Gaza on screen: anti-antisemitismo, islamofobia e razzismo in Italia
GAIA GIULIANI
Abstract
In light of the persistent downsizing by Italian mainstream media of the entity of the human/ environmental catastrophe in Gaza since October 7, 2023, this article aims to examine how these media construct the Arab Muslim as the ‘natural’ enemy of Israel, and therefore as an inherent threat to the West – and to Italy. I argue that Italy’s longstanding history of Islamophobia contributes both to a lack of public outrage over the genocide in Gaