The Italian city of Turin always displayed hostility towards the State of Israel. Three years ago, at Park Ruffini, authorized by the municipality, a launching of shoes against the silhouette of former Israeli President Shimon Peres holding a Star of David was held.
Now there is an ambitious exhibition of the Museum of the Resistance. Officially, the title of the exhibition is “The long journey of the Palestinian refugee population”. An exhibition created by the Italian branch of UNWRA, the UN agency for perpetuating the "refugee" status of the Palestinians, and which in the last war in Gaza had some minor problems with the storage of Hamas’ rockets in its schools and facilities.
The municipality of Turin and the Piedmont region financed the event. The press conference for the presentation was attended by the Councillor of the Piedmont Region Monica Cerutti and Maurizio Braccialarghe, Councillor for Culture of the city of Turin.
The museum’s show is a blood libel against the Jews, apart from the fact that a Museum of the Resistance, which should pass on the memory of the anti-fascist resistance, is celebrating the "memory" of the “Palestinian resistance”. Surprising is also the timing, just after the war in Gaza. In the exhibition there is a video streaming major Western capitals, from Paris to London, on the background of “the wall” of Israel. The Arc de Triomphe is overshadowed by the concrete segment of the Israeli fence (actually only a small part of that barrier is concrete, the rest is reticulated and sensors). But there is also the parliament in Ottawa, Canada.
The exhibition does not say that the fence was built to stop the wave of attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers in the Israeli cities. It explains, however, that “the wall harms ecosystems, breaks the territorial continuity and social cohesion, destroys the economy, separate each family and the community”. Jews are libeled for preventing their own blood from being shed.
In the exhibition there is Sabra and Shatila, the massacre of September 20, 1982 in Lebanon, where hundreds of Palestinians were killed by the Maronite Phalangists. The caption of the Turin exhibition states that “several hundred Palestinian refugees were massacred in the districts of Sabra and Shatila by Israeli forces between 16 and 18 September”. By Israeli forces? Is Turin’s mayor, Piero Fassino, aware of having financed such an anti-Semitic lie? Why is the Jewish community of Turin, that of Primo Levi, which is among the funders of the Museum of the Resistance, silent on this ideological crime?
The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of photographs of Palestinian children in the rubble: “Children on the way to school in Gaza”, reads an image of apocalyptic ruins and lost childhoods. There are the “children who are swimming in the open air in Gaza”. There are the Israeli bulldozers razing the Palestinian homes. Houses of terrorists. But the show is more laconic and just says, “Demolition of homes”.
The show erases any cause-and-effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And to describe the Palestinian refugees of 1948, the word used by the Museum of the Resistance is the Arabic one, “Nakba”. The catastrophe. At the opening of the exhibition the former Italian senator, Tana de Zulueta, said that UNWRA is pronounced “unrà”, as the Arabs say. Rà, in Hebrew, means bad.
It is pure anti-Semitism spreading from a sad, beautiful Italian town.
Why shouldn't the Palestinian Arabs kill four Jews at prayer in Jerusalem if the entire world already believes in their role as assassins ?