In recent months, lawyer Iuri Maria Prado, who combines his legal profession with intense publicity work, has submitted a series of disciplinary complaints to the territorial councils of the Journalists’ Professional Body against reporters, correspondents, presenters and commentators, asking them to verify whether some of their statements on Jews and Israel constituted ethical violations.

Prado always gave evidence of these initiatives on his X profile, drawing attention to the cases submitted to the territorially competent disciplinary councils, and explained how their subject matter was false or unverified news or statements with discriminatory meaning and content.

The exposés concerned both well-known and lesser-known names in Italian journalism, which we will omit here to prevent their good or bad reputation in the eyes of the reader from taking precedence over the ‘quality’ of the statements questioned by Prado, some examples of which we will give, and which must be considered in themselves and regardless of their author, in order to appreciate or exclude their danger, depending on the judgement one wishes to make of them.

The history of anti-Semitism follows a fairly well-known general law. When one can say anything about Jews, one can soon afterwards also do anything about them, and the measure of prejudice against them will quickly be matched by that of the violence they will be forced to endure.

One should always start here when discussing what ‘can be said’ or ‘cannot be said’ about Jews.

The paradox is that, even in Italy, at the moment when anti-Semitic hatred exploded most clearly, after 7 October 2023, as the long wave of the Hamas pogrom, even openly discriminatory attitudes – think of the Pride and 25 April programmatically and proudly Judenfrei – instead of being harshly censored, found ample justification in public discourse as a form of legitimate political criticism.

In almost all of these cases, the accusation and plea for exoneration made against Jews – be it the old people or children insulted in front of synagogues or the tourists not allowed in public establishments – was motivated by the faults or crimes charged against the Jewish state.

In the anti-Semitic paradigm, there are no individual Jews, but a single, undifferentiated ‘collective Jew’. Except for those willing to swear on the Nazism of the so-called ‘Zionist entity’ and the unobjectionability of the genocide it is allegedly perpetrating, this ‘collective Jew’ before 1948 coincided with the Jewish people and is today identified with the State of Israel.

Whether all the statements reported by Prado to the disciplinary councils constitute expressions of direct and overt hatred can be debated (some objectively do), but it is certain that they all flirt with themes, motifs, codes and representations that are recurrent in anti-Jewish discourse and intentionally or unintentionally suitable for fuelling it.

The declared objective of the complaints is to assert a criterion of deontological responsibility, which obviously concerns a different and broader perimeter than the contestation of conduct liable to more serious censure in civil or criminal proceedings.

The Exposed and the Boundary between Criticism and Prejudice

Let us review some of these statements and ask ourselves honestly whether, as the president of the Professional Body of Journalists, Carlo Bartoli, has argued – quite irresponsibly – the exposés are only ‘intended to intimidate and intimidate colleagues‘ and to ‘silence unwelcome voices‘, and whether, as the coordinator of Articolo 21 and former president of the FNSI, Giuseppe Giulietti, has added, they are the work of a ‘network squadrista‘ to be ‘putunder fire‘ in a ‘symbolic, political and trade union‘ sense.

What can one say about a journalist who, on the subject of two French Jews (a man and his six-year-old son) attacked in an Italian motorway service station, first of all points out that they were not ‘attacked‘, but rather ‘severely challenged’, and that in any case ‘one has to take that into account when one has international criminal rulers‘?

And of the TV presenter, who shows images of a Jewish hostage in Gaza superimposed on those of a sick Palestinian child and argues that this hostage – referred to as ‘one of their own’ – is indeed ‘skin and bones’, but ‘like most of the people in Gaza’?

What about the big progressive signature claiming that ‘there is no doubt‘ that the government of Israel has ‘an explicit and declared plan to eliminate the Palestinian population‘?

And of the envoy celebrating the booing of the Israeli Olympic representation as ‘confirmation that Israel’s image is irredeemable after the genocide’?

The political and legal knot of contemporary anti-Semitism

What about reporters reporting on the ‘raids in the capital’ carried out by ‘one hundred beaters’ of Roman Jews?

And of the outspoken correspondent who certifies how the news that the perpetrators of the 7 October pogrom ‘burned children’ Jews was ‘repeatedly proven to be fake news’?

And of the journalist who, with regard to the Vueling flight departing from Valencia, from which fifty French children of Jewish origin were hastily disembarked for having sung a traditional song on board, concluded the news as follows:‘If they know that their parents can kill women and children with impunity, imagine how much trouble a bunch of kids would have putting the safety of an aeroplane flight at risk‘?

None of the complaints reportedly resulted in the initiation of proceedings or the imposition of disciplinary sanctions. Most of the complaints remained unresolved, some were dismissed.

This affair, however, not only bears witness to Prado’s stubborn commitment against the uncontrolled and largely unconscious spread of an anti-Jewish common sense with dismal historical precedents, but also illuminates a problem whose juridical and political relevance is also beginning to be felt in Italy, as demonstrated by the troubled approval at first reading in the Senate of a bill to combat anti-Semitism, based on the adoption of the operational definition given by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and repeatedly referred to in Prado’s exposés.

It seems quite evident that the reservations loudly expressed towards this law by the left-wing oppositions (M5S, AVS AND PD with a few notable exceptions among elected democrats) rest on the same assumption that leads, to quote one of Prado’s exposés, to consider as a legitimate and uncensurable criticism of the government of Israel the accusation of unknown French Jews of wanting to ‘kill women and children with impunity’.

Criticism of Israel as a political-deontological excuse for anti-Jewish prejudice, hatred and contempt.

Anything can again be said about the Jews – and the results are beginning to show.