Our writer Armando Simón commends this article in the Italian newspaper Atlantico to our readers. It is in Italian but if you don’t know that language (and I don’t) auto translate is much improved from its early days. These are some salient extracts.
Although they love to portray themselves as victims of alleged lobbies, the propals manage to convey hate speech and fake news on the mainstream media that until a few years ago would have caused a scandal: like Enzo Iacchetti who, guest of Bianca Berlinguer at È sempre Cartabianca, said: “I feel like a Hamas terrorist, together with millions of children and adults who protest for Palestine”.
Ditto for a recent episode of Otto e mezzo, where journalist Alessandro De Angelis said that Israel would be “re-proposing its historical nightmare on the side of the torturer”, in essence comparing the Jews to the Nazis.
While the rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena Tomaso Montanari supported the hoax that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians, when experts in dog units explained how unlikely it is to be able to do such a thing.
Sometimes Jewish intellectuals such as Gad Lerner and Roberto Saviano also conform to this tendency, out of ideology or opportunism, so as not to be marginalized by a left that has made hatred of Israel a real religion.
In the interview with Radio Popolare, Lerner also downplayed the role of the Jewish Brigade, which he called “a very isolated and marginal episode in the history of Jewish anti-fascism in Italy.” This overshadows the fact that in Piangipane (a hamlet of Ravenna) there is a military cemetery where 956 soldiers of the Allied troops who fought in Italy are buried, of which 33 were volunteers of the Jewish Brigade.
The Jew Who Hates Himself
In the past, some thinkers such as the English philosopher Roger Scruton have adopted the term “oicophobia” to identify the hatred of one’s origins, very rooted in Western societies that too often self-denigrate themselves for the feelings of guilt due to colonialism.
In the Jewish world there are undoubtedly cases of oicophobia, which are sometimes expressed in the figure of the “self-hating Jew”. An expression coined by the German philosopher Theodor Lessing in his 1930 book Jewish Self-Hatred.
Who falls into this category is undoubtedly the journalist Massimo Fini: despite being the son of a Jewish mother, in an article that appeared on his blog (and then taken up in a sweetened way in Il Fatto Quotidiano) he wrote that “it is since they have existed, that is, since the dawn of time, that the Jews have caused havoc and, if necessary, they carry out murders without there being any moral condemnation against them”, and that “in the DNA of the Jews there is also the revenge of which Israel is giving ample demonstration today”.
Theater actor Moni Ovadia, known for his fiercely anti-Israeli positions, could also fall under this definition. During a meeting in January 2025 at the headquarters of the Province of Massa-Carrara, Ovadia said in reference to October 7 that “Hamas‘ action is legitimate.”
. . . he defended Barbero’s thesis that there never existed a Kingdom of Israel in ancient times. He added to the dose by citing the thesis of the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand (trained in far-left parties), according to which the Jewish people themselves are an invention, and today’s Jews are not the true descendants of those who lived in the land of Israel in biblical times.
What Ovadia does not know is that the thesis of the “invention of the Jewish people” was disproved as early as 1997, when a study conducted by geneticists at the University of Arizona and published in the journal Nature demonstrated the existence of a common biological root between Ashkenazi Jews (originally from Germany and Eastern Europe) and Sephardim (descendants of those expelled from Spain towards the end of the 1400s).
Ovadia, Fini and others like them believe that attacking their own people, lending themselves to making fig leaves for anti-Semites and propals, gives them an image of “rebels” or “contrarians”. In reality, given the precedents, in the end the only thing left on him will be the damnatio memoriae.
