The images of the students of the occupied university of Turin being harangued by a jihadist imam are shocking. But before talking about it I would like to go back 45 years.
In 1979 a group of Roman militants of the Autonomia Operaia were stopped in Ortona, Abruzzo, while they were transporting a missile or something similar on a minibus, no use wasting time on the technical details, owned by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The episode caused a lot of noise, also because no one at the time knew of the existence of the Moro award, except obviously for some selected state and government officials. In essence, the Moro award was a secret and informal agreement based on this exchange: the Palestinian groups had the green light to use Italian territory as a logistical background for their operations in exchange for the guarantee that they would not carry out attacks on Italian territory. The post-fascist right has long embroidered on the Ortona episode, trying in vain to place it at the origin of the infamous and ridiculous Palestinian trail for the massacre at the Bologna station in 1980. But that’s not what we’ll talk about today. Jump back another seven years.
Turin, Islamic prayer canceled at the Polytechnic. Imam Baya: “It is unconstitutional”
In 1972 – the Moro award is not yet operational – Oriana Fallaci goes to Amman, Jordan, to interview George Habash, head of the Popular Front. It’s a tense interview, a melee. Fallaci does not hide her revulsion for Habash’s political methods, who in turn does nothing to please her or change her mind. Fallaci criticizes the Palestinian leader for his use of terrorism and the unscrupulousness with which he plans to also attack civilians. He reproaches him for the practice of hijackings, attacks on planes and in airports. He says Habash: “If Italy is a base to attack the Arabs, the Arabs have every right to use Italy as a base to attack the Jews.” Fallaci asks: “Dr. Habash, what is heroic about terrorism, about setting fire to an old people’s home, about destroying the oxygen reserves of a hospital, about crashing a plane or destroying a supermarket?”. Habash’s response is this: “Guerrilla warfare, a certain type of guerrilla warfare. And what is guerrilla warfare if not the choice of an objective that offers one hundred percent success?”. Fallaci disputes with Habash that in Europe those who fought for freedom did not kill children and defenseless people. This is how Fallaci describes Habash’s response: “He did not react by getting angry. He actually explained his theory to me to prove me that I was wrong.”
Imam Brahim Baya: “There were some boys who wanted to pray, we asked the occupiers for permission”
Until the 1980s, the closeness between a significant part of the Italian left and Palestinian groups was cemented by a common ideological vision. Habash supported in that interview: “The aim of our struggle is not only to restore an identity to Palestine but to establish socialism there.” The autonomous workers who transported the missile on behalf of the PFLP were not only supporters of the Palestinian cause, they felt they were political brothers of the Front. The motive of the most radical Italian pro-Palestinians, translated into a nutshell, would have been exposed like this: we support the Palestinian movements not only because we think they have the right to take back their land, but because on that land they want to do the same thing that we want here. The revolution. Communism. In fact, that cry that today rings out in the streets of pro-Pal students, “Free Palestine!”, once had a second verse: “Red Palestine!”, now erased from history. History erases. History changes everything, and we change too.
Let’s go back to Turin. In the occupied university classroom, crouching students listen to the imam glorify jihad. Not the Koranic jihad, the moral tension towards religious purity. Precisely the jihad holy war, the physical destruction of the infidels. Not a fly flies. I don’t know how much the students of the University of Turin who listened enthralled – fortunately, only symbolically – to the words of the jihadist imam know about the Moro praise, Habash and missiles in Ortona. Not that it’s essential to know, you can live well without it. However, I was wondering this when faced with the evidence of what has happened in the space of a few decades and a couple of Intifadas: where once the political motive of pro-Palestinian solidarity was the commonality of objectives, today it is the adoption of the objectives of others. Yesterday the ideological bond prevailed, today the sense of guilt, the expiation of an alleged privilege. I’m not saying that before it was better and now worse, much less the opposite. Of course, before there was a political logic, now a mystical logic: girls and boys hanging on the lips of a religious man who, essentially, is enlisting them in a holy war of which they could potentially also be future victims. Which would still be an excellent way to atone for Western white privilege. Young people who drink in the words of someone who, despite what they probably think, is not sharing a goal, he is catechizing them. He is subjugating them, at their request. Submission. Like the shocking images of American students bowing to pray towards Mecca (I won’t use the easy argument about how a priest would be welcomed in occupied Italian universities, it’s a bit gross, although like all gross things it has its undeniable effectiveness). Submission. The fact that a strange, somewhat reactionary French gentleman wrote a novel about it does not mean that it is reactionary to take note of it (parenthesis on Fallaci-Habash: after the publication of the interview the PFLP communications office contested some parts of it, which Fallaci However, he had recorded it and branded the journalist a “fascist”. Fallaci’s reply: “To this vulgarity I only reply that when Dr. Habash did nothing to prove himself an anti-fascist and his people got along so well with the Nazis, I was a little girl with braids who fought fascism in the Resistance”).
No one should be so foolish as to exchange the sacrosanct defense of Gaza’s civilians from the retaliation of the Israeli army with sharing in the jihad. In the words of that imam there is also the claim for October 7th. Of every possible October 7th past, present and future. To deny that this is the case is to deny the evidence, even though there are now more and more people who don’t even bother trying to deny it.
