“Rome, unacceptable display of fascist squads. Far-right must be sidestepped”

Let’s call things by their name, without ambiguities or hesitation. So the President of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities Noemi Di Segni asked with reference to the unacceptable “display of fascist squads” recently staged on the streets of Rome.
It was a very serious attack on democratic values that, she pointed out, “all political and judiciary forces” are being called to condemn with clarity. “The events of the last few hours – reads her message – remind us of how urgent it is that shameful contiguities with an increasingly pervasive Italian neo-fascism are definitively set aside by those who in words condemn it but in fact do not do enough, or worse, relate to them”. Words, Di Segni remarked, are not enough. “We must act now, and not only in Rome, to clarify the danger from these groups and negate a legitimacy widely granted so far”.
Meanwhile, the rantings about the Shoah by Rome center-right mayoral candidate Enrico Michetti, who in one of his articles promoted some delusional theories about the memory of the Holocaust, banks and “lobbies” able to decide the destinies of the planet, stirred a controversy.
“The sole idea that our municipal institutions may be led by people whose thinking is steeped in such prejudice makes one tremble,” the UCEI President commented at the end of Shabbat. Her firm words of condemnation were repeated on Sunday with evidence by many Italian newspapers. “Culture of dialogue and education in the memory of what fascism was – her appeal states – must be key points also in basing electoral choices”.