“One of the most outspoken politicians against Italy’s anti-immigrant policies has been Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando.
“Minister Salvini isn’t against Muslims, Minister Salvini isn’t against immigrants, Minister Salvini is against Italians,” says Orlando, tapping his finger on his desk. “He is against our culture of hospitality, he’s against our Mediterranean soul, he’s against our history.”
But “our history” includes enormous efforts by local Christians to free Sicily from Muslim rule. That’s the history Salvini remembers, and Orlando chooses to forget. “
This past January, [Mayor of Palermo] Orlando, along with the mayors of Naples, Reggio Calabria and Florence, clashed with Salvini by rejecting the controversial Security Decree. The decree, in part, cancelled residence permits for humanitarian reasons, replacing it with shorter permits for specific incidences like natural disasters.
“Orlando’s welcoming approach to immigration and multiculturalism can be seen in his office. It boasts a 200-year-old, coffee table-sized Quran, gifted to the city by the Aga Khan Foundation.
One wonders if Orlando has ever been tempted to read the Qur’an. For if he did, he might be less sanguine about Muslim migrants. He might discover those 109 verses that command Muslims to wage violent Jihad against non-Muslims, to “fight” and to “kill,” to “strike at the necks” and to “sow terror in the hearts of” non-Muslims. He might discover the verses in which Muslims are told they are “the best of peoples” and that non-Muslims are “the most vile of created beings.” Perhaps Orlando suspects, and doesn’t want to know what he would find were he to read the Qur’an; it would only disturb his equanimity.
“Arabic and French pamphlets on migrant rights sit neatly stacked to the side of his desk.“When someone asks how many immigrants are in Palermo, I don’t respond 100,000 or 120,000,” Orlando explains. “I say none because the people in Palermo are Palermitans. The mayor of Palermo does not make a differentiation between those who were born in Palermo and those who live in Palermo.”
So just like that, the leftist mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, who has that kind of buonismo about Islam that so infuriated Oriana Fallaci, erases with a rhetorical flourish the distinction between those who are born in Palermo, and likely come from families that have lived in Palermo for generations, and those migrants who just arrived yesterday, having a different language and customs, misogynistic views of women, an inculcated contempt and hostility for all those who do not share their faith. For these economic migrants bring with them, undeclared in their mental baggage, the ideology of Islam. But for Leoluca Orlando history and ideology do not matter. Like Pope Francis, Leoluca Orlando doesn’t believe that Europeans have a right to keep out those who wish to settle among them, no matter how unstable or threatening they appear to be. Orlando does not think Europe — Italy, Sicily, Palermo — has a right to preserve its own culture, customs, beliefs. For Mayor Orlando, the minute a migrant settles in Palermo, he becomes just as much a Palermitano as someone whose family has been in the city for hundreds of years.
“Orlando links his perspective on immigration and his policy to the city’s culture and history.
His perspective on immigration should not be attributed to his city’s “culture and history.” His is the standard view of the European left. Migrants, all migrants (but especially those from the favored non-white and Muslim peoples), have a right to settle wherever they want in Europe, and no matter what the indigenous population may think. Diversity is an unalloyed good. Too great an attachment by Europeans to their own nation and culture is to be discouraged as reactionary, ‘islamophobic’. The only acceptable culture is that of multiculturalism.
“In the south of Italy, in particular, we are not European, I’m sorry but Palermo is not Frankfurt or Berlin” claims Mayor Orlando.
Comment:
Of course Palermo is not Frankfurt or Berlin. But just because Palermo ls a far cry from those efficient, well-organized, business-like German cities, this does not make Palermitans “not European.” That would make as little sense as claiming that people in New Orleans or Biloxi are “not American” because of their slower pace of life, their southern drawl, their laid-back lassitude. By dint of their shared ethnicity, language, laws, customs, history, and especially, by their shared religion, Sicilians are Italians, and Italians are Europeans just as much as people in Frankfurt or Berlin.
