quote:

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Mr Alemanno campaigned on the ticket of a tough approach on crime, after a series of attacks blamed on immigrants.

He promised to put more police on the streets of the city and to expel thousands of Roma travellers living in illegal settlements around the city.

The conservative wears a Celtic cross, the symbol of the far right, around his neck.

He is a former youth leader of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, the MSI, and is married to Isabella Rauti, the daughter of Pino Rauti, a leading figure on the far right.

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There was a notorious case of an Albanian Roma man killing an (old-stock) Italian woman on her way home from work in an outlying part of Rome, but obviously he wasn't the only killer in Rome that year, and it is too often forgotten that a Roma woman in his own community spoke out against the killer to the police.

I've already sent the BBC article to a friend in Europe who is involved with the Europe-wide movement for the defence of Roma rights.

quote:

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Italy's new parliament met for the first time yesterday with applause for Rome's mayor-elect, Gianni Alemanno, a day after followers celebrated his triumph with straight-arm salutes and fascist-era chants.

Alemanno, a former neo-fascist youth leader, took 54% of the vote in a run-off on Sunday and Monday, crushing his rival, Francesco Rutelli, a deputy prime minister in the last, centre-left government.

Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy's leap to the right by declaring: "We are the new Falange." Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters.

The original Falange - the word means "phalanx" - was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, which supplied Francisco Franco's dictatorship with its ideological underpinning.

The prime minister-elect's closest ally, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League leader, kept up the intimidating rhetoric, arriving for the first session of Italy's parliament warning of violence if the centre-left did not go along with his plans for federalism.

"I don't know what the left wants [but] we are ready," he told reporters. "If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand."

On Monday night, the area around Rome's city hall rang to chants of "Duce! Duce!", the term adopted by Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German "Führer". Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

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quote:

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“ October 16, 1943 is one of the finest accounts ever written about the massive German roundup of Jews in Rome on the date of its title. Debenedetti’s mastery of the facts, literary ability, and concern for the human dimension make this tragic event come alive in all its horror. His work is both a valuable contribution to the historical record and a moving tribute to the more than one thousand Jewish victims of a Nazi atrocity in the Eternal City.”
—Susan Zuccotti, author of Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy, winner of the 2000 National Jewish Book Award for Jewish-Christian Relations.

For more than fifty years, Giacomo Debenedetti’s October 16, 1943 has been considered one of the best and most accurate accounts of the shockingly brief and efficient roundup of more than one thousand Roman Jews from the oldest Jewish community in Europe for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Completed a year after the event, Debenedetti’s intimate details and vivid glimpses into the lives of the victims are especially poignant because Debenedetti himself was there to witness the event, which forced him and his entire family into hiding.

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Bleak.

We may find lots of Italian antifascist exiles arriving in North America soon.

(on edit)

Jeez...I didn't catch the spelling error you were referring to until just now. God, that's embarassing. Probably how I lost that job at Chernobyl.

[ 11 June 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]