the News, 23 March 2008

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‘Mamma li Turchi!!’, Italy and the Saladin Syndrome

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Today in Italy, the traditional fascist hatred of the Jew is increasingly substituted by a hatred of Muslims, all of them, children, women and men. Today Muslims in Italy are not so differently represented as their Semitic brothers were during the time of the Fascio and the Eia Eia alala.”

Gabriele Marranci examines the rise of Islamophobia in Italy.

Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist, 25 December 2007

In Europe, where’s the hate?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Gary Younge“Over the past year or so the rural Italian idyll of Colle di Val d’Elsa has played host to a bitter battle for Enlightenment values. On one side, the hamlet’s small Muslim community has raised a considerable amount of money to build a large mosque. Having gained the mayor’s approval, the Muslims signed a declaration of cooperation with the town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the site as a good-will gesture.

“In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the site. On a wall near the site vandals daubed: ‘No Mosque’, ‘Christian Hill’ and ‘Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!’ Such is the central dynamic in European race relations at present.

“… the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamofascism’ – that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning – but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.”

Gary Younge in the Nation, 20 December 2007