Shroud of Turin

Turin, Italy — The Turin book fair this year features Israeli literature, and Israeli president Shimon Peres is coming to the opening ceremony next weekend. Lots of others will be there, too, many of them to attack Israel and her supporters. On May Day, a group of protesters burned an Israeli flag (and an American flag, too, in case you were wondering) in Turin, and promised more once the fair got going. The local authorities were understandably concerned, but they reacted with that gutless non-affirmation of the rule of law to which we have become so sadly accustomed: They banned people carrying Israeli flags from the fair.

In private, the local police say that it’s just a matter of numbers. They expect a certain number of anti-Israeli demonstrators, and are prepared for them. But they worry that if people come to demonstrate support for Israel, the number of potentially violent people could double — which would require an influx of police from outside Turin, which would set the stage for a very unpleasant situation.

In short, they’ve been intimidated and they’ve succumbed to the intimidation. It is now perfectly fine to burn the Israeli flag in Italy, but the authorities may crack down on anyone who carries it to celebrate the Jewish State.

That sort of behavior in Turin, a leftist political center with a longstanding Jewish community (think Primo Levi, for example), helps us understand why Italian Jews quite surprisingly supported the Center-Right in the recent elections, even in Rome, where the local community had been reliably Center-Left for more than a generation. Back when we lived there (my wife, Barbara, and I were married in Rome in 1973), the Jews were totally in the bag for the Communist party, and later for its successors. But not this time. Fully half the residents of the old ghetto area on the banks of the Tiber voted Center-Right, prompting the Financial Times to issue an unusually disgusting headline on May 4: “Fascists and Jews united for Rome mayor.” The paper’s Rome correspondent, Guy Dinmore (who once decided, on the basis of the taste of his own thumb, that I was a monarchist with regard to Iran), drove the point home in the first two paragraphs:

Rome’s election last week of its first rightwing mayor since the time of Benito Mussolini has been celebrated by fascists as a historic victory over the left. Packs of young, thuggish supporters of Gianni Alemanno greeted the new mayor’s appearance at the Campidoglio city hall with straight-armed “Roman” salutes, shouting abuse at communists and immigrants.

You have to read a bit further to discover that the Jews finally got tired of an Italian Left that blindly supports anything called “Palestinian,” and burns Israeli flags. This sort of backhanded contempt for a religious community that dares to assert its self-interest against the darlings of the “progressive media” is of a piece with Christopher Dickey’s sneering remarks about the very public baptism (in the Vatican, by the pope, on Easter Eve) of one of the country’s best-known intellectuals, Magdi Allam. In Newsweek, Dickey declared Allam a “famously self-hating Muslim” and suggested that the whole thing was a deliberate provocation by Benedict XVI aimed at the Muslim world. I don’t think anyone is entitled to be surprised when the leader of the Catholic Church performs public baptisms, and I can’t imagine a more misleading description of Magdi Allam than the one Dickey used. Magdi Allam is an Egyptian who was raised in a very liberal Sunni community, and moved to Italy, where he rarely practiced his religion. Over the past few years, he has undergone two parallel conversions, one to Christianity, and the other to a more conservative political understanding. Rather like the Roman Jews’ political evolution.

Allam used to write for the country’s leading leftist newspaper, La Repubblica, but is now the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, where he has become quite influential and is widely admired. He is exactly the sort of person that the flag burners and the self-styled progressive media dread: smart, brave, and coherent.

At the same time all this was going on, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi decided to stick his nose into Italian politics, dispatching one of his sons to warn prime minister-designate Silvio Berlusconi against giving a ministry to Roberto Calderoli, a leading member of the Northern League. Calderoli was a minister in an earlier Berlusconi government, and had greatly irritated the Muslim world and the politically correct Italian intelligentsia by showing off a T-shirt with one of the famous Danish cartoons of the Prophet. Qaddafi Jr. warned of grave consequences (undoubtedly guaranteeing Calderoli his post), and the Arab League, called to pronounce on this brazen meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign country — indeed so brazen that Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, who never met a radical Muslim he didn’t like, publicly denounced it — punted. Since the Italians hadn’t yet decided anything, the League intoned, there was no need for the League to do anything either.

It seems to me, more than ever, that the destiny of this continent is very much up for grabs, and that Italy, as it has been for many centuries, is the political laboratory of much of the Western world. These Italian minicrises will probably turn out to have been very important. I hope that at least some of our leading publications will send serious reporters to Turin for the big event this weekend.