Italy's Deputy PM Matteo Salvini found
not guilty in Open Arms migrants case
The leader of Italy's right-wing Lega Party and Giorgia Meloni's ally, Matteo Salvini, had been accused of kidnapping and dereliction of duty over his refusal to let a migrant rescue boat dock in Italy in 2019.
A court in Sicily found Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini not guilty of kidnap for detaining 100 migrants aboard a humanitarian rescue ship in 2019 incident when he was interior minister.
"I am happy. After three years, Lega has won, Italy has won. Defending the homeland is not a crime but a right. I will go forward with more determination than before," Salvini said following the verdict.
In August 2019, an NGO ship called Open Arms was carrying 147 migrants from the Libyan coast when Salvini prevented it from docking on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
The Open Arms remained at sea for almost three weeks, with the NGO reporting those on board endured dire circumstances leading to medical emergencies and deteriorated mental health. Some threw themselves overboard, and several minors were evacuated during the standoff.
Eventually, the prosecutor in the Sicilian city of Agrigento, Luigi Patronaggio, ordered the vessel to be preventively seized after inspecting it. The remaining 89 people onboard were allowed to disembark.
Salvini, who leads the anti-migrant, Euroskeptic Lega party, has argued that the then-government of Giuseppe Conte backed him fully in his mission to "close the ports" of Italy to rescue ships carrying migrants found at sea.
Arriving at the courthouse on Friday morning, he said it was a beautiful day "because I am proud to have defended my country. I would do what I did again."
Last week, he told a rally that "defending the borders, the dignity, the laws, the honour of a country cannot ever be a crime.”
Open Arms' Italian lawyer, Arturo Salerni, has argued Salvini failed in his duty as a public official to protect the human rights of those on board the ship. Prosecutors during the trial say that those stranded at sea should have had their human rights protected over "state sovereignty."
"A person stranded at sea must be saved and it is irrelevant whether they are classified as a migrant, a crewmember or a passenger," Prosecutor Geri Ferrara told the court in September.
Meloni's support
Salvini had said he would be unlikely to step down in the case of a guilty verdict over five years, which would have automatically barred him from office.
He has the support of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who earlier this year said in a post on X that "turning the duty to protect Italy's borders from illegal immigration into a crime is a very serious precedent."
She never indicated she would expect his resignation, but on Wednesday, she told the Italian Senate that Salvini has the "solidarity of the entire government".
Meloni has moved to crack down on migration since taking power in 2022, striking deals with northern African countries in a bid to prevent migrants from departing and setting up a landmark scheme with Albanian leader Edi Rama to process asylum applications in so-called "return hubs" away from Italian soil.
The deal has gained traction across European member states, although it has since become a legal nightmare for Meloni after 24 asylum seekers who were sent to Albania were promptly sent back to Italy after a Roman court declared the scheme unlawful.
Roman courts are remarkably anti-Italian.
The standoff between Open Arms and Salvini was one of over 20 during his tenure as interior minister from 2018 to 2019, where he took a hardline stance against migration. At the time, he repeatedly closed Italian ports to humanitarian rescue ships and accused NGOs that rescued migrants of effectively encouraging human traffickers.
In one incident, now-MEP Carola Rackete entered the port of Lampedusa against Salvini's orders after declaring a state of emergency on her boat.
She was soon arrested on charges of illegal migration that were eventually dropped.
As France gets more Islamic and more and more godless every day, Jews are wisely abandoning the country. The Bible says that Jews are a blessing to the world, but France seems to want to reject that blessing that has served them well for many centuries.
There is no blessing that accompanies Islam, only a curse against those who attack Jews.
Antisemitism Skyrockets in France
The latest polls on antisemitic attitudes in France are hair-raising. Many people in France, including its Muslims, now subscribe to more than six “antisemitic prejudices.” One in five young people think the country would be better off if the Jews left. There have been a rash of attacks on Jews, including Jewish girls and women who have been raped as payback for the IDF attacks in Gaza. More on the hair-raising rise in antisemitic acts and attitudes can be found here:
Half of French People Adhere to Over 6 Antisemitic Prejudices,
12% Happy to See Jews Leave Country: Survey
Algemeiner, November 22, 2024:
Hostility toward the Jewish people has surged to alarming levels in France, where half the population adhere to more than six antisemitic prejudices and nearly one in five young people want to see the departure of Jews from the country, according to a new survey.
Ipsos, a market research and consulting firm, conducted the survey of the French public for the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, to examine the country’s attitudes toward the Jewish community amid a surge in antisemitic hate crimes over the past year.
The findings, unveiled by CRIF on Thursday and first reported by the French news magazine Le Point, revealed a surge in antisemitic attitudes across France.
Among France’s general population, 12 percent of people are happy to see Jews leave the country, up from just 6 percent in 2020, according to the survey.
“It’s a terrifying figure,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the radio station Europe 1 when asked about the finding.
The number goes up among people under the age of 35, of whom a striking 17 percent think that the departure of Jews from France would be good for the country.
They don't mention that the percentage of Muslims in the under 35 age group has exploded while indigenous French are decreasing in numbers.
“It is contrary to the historical trend,” Arfi told Le Point. “Young people are more receptive to antisemitic, Islamist, and conspiracy theories, which are invading social networks.”
As for people aged 18 to 24, only 53 percent think that the majority of Jews are well integrated into the population, compared to 84 percent of French people more broadly, the survey found.
Overall, nearly half (46 percent) of French people today adhere to more than six anti-Jewish prejudices, compared to 37 percent in 2020, according to the results. Meanwhile, almost a quarter of those surveyed think that Jews are not really French like the rest of their countrymen, an uptick of more than six points.
The numbers increase among backers of France’s main far-left and far-right political parties. Indeed, the survey found that 52 percent of those who support the far-right Rassemblement National (RN — “National Rally”) and 55 percent of those who support the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI — “France Unbowed”) adhere to at least six antisemitic stereotypes. And a third of LFI supporters indicated they adhere to at least nine such prejudices….
Supporters of both the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) and the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) adhere to at least six antisemitic stereotypes, but the LFI is far worse in its antisemitic views, for fully one-third of the party’s supporters accept nine such stereotypes.
LFI leader Jean-Luc Melenchon is a rabble-rouser who does not hide his anti-Israel and his antisemitic views. He has accused Israel of “genocide,” has suggested that French Jews are not loyal to France, but only to Israel, has never denounced Hamas for its October 7 attack, but called the attack “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” that came “in the context of the intensification by Israel of the policy of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.” He has attacked Raphaël Glucksmann of the party Place Publique for supporting a resolution adopted by the European Parliament denouncing Hamas’ atrocities. To this day, neither Melenchon nor the party he leads has denounced Hamas’ atrocities. But he and his party have been deeply critical of Israel for its “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” in Gaza, and demanded that France place an embargo on weapons it has been selling to the Jewish state. He supports the ICC’s issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Antisemitic acts rose by ten times in the last three months of 2023 — when the war in Gaza began — over the same period in 2022. And as that war continues, and the news brings fresh stories about civilian casualties that are taken out of context, anger at Israel rises. Nothing is said about Hamas’ embedding of combatants and weapons in civilian areas. Nor is anything reported about the enormous efforts the IDF makes to warn civilians away from areas about to be targeted. All the French public sees is pictures of wounded or dead children and the ruins of buildings; no wonder, with such daily fare, anti-Israel animus, and antisemitism, have been rising in France.
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