“Long live Hitler” and “you are a failed soap bar” are not slogans one expects to hear at events celebrating the triumph of the Allied powers over Nazi Germany. Unless you were in Milan, last week, during Italy’s Liberation Day celebrations.
Unlike the rest of Europe, where Victory Europe Day is marked on May 8, Italy celebrates Liberation Day on April 25, to mark a popular uprising, 81 years ago, against the retreating German occupiers and their Italian Fascist stooges. April 25 was meant to be a national holiday for all Italians, celebrating the end of the war and democracy’s rebirth. In fact, it is another low point in a current surge of antisemitism, with a 400 per cent increase in reported incidents since 2022. Jews wanting to join the official march were surrounded, taunted, threatened, and ultimately forced out of the event. Worse: Milan’s mayor blamed the victims for provoking the incident. And the national leader of the main opposition party, Elly Schlein, has so far refrained from condemning the incident, despite some of her party’s members urging her to do so.
In retrospect, that a day dedicated to celebrating freedom has been turned into a passion play against Israel, America, and the Jews is hardly surprising. In recent years Italy’s militant left is increasingly pro-Palestinian, pro-Iran regime, and pro-Putin. It has weaponised the occasion to promote an anti-Western agenda, silence critics, exclude them from the marches, and impose a strict political orthodoxy: anti-Western terrorists and regimes, to them, are the modern equivalent of the Italian Resistance that fought the Nazis and their collaborators. They consider Israel, America, and the West in general, as the new Nazis. To them, Jews are complicit, unless they denounce Israel and embrace the cause of Hamas. In the process, Italy’s militant left (and the mainstream left that cannot condemn it) is obliterating the core liberal democratic and anti-totalitarian values the April 25 celebrations were born to exalt.
In every major city, this year, official Liberation Day marches saw large mobilisation of militant groups bearing not just Palestinian flags, but also flags of the Islamic Republic of Iran and of the Russian-propped breakaway republics in occupied Ukraine, accompanied by hateful slogans and acts of intimidation and violence against those refusing to conform to this latest brand of Third World orthodoxy. US, Israel, and Ukraine flags, by contrast, were booed and chased out of the marches.
In Rome, a monument was inaugurated to commemorate what organisers call “the Palestinian genocide”. In Turin, EU and NATO flags were burned. In Bologna, an 81-year-old former academic carrying a Ukrainian flag was blocked from participating in the event. In Milan, pro-Israel activists, alongside Ukrainian flag bearers and Iranian dissidents, were cornered for two hours by an angry mob shouting antisemitic slogans and making the Nazi salute. As Barbara Covili, an activist with the advocacy group Sette Ottobre, recounts, “while we were being surrounded and insulted, others were let free to march waving the flag of the Iranian regime.”
Her group was besieged by an angry mob and eventually excluded from the official event. Much like in other cities, they were not just waving British, US, Israel, Ukraine, and Iranian anti-regime flags. They were also carrying the flag of the Jewish Brigade; a 5,000 strong military unit made of Jewish soldiers from the Land of Israel that from 1944 fought in the Allied armies. They enlisted to fight in Europe; they participated in the Italy campaign; and shed blood in key battles. Some of their fallen are buried in a military cemetery in Piangipane, near Ravenna. They paid a steep price of blood for Italy’s freedom, which earned the Brigade, in 2017, Italy’s highest military honour, a gold medal for military valour. By contrast, those flags the left waved as symbols of freedom and antifascism were staunch allies of Nazi Germany, devout believers in its ideology, and committed proponents of ruthless totalitarianism.
In 1945, while Jewish soldiers who would later fight in Israel’s 1948 war of independence were helping Italians free themselves from the Nazis, the Palestinian leadership was still siding with Italy’s cruel occupiers. The historic leader of Palestinian nationalism, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al Husseini, ran the Arabic language Nazi propaganda operation until the war’s end. While in Berlin, in the 1940’s, he helped the Nazis form a Muslim SS division, for which he actively recruited Bosnian and Albanian Muslim volunteers and helped train their chaplains. The Mufti toyed with the dream of a final solution in the Middle East. His heirs still do.
Nazi ideology did not influence the Mufti alone, but also both Arab nationalism and political Islam. The young military officers who established nationalist regimes in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, in the 1950’s, were Nazi admirers; recruited fugitive Nazis in their services; and used them to spread Nazi, antisemitic propaganda across the Arab world. Their impact is still acutely felt in Arab politics, and echoes of Nazi propaganda and ideology still resonate in the worldview and behaviour of Islamist movements.
Political Islam too owes a debt to European totalitarianism. The rabid antisemitism and conspiratorial mindset of Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, owes as much to European influences as it does to their own, autochthonous reading of Islamic sources.
It is ironic, then, that those Italians most fervently proclaiming their antifascism at April 25 celebrations, do so by waving the flags of regimes and political movements most closely aligned, both historically and intellectually, with the Fascist ideology they purport to oppose. A coalition of proxies for the totalitarian regimes of Iran and Russia, and for the terrorist groups they support, have overtaken Italy’s militant left and are now busy imposing their intolerant politics on the official public narrative of Italy’s liberation.
When demonstrators make the Nazi salute to intimidate Jews or chase American flags from a march meant to celebrate the defeat of Nazism, it should not be difficult to call them what they are: fascists to the core. Sadly, the political leadership of Italy’s left opposition, seeing them as useful political muscle and indispensable votes for next year’s national elections, is incapable of articulating a clear condemnation.
“I am not Jewish,” reflected Covili after last Saturday’s events, “but I side with the Jews, because it means fighting for our democracy and our freedom. It means defending Western values.”
It should be obvious, but it isn’t. In a moral inversion, Italy’s militant left is marching in lockstep with the fascists of our time, pretending to do so in the name of antifascism. Were they to win next year’s national elections, the street mob that silenced those truly marching for freedom last week will be calling the shots.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Terror Finance (CENTEF)
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