Again, Leoluca Orlando:
“Palermo isn’t Paris … Palermo is Beirut, Palermo is Istanbul, Palermo is Jerusalem, Palermo is Tripoli. Palermo is a Middle Eastern city in Europe. The Mediterranean isn’t a sea, it’s a continent. We have a Mediterranean identity that is multicultural.”
Comment:
Leoluca Orlando seems to relish the idea that Palermo has become one more Middle Eastern city, akin to Beirut, Istanbul, Tripoli [Jerusalem, which he also names, is –thanks to its majority Jewish population — a European rather than a Middle Eastern city]. Can 20,000 Muslims [out of 25,000 migrants] in Palermo, which has 700,000 inhabitants (and nearly 900,000 if outlying districts are included), really transform the city into Beirut or Tripoli? Of course not. But what astonishes, is Orlando’s attitude, which is one of pleasure at the idea that his city might be becoming “Beirut, Istanbul, Tripoli.’” What should horrify him ostensibly fills him with delight — or is this delight feigned, because he doesn’t know how else to respond?
“For people like Masur [a Muslim in Palermo, who came from Bangladesh] this multicultural identity has helped him feel not just tolerated, but accepted.”I feel at home now,” he says. “If I go somewhere else in Italy, like Venice or Milan, I say ‘no,’ I want to go back home to my Palermo.”
But surveys reveal that Muslims living in Italy feel less attached to their country than in any other EU country. Asked to rank their attachment on a five-point scale, the average score in Italy was 3.3, the lowest of the 15 countries surveyed. Apparently a great many Muslims do not “feel at home” in Italy, though of course these economic migrants are happy to pocket the many benefits that the generous Italian state provides, including free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, family allowances, and unemployment benefits even without the need for recipients to have been previously employed .
Many Sicilians do not share Mayor Orlando’s delight with Muslim immigrants. Sabina Bonelli, parliamentary candidate for Lega Salvini Premier (the new name of the party headed by Salvini), told CNBC that Sicily had been turned into a “big refugee camp.”
“The Mediterranean was a cradle of culture, trade and tourism but it’s become a place where human traffickers bring lots of people and give them false hope,” she said, adding that Italy needed to regulate migration and a law to block new arrivals.
Leoluca Orlando doesn’t share her dismay:
“Palermo is no longer an Italian town. It is no longer European. You can walk in the city and feel like you’re in Istanbul or Beirut.”
This statement can be read in two ways. It happens to have been said by Leoluca Orlando, for whom these Muslim migrants are a good thing. He never tells us exactly what wonderful things these Muslim migrants have brought to Sicily. Not a single benefit to the lives of Sicilians is presented. We are to take it on faith. Perhaps he is unaware of the vast dragon the public treasury of these Muslim migrants, who are in no hurry to find jobs, but glad to live on state support. He may not know that Muslims have taken over much of the drug trade, and prostitution, too, from the Mafia. That’s why the Mafia has been leaving Palermo: the Muslim gangs are too dangerous. Mention of the Muslim gangs would not fit Orlando’s optimistic narrative.
Does Mayor Orlando know that most Sicilians don’t want to walk in Palermo to “feel like you’re in Istanbul or Beirut.” They are no different in their desires from other Europeans. How many English people relish walking in certain parts of their cities — Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, London — and feeling as if they were in Karachi, or Baghdad? How many French people in Paris or Marseille enjoy those neighborhoods that have become versions of Algiers, or Rabat?
Not everyone in Sicily is quite so convinced as Mayor Orlando that Muslim immigration is to be welcomed. Not everyone is so enamored of the “diversity” and “multiculturalism” he celebrates. Matteo Salvini’s Lega Salvini and Beppe Grillo’s Cinque Stelle, have made electoral gains in Sicily with their anti-immigrant policies, a clear sign of growing disaffection with the welcome extended to Muslim migrants by such mayors as Leoluca Orlando. The next Italian elections will tell us whose version of reality is being accepted by the voters: those who regard the growing Muslim presence with delight, like Mayor Orlando in Palermo, or those who regard it with dread, like Matteo Salvini.