Don't tell me Muslims aren't fascist

From Italian Book Fair's Plans to Honor Israel Lead to Protests:

The selection of Israel as guest of honor at this spring’s International Book Fair in Turin has set off a furious debate among Italian, Israeli and Arab authors and intellectuals, including calls to boycott the event, Italy’s largest annual gathering of the publishing world.

Those opposed to the decision say that offering such an honor at a fair opening in May, when Israel will celebrate its 60th anniversary as a nation, is to ignore its policies toward Palestinians.

“A prestigious event like the book fair can’t pretend it doesn’t know what’s happening in that part of the Middle East,” said Vincenzo Chieppa, a local leader of the Italian Communist Party, who was one of the first to raise objections to the selection of Israel.

Subsequent calls to boycott the fair — coming both from extreme-left-wing Italian political activists and prominent Italian and Arab intellectuals and authors — have prompted a wave of newspaper articles, some raising concerns about censorship and others extolling the need to place art above politics.

On Tuesday, for instance, a small group of protesters associated with a local pro-Palestinian group stormed the book fair offices in Turin, demanding that the invitation to Israel be rescinded.

The Cynical Use of Israel in Italian Politics

From The Cynical Use of Israel in Italian Politics:

Italy presently has a left-wing government. Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema was one of the strongest opponents of Israel when he was prime minister in 1998-2000. A few decades ago the Italian Left started to use the conflict as a strategic instrument to build domestic political alliances. It is not by chance that the radical shift in the EU's stance toward Israel occurred in a declaration at a 1980 conference in an Italian city, Venice, which demanded the creation of a Palestinian state. It was issued when the PLO still explicitly said that it wanted to destroy Israel. The new Italian Right led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has to a large extent relegitimized pro-Israel positions in Italy. Yet almost the entire Left and large parts of the Catholic world retain their anti-Israel views.

It's not too late to convict Nazis

From JPost:

Despite the more than 60 years that have passed since the Holocaust, the number of Nazi war criminals being convicted is on the rise, a report released Thursday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles shows. Nineteen Nazi war criminals were convicted over the last year,up from 16 a year earlier and five the year before that, according to the center's seventh annual report. Fourteen of the 19 Nazis found guilty last year were convicted in absentia in Italy.

The report slams Germany, Austria and Poland for failing toachieve "any progress" against the war criminals over the lastyear despite hundreds of cases under investigation.

"While it is generally assumed that it is the age of the suspects that is the biggest obstacle to prosecution, in many cases it is the lack of political will, more than anything else, that has hindered the efforts to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice, along with the mistaken notion that it was impossible at this point to locate, identify, and convict these criminals,"Zuroff said.

The center commends Italy for becoming the second most successful country, after the United States, in the prosecutionof Nazi war criminals, even if the Italian convictions were carried out in absentia and the criminals have yet to be extradited or to serve jail terms.