Osservatorio antisemitismo | Page 8

In mid-November the Special Operations Group( Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale – ROS) of Bolzano arrested a number of presumed terrorists of Middle-Eastern origin who had been proselytizing and planning terrorist attacks. During covert surveillance activities, one of the detainees was heard to say:“ It is good to die for Allah. No matter what I do for Allah I will not have done enough. I will not be at peace until I have killed some Jews.”
Websites
The past fifteen years have witnessed continual growth in anti-Semitic websites in Italy. There were perhaps forty of these sites in 2007; in 2015 these numbers had swelled to some two hundred and their growth continues unabated.
The online spaces presenting the most explicit, rich, articulated and extremist anti- Semitic documentation are those associated with neo-Nazi and / or traditionalist Catholic ideologies. Paradigmatic here are Holy War, and the Italian sections of the white supremacist website Stormfront and of Radio Islam.
These three websites have been built around an explicit, aggressive anti-Semitism. They represent a sort of enormous anti-Semitic archive where one can find all the themes leveraged in anti-Jewish polemics. They have hundreds of anti-Jewish cartoons and photomontages, many laic and religious anti-Semitic texts, documents accusing the Jews of practicing ritual homicide, anti-Semitic songs and screen savers, black lists, audio, video and anti-Semitic and negationist documentaries, some self-produced.
HolyWar and Stormfront Italia have been blacked out in Italy by the police force but can still be accessed via proxy servers, requiring only that users download and install a free user-friendly program that allows them to navigate in an anonymous manner.
Another website providing a platform for this ideology is Maurizio Blondet’ s blog“ Blondet & Friends”, which contains a wealth of pungent anti-Semitic documentation( principally in the conspiracy theory vein) but lacks the aggressive graphics of HolyWar and Stormfront. The blog is presented as a sort of free online newspaper that is updated on a daily basis with original articles of anti-Semitic inspiration, often written by Blondet
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