Italics – Blacklist in Disguise

By Daniela Gross

Waiting for the New Year, media are filled with every kind of list. We can choose amongst the best books, the best movies, and even the best scientific discoveries. The worst list we read, however, comes from Italy. Featured by the Radio Islam website, it enumerates the “Italian influential Jews” and includes entrepreneurs, journalists, teachers, historians, and so on.

As reported on the daily Il Giornale by Patricia Tagliaferri, “the Prosecutor’s office opened an investigation, for the time being against unknown persons, after the publication on the website of a blacklist of Jewish people, a kind of proscription list.” Radio Islam – whose home page declares it is “a non-political association, aimed at promoting more and better relations with the West” and is against “Jewish racism toward non-Jews and international Zionism’s goals”- might soon be shut down by the police. In the meantime, many names of the presumed “Italian influential Jews” spread throughout the media, thanks to accurate quotations. Is this freedom of press, or another hatred speech in disguise?