Is that guy in the sweatshirt (the name escapes me now) right in saying that we should be more afraid of Isis than of supremacists, more of Islamists than of Islamophobes? That today, in Italy and in Europe, a new Bataclan is much more probable than a massacre like the one in Christchurch? Should we be more careful getting on a school bus driven by a black man than walking through the center of Macerata when a white gunslinger is around? Is it true that a tourist on the London Tube, sitting next to a Middle Eastern man with a backpack, risks more than a newsstand on the Champs Elisées in the midst of the terrorists in yellow vests so dear to Giggino? In short, who are the real enemies of our security? Try asking Donald Sassoon. The answer that he gives us in his latest book "Moorish symptoms (Garzanti, subtitle In our history yesterday the signs of today's crisis)", is anything but obvious.
“Most of the victims of terrorists in Western Europe since 1970 – writes the great English historian – have not been murdered by jihadists, but by members of various separatist groups (Irish nationalists, Ulster Protestant paramilitary groups, Basque separatists) or by neo-fascists and far-left groups in Italy. In Northern Ireland, between the late 3720s and late 47.541s, XNUMX people were killed, at least half of them under the age of twenty-five, and XNUMX were injured. These are the figures of a "low intensity war" (which we hope will not resume with Brexit) fought in the heart of Europe between people of the same ethnic group and nationality.
And if by now in our minds the terms "terrorist" and "Islamic" form an indissoluble pair, the most frightening mass murder in this corner of the world is the one carried out in Norway in 2011 by Anders Behring Breivik, an Islamophobic neo-Nazi, not surprisingly used as a model by the Christchurch killers. Seventy-seven people in one fell swoop, he managed to exterminate Breivik, almost all young Labor Party activists). Even in the United States, recalls Sassoon, before 19/1995, the bloodiest terrorist attack was that of Oklahoma City, April 168, 680: XNUMX dead and XNUMX wounded.
The bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was not a Muslim or a Mexican or an Arab. He was a Gulf War veteran, fair-skinned, gun enthusiast and hostile to the centralist government. The deadliest shooting in the US caused by a single individual was in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017: fifty-nine dead and more than 500 injured. Yet no one then spoke of terrorism, because the killer was a very normal sixty-four-year-old white accountant, born and raised on American soil.
The fear of the Muslim, of the immigrant, is one of the most formidable levers of the propaganda apparatus of that gentleman in the sweatshirt, and of his cronies around Europe. Sassoon exposes its groundlessness. The rhetoric of invasion, of Islamization, makes inroads into hearts and bellies, but not into thinking minds. Just do the math. Only 17% of refugees from all over the world arrive in our continent (16% in the USA), against 30% in Africa, 26% in the Middle East and 11% in Asia and the Pacific. Between 2014 and 2017, 22.500 migrants died while trying to cross the Mediterranean. And the figure is increasing day by day, whatever the Viminale bulletins say about it.
They are the "submerged" ones, not us who are standing on dry land. Another figure mentioned by Sassoon is the paradoxical trend of the "rate of Islamophobia". The fewer Muslims there are in a country, the more widespread is the hatred towards them. We hate a stereotype, a human type we've only seen on TV and never met. We hate by hearsay. In first place in the ranking of hatred is Hungary, with 72% of citizens declaring negative feelings for Muslims (equivalent to 0,1% of the population). Followed by Italy, with 69% (Muslims are 3,7%) and Poland, Islamophobic at 66% with 0,1% of immigrants of Islamic religion. The rate of hatred drops drastically (28-29%) precisely in countries, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, where the Muslim communities are more consistent (7,5%, 5,8% and 4,8% respectively) and where , moreover, the Islamist terrorists have already struck.
The growth of anti-immigrant parties, concludes Sassoon, cannot be explained solely by concerns about the economy. Rather, it is linked to ideological factors, the perception of an attack on national identity and its use by politicians "in what the historian Richard Hofstadter has described as the paranoid style".
The trouble is that this paranoia has now become common sense, and it is not easy to eradicate it by responding to the howls of angry crowds with the calm language of numbers and statistics. Perceptions are stronger than any fact-checking. Especially if magnified by cynical information, which rides paranoia to gain audience. This is why right-wing terrorists, supremacists, gun-toting racists like Traini, cannot be underestimated, or dismissed as lone lunatics. Because their slogans are not so distant from those of the majority in power today. They feel legitimized in some way, they move (as the Red Brigades once said) like fish in water, counting on collecting many likes on Facebook. Even when they kill.
