Last month the new Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, shared online a brief video of a Ukrainian woman being raped in Piacenza by an African migrant.
The reaction among Italy’s media and political elite was one of outrage; not at the fate of the 55-year-old woman, but at Meloni for having dared posted the footage on Twitter along with the declaration: ‘One cannot remain silent in the face of this atrocious episode of sexual violence against a Ukrainian woman carried out in daytime in Piacenza by an asylum seeker. A hug to this woman. I will do everything I can to restore security to our cities.’
Meloni was accused by one of her political opponents, the centrist Carlo Calenda, of being ‘immoral’ and the writer Igiaba Scego said the video’s only purpose was ‘clickbait voyeurism’, and it epitomised her ‘horrendous’ election campaign.
Within 24 hours Twitter had removed the video but neither they nor the Italian liberal left had it within their power to prevent Meloni’s victory in Sunday’s election.
The elite reaction to her success has been predictable, as you will discover if you type ‘Meloni’ and ‘Mussolini’ into google. According to the world media Italy’s new leader is Il Duce in a blouse.
‘Europe Looks at Italy’s Meloni With Caution and Trepidation’ declared the New York Times in a headline. That depends who you talk to. Others look at the result with unbridled glee. In a radio interview on Monday morning Marion Maréchal, the vice-president of Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party, was cock-a-hoop. She believes the election of Meloni will indirectly protect the French. From what? Marechal referenced an incident in the city of Nantes in the early hours of Sunday morning when a woman was raped. The men in police custody are Sudanese migrants.
There was a time when it was only the so-called right wing media outlets who reported such details. But, as with Sweden, the sheer scale of the violence in France makes silence unsustainable.
In Angers in July a Sudanese man allegedly knifed three young men to death after they told him to stop verbally abusing a woman; in Paris a Congolese national is in custody accused of raping two elderly Alzheimer’s patients in a hospital, and in Toulon five police personnel were attacked this month by a Malian.
Then there are the incidents that made global headlines: the young Tunisian who crossed the Mediterranean specifically to slaughter three worshippers at a church in Nice in 2020, and the Pakistani who in the same year attacked two journalists with a meat cleaver in the mistaken belief they wrote for Charlie Hebdo.
The French left share the emotions of the New York Times. The president of the Socialist group in the National Assembly, Boris Vallaud, spoke of a ‘dark awakening in Europe’ and Yannick Jadot of the Green party remarked: ‘Poland, Hungary, Sweden and now Italy. Democracy can never be taken for granted, and hateful impulses can never be overcome.’
One fact about Mussolini that is rarely mentioned in this day and age is his political origins. He started out a Socialist but was expelled from the party for his belligerent position at the outbreak of world war one.
Twenty first century Socialists have a habit of overlooking inconvenient truths, and none more so in France where the hateful impulses of which they talk spring almost exclusively from their quarter. On Saturday a mob of several dozen Antifa activists attacked a meeting in Brittany hosted by the acting president of the National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella. Their objective was the same as the hoodlums who frequently targeted Eric Zemmour as he toured France on the campaign trail last winter: to intimidate into silence those who do not share their political views.
As the continent continues to move to the right, there must be a legitimate concern that the extreme left will become more violent as it realises it is losing electoral power.
Italy should be particularly worried given its history of extreme left terror; the Red Brigades of the 1970s and early 1980s are estimated to have murdered just under 50 of their opponents, as well as carrying out kidnappings and bank robberies. Many of their members fled to France where they were allowed to settle by François Mitterrand’s Socialist government. Italy have sought for years to have them extradited – including terrorists convicted in their absence of murder – but in June this year a French appeals court ruled that to return the Marxists to Italy would be in breach of their human rights.
If the left is to be successful in countering the rise of the right across Europe they must summon up the courage and honesty to admit that mass immigration has not been a success, and that those who say so aren’t racists but realists.
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