In Italy since September 11, the dangers of radical Islam were addressed soley by right-wing rabble-rousers. Finally Reset magazine has kicked off a proper debate. By Franz Haas
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Italian media and popular imagination, like those of the rest of the Western world, were haunted by horror visions. Italians imagined rockets being fired at the Vatican, aeroplanes flying into Milan Cathedral or bombs being planted on the already rudimentary metro networks of the major cities. Following the attacks on trains in Madrid and London, Italians each time had the feeling that they had once again narrowly escaped being a target and began to fear that Italy might have its own home-made terrorism. The police and the secret services kept Muslim prayer houses under surveillance, people were arrested, brought to trial or deported, but concrete plans for a terrorist attack - like those discovered in Germany in Septembe - were never found. Recently an Iraqi was arrested at Venice airport for allegedly "planning attacks," but more precise details of the investigations never transpired.
By contrast, the more obvious problems of living together with more or less radical Muslims in their own country are a constant theme in the Italian public sphere. The issues include building new mosques, the dispute over headscarves, veils and burqas, the restrictive dress codes for women and the "honour killings" of Muslim girls determined to adopt Western lifestyles. The case of Hina Saleem, a young Pakistani woman living in Brescia, who had her throat cut by her father assisted by other male members of her family because she wore the latest fashions and had an Italian fiance caused a major sensation in summer 2006. A representative of a Muslim women's organization investigating the murder recently received death threats from Islamic extremists. Female circumcision is also a horrifyingly widespread secret practice ? according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, there are some 25,000 women with mutilated genitals living in Italy.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1609.htmlIn view of such practices as "honour killings" and genital mutilation you don't need to be a pessimist to ask whether these horrific manifestations of an archaic way of life imposed by the dictates of theology will ever be rejected by all Muslims in the Western world or whether the principles of radical Islam are not fundamentally incompatible with those of the West today. As long as Europe is not even able to defend the principles of the Enlightenment (the basic tenets of which, despite all the reverses and negative sides in its dialectic, the West has done well to adhere to over the past two centuries) on its own territory, the discussion about anchoring "Christian values" in the constitution of the European Union will remain an idle luxury. An Islam that would be considered enlightened by European standards is still a far-off vision.
For too long warnings about the evils and dangers of radical Islam in Italy were the domain of the political Right and the xenophobic Lega Nord (Northern League) party. The alarm signals they issued were generally crude and simplistic and sometimes even dangerously tasteless. Recall, for example, the incident in February 2006 when a minister of the Berlusconi government had one of the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons printed on a T-shirt and displayed it provocatively in front of television cameras (news story). This prompted protests in front of the Italian consulate in Libya that left eleven people dead. The appeals of journalist Oriana Fallaci, the figurehead of the anti-Islam movement in Italy who in her books "The Rage and Pride" (2001) and "The Force of Reason" (2004) made no bones about engaging in overt racism, were in a similar vein. In taking this approach she did this sensitive subject a disservice, for the result was that liberal and left-wing intellectuals distanced themselves still further from her, preferring to avoid the controversial issue altogether.
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Italian television has repeatedly broadcast authentic film-clips and recordings of "hate preachers" calling on gatherings of Muslims to wage a holy war against the infidels. In March of this year the programme "Annozero," moderated by the popular journalist Michele Santoro, showed film footage shot with a hidden camera in which ? in the same spine-chilling manner of the new German film "Hamburger Lektionen" (see our feature) ? an Imam was shown preaching in Turin that there could be no dialogue with the infidels: "You have to kill them, basta." Connections have also been proven to exist between Islamic centres in Italy and the Hamburg cell that harboured the terrorists responsible for the 11 September attacks ? which makes the silence of leading intellectuals on the subject all the more puzzling. The writer Umberto Eco, for example, found even the "heroic appeals for press freedom" in the dispute about the Danish cartoons "excessive," while in his column in the weekly L'Espresso an enlightened shrug of the shoulders was all he could muster up in response to the phenomenon of fanatical Islam in his own country.
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Scialoja warns expressly about questionable sources of financing for the construction of new mosques and welcomes the planned referendum in Bologna (saying "I'm a bit Swiss in that respect") on the grounds that it would guarantee the Muslims greater legality. He is also sceptical about the alliance between the radical Italian Left and Islam. He believes the Left is deceiving itself: "They regard certain Islamic movements as representative of the grass roots, of the real proleteriat," he says, adding that they see in Islam "an anti-imperialist and anti-American movement." This assessment would seem to confirm that the two fronts from which critical thinkers like Mario Scialoja and Magdi Allam are being attacked are the extreme Left and radical Islam, as anyone prepared to sort through the tangle of blogospheres would discover.
