In the 1990s the association of immigration and crime and se-curity mostly concerned Albanians, at the time the most numerous im-migrant group in Italy. As a result of this stigmatization, Albanians chose an assimilation strategy of integration.75 Subsequently —after 9/11 and a visible growing Muslim presence in Italy— feelings of hos-tility, partly fuelled by commentators, writers and journalists, were directed towards this specific group. In most surveys of the media, the predominant image of Islam is that of a threat to security, culture and basic Western values. Then it was the turn of the Roma (and, by extension through ignorance, Romanians in general), as a result of some violent episodes involving some of them, pounced upon by the press and leading to outright attacks on some of their settlements.76
In recent years, partly as a result of the economic crisis, general racism has grown against the vast category of “immigrants” without any distinction between new arrivals and those already settled, some even holding Italian citizenship. The situation has deteriorated in the last years, findings a new target in refugees and asylum-seekers. In this context, the proclamation of the Islamic State and the attacks car-ried out by its adherents have shone the racism spotlight again on the
“Muslims” issue, re-activating the barely-forgotten Muslim-terrorism and immigrant-terrorism relationships. Indeed, hostility towards im-migrants overlaps with animosity shown towards Islamic extremism, justified by accusations of disloyalty towards the countries where nu-merous, variegated Islamic communities reside, constituting an in-ternal enemy threatening to perpetrate violent attacks against their host countries.
75 V. Romania, Farsi passare per italiani. Strategie di mimetismo sociale (Roma: Carocci, 2004).
76 Among them, the most notorious example was the burning of the Roma camp in Continassa, Turin, in 2011.
Since summer 2014, with the proclamation of the Islamic State and the first decapitations of Western citizens, national media have re-peated the same mistake as they had made after 9/11, using double standards and generalizations and thereby helping to fuel fear and hos-tility. One headline after another warned of the potential presence in Italy of what the press termed “the terrorists next door,” creating a cli-mate of fear in public opinion. Specifically, there was increasing attention on this topic and a growing number of articles dealing with Islam and Muslim communities in an accusatory, aggressive, attacking tone. The Pulitzer Prize winner, Glen Greenwald, commenting on coverage of the January, 2015, Paris attacks, notes that: “It's absolutely the really scary climate that has emerged in the wake of Paris, an extremely anti-Muslim strain of animosity that we've seen historically in the past and that is both ugly and really dangerous”.77 Italian newspaper Libero got sued because of its headline “Bastardi Islamici” (Muslim Bastards), published after the attack to Charlie Hebdo. Television news programmes, newspapers and magazines play –sometimes contradictory– variations on the Muslims-terrorists, Islam-terrorism theme. In particular, many headlines screamingly demanded that Italian Muslim communities should take a stand against terrorists and terrorism, almost as a provocation or necessity to defend themselves against the public accusation of complicity by collective responsibility or connivance with terrorist activity. Less publicity was given, however, to campaigns promoted in various Italian cities, like, Not in My Name, where they explicitly distance themselves, by word and deed, on the part of prominent representatives and spokespersons from Italian Muslim communities.
It was regularly underlined that the lack of integration and the discrimination-emphasized, also by the media-can feed fundamental-ism and that the construction of stereotypes and generalizations can lead, as a response to discrimination, racism and Islamophobia, per-ceived and experienced, to the formation of reactive identities and the risk of radicalization. As stated by a representative of the Milan Is-lamic Association: “Fundamentalism occupies a small space which grows with injustice: the more injustice grows, the more this space
77 Media Diversity Institute, Paris Attacks: What the Media Could Have Done Differently, November, 24 2015.
grows because it fuels fundamentalist ideas. What I mean is this: when there are feelings like Islamophobia accompanied by, say, an attack in the newspapers, the mass media, prejudices et cetera against Islam and Muslims…when the Muslim, for example, is investigated and “black-listed” only because he is a Muslim, he feels under attack and his calm, responsible, civil tone begins to crack. That is where cultural ag-gressiveness, the aggressiveness of prejudices, grows; where there is a risk of feeding integralism, even within the community”.78
Incidents of violent fundamentalism, along with the sensational-ist approach of the media to the issue, are a likely risk of fuelling ex-ploitation, populist tendencies and of giving support to forms of anti-Islam political propaganda, and anti-immigration feeling in general, at the local level, which may, in turn, hinder the process of integration and the commitment of the associations on the ground to the recogni-tion of their rights. “Let's say that in my opinion rather than revealing changes in attitude we have witnessed the usual exploitation, when we see phenomena of this type. Obviously, they then become part of the public political discourse of groups who use them to try to deny some rights. We are specifically engaged in a campaign on behalf of free-dom of worship, the possibility of setting up official religious spaces, a campaign which we have been conducting for some time. All this talk about ISIS use as a polemical political argument of those who were against […]”.79
ISIS and the series of attacks in Europe have therefore not played in favour of Muslims and the recognition of their presence in the public space and, consequently, of the enjoyment of rights, but have contributed to increase prejudices, suspicions and forms of Is-lamophobia that, amplified by the mass media, risk to determine or in-crease, especially among young people, the dynamics of rejection, so-cial isolation, resentment that can lead to adherence to extremist mes-sages and radicalization processes in reaction to a situation that is no longer judged bearable.
