Islamophobia Watch

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.

Reuters, 9 May 2008

Roberto 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

"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

A 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 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

Italian editor and critic of Islamic extremism Magdi Allam, who converted to Catholicism from Islam and was baptised by Pope Benedict XVI, today branded his former faith as intrinsically violent."I had to do this (abandon Islam)", Allam wrote in a long letter to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. "Beyond ... the phenomenon of extremists and Islamist terrorism at the global level, the root of evil is inherent to a physiologically violent and historically conflictual Islam," wrote the Egyptian-born journalist.

Regarding a combative tone that has made him famous in Italy, Allam wrote: "Over the years my spirit has been freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimises lies and deception, violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission to tyranny." He described Catholicism as "an authentic religion of Truth, Life and Freedom".

The Australian, 23 March 2008

"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

Italy's former deputy education minister has provoked a scandal by parading a pig, an impure animal for Muslims, on the site of a planned mosque in the country's north, news reports said Sunday.

"We have 'blessed' the ground that the Padua authorities want to transfer for the mosque," said Mariella Mazzetto, a member of the populist right-wing Northern League party in the city. She walked the pig on a lead accompanied by about 10 party members, Italian daily newspapers reported.

"It's a question of defending Italian identity," said Mazzetto, who was deputy education minister in 1994-95 under the former right-wing government of Silvio Berlusconi.

AFP, 12 November 2007

A mosque in a small town outside Milan has been the target of a violent attack – the eighth on mosques in the region of Lombardy surrounding the city.

Italian media reports said the Alif Baa Islamic Centre, in the northern Italian city of Abbiategrasso, 20 kilometres west of Milan, was subjected to fresh violence on Wednesday. Witnesses said a masked man was seen throwing a Molotov cocktail inside the courtyard of the mosque from his motorcycle in the late afternoon. No major damage or injuries were reported in the attack.

This is the eighth assault against Islamic centres in the region of Lombardy in recent months. The Alif Baa Islamic Centre reported other attacks on 25 July and 10 August this year. Another mosque in the nearby city of Segrate was attacked on 5 August and the car of the Imam, Hamid Zariate, was destroyed.

AKI, 25 October 2007

Rome, October 9 – The decision by a northern Italian city official to allow Muslim women to wear the burqa has sparked consternation in the country, even though at least one minister supported the move. "We have already said several times, and we reiterate it now, that the use of the burqa is unacceptable," said a spokesman for Interior Minister Giulio Amato.

A 1975 law, introduced amid concern over homegrown terrorism in the country's cities, forbids Italians from appearing in public wearing anything which covers their faces. Apart from this law, which appears to apply to the burqa, many politicians on both sides of parliament said the garment was also a humiliating imposition. "I am indignant. Covering up women's faces is an offence to their dignity," said Equal Opportunities Minister Barbara Pollastrini.

Vittorio Capocelli, the prefect of Treviso in the Veneto region, decided on October 5 that it was acceptable for Muslim women in the city to wear the garment as long as they were ready to remove it and identify themselves to police when required. A day later Family Minister Rosy Bindi, a prominent Catholic politician, indicated her agreement, saying that it was right to be "respectful of the veil" as long as women wore it of their own free will.

The apparent green light for the burqa drew a stinging editorial from Egyptian-born writer and journalist Magdi Allam in Tuesday's edition of Corriere della Sera, Italy's best-selling daily. "If the prefect's decision sets a legal and administrative precedent on a national level, Islamic women could soon be going to school completely covered, be getting hired in workplaces and circulating freely all over Italy," he wrote.

Muslim News, 10 October 2007

The report is reproduced from ANSA and the reference to the burqa distorts the position – which is that the 1975 anti-terrorism law prohibiting the use of any dress or disguise that inhibits the identification of an individual in public has been used to ban not just the burqa but the niqab too, though the the rule is open to local interpretation and its application has been geographically uneven.

From London's docklands to the rolling hills of Tuscany, from southern Austria to Amsterdam and Cologne, the issue of Islamic architecture and its impact on citadels of "western civilisation" is increasingly contentious.

The far right is making capital from Islamophobia by focusing on the visible symbols of Islam in Europe. In Switzerland it is the far-right SVP that is setting the terms of the debate.

Next door in Austria the far right leader Jörg Haider is also calling for a ban in his province of Carinthia, even though there are few Muslims and no known plans for mosques. "Carinthia," he said, "will be a pioneer in the battle against radical Islam for the protection of our dominant western culture."

In Italy the mayors of Bologna and Genoa last month cancelled or delayed planning permission for mosques after a vociferous campaign by the far-right Northern League, one of whose leaders, Roberto Calderoli, threatened to stage a "day of pork" to offend Muslims and to take pigs to "defile" the site of the proposed mosque in Bologna.

While the far right makes the running, their noisy campaign is being supported more quietly by mainstream politicians and some Christian leaders. And on the left pro-secularist and anti-clericalist sentiment is also frequently ambivalent about Islamic building projects.

Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne has voiced his unease over a large new mosque being built for the city's 120,000 Muslims in the Rhineland Roman Catholic stronghold. A similar scheme in Munich has also faced local protests.

The Bishop of Graz in Austria has been more emphatic. "Muslims should not build mosques which dominate town's skylines in countries like ours," said Bishop Egon Kapellari.

Guardian, 11 October 2007