78 Interview made in October 2015. See also S. Coglievina, V. Premazzi,
“L'Islam in Italia di fronte al fondamentalismo violento”, M. Diez, A. Plebani (eds.), La galassia fondamentalista tra jihad armato e partecipazione politica (Padova:
Marsilio, 2015), pp. 126ff.
79 Representative, Coordinamento Associazioni Islamiche Milano, interview by the author, October 2015.
If it is true that radicalization (and all Italian foreign fighters who have left for Syria and Iraq confirm this) has multiple causes, not only discrimination and the perception of refusal, and can engage in weaknesses, sometimes even personal ones, of individuals who end up embracing religious practices far from their family experiences, rad-ical and irreconcilable visions with the context of life until joining in-ternational jihadism, because in search of “meaning” for their own life and belonging to a community,80 it is also, however, important not to create “people under surveillance” or second-class citizens, who must prove to be devoted to Islam and good citizens.81
Exclusion and difficulty in becoming citizens, in being recog-nized with the same rights together with certain security measures such as expulsions can therefore worsen this perception and lead to the risk of forms of radicalization and violent extremism. The fact that the citizenship reform wasn't approved risks to have the undesirable effect of intensifying the feelings of frustration and anger and even the sense of revenge, at the individual level and not only for Muslims as it affected second generations of all origins and religions, forcing them to find an alternative to the feeling of belonging to the state they were born in but where they still feel and are excluded.
The best among the possible endings, which is already taking place significantly, is a new migration, often following the acquisition of citizenship, years after the first submission of the application, to other European countries. The worst is, as repeatedly pointed out, the development of forms of reactive identity that can activate radicaliza-tion processes and up to join terrorism groups. The path of the citizen-ship reform continues to seem not an easy one, despite the promises of various representatives of the national institutions, but at the same time it is increasingly needed because the lack of recognition is a time bomb that could sooner or later burst into our hands and then we could only say that “soon was yesterday” as the slogan of one of the
citizen-80 V. Premazzi, “Oltre la motivazione socio-economica, il fascino del Cal-iffato tra i giovani figli di immigrati in Europa”, A. Pin, C. Pellegrino (eds.), Europa e Islam attualità di una relazione (Padova: Marsilio, 2016), pp. 66ff.
81 See also S. Coglievina, V. Premazzi, “L'Islam in Italia di fronte al fonda-mentalismo violento”, M. Diez, A. Plebani (eds.), La galassia fondamentalista tra ji-had armato e partecipazione politica (Padova: Marsilio, 2015), pp. 126ff.
ship reform national campaigns.82 Finally, it is also important to un-derline how it was pointed out by L. Guglielminetti, Italian expert of the Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) of the European Com-mission, that the anti-terrorism strategy, to be effective, must therefore be more complex and articulated than relying only on restrictions and deportations and that it is of fundamental importance to ensure the possession and protection of the rights in counterterrorism laws and strategies.83
82 See also V. Premazzi, Ius soli (#SenatoRispondi), Amico Missioni Con-solata, November 18, 2016.
83 L. Guglielminetti, “Fine legislatura senza ius soli ne lotta alla radicalizza-zione. Il perché”, Homme révolté, January 10, 2018.
Media and Violence in Europe:
The case of growing Islamophobia in Italy Ines Peta
The goal of this study is to determine the possible factors lead-ing to increased anti-Muslim sentiment in Italy. Islamophobia is a phenomenon that has barely been studied in this country. Therefore there is a manifest lack of data on Islamophobic incidents.
Nevertheless some recent surveys give a glimpse into the extent of the phenomenon and some interesting reports, such as European Is-lamophobia Reports published by SETA Foundation, address this topic. We begin by examining first anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States and Europe through a secondary analysis of two recent Pew Re-search Center surveys in order to underline the common demographic predictors of Islamophobia. We then analyze the specific case of Italy and the potential relationship between exposure to negative news about Muslim-related issues and attitudes toward Muslims in this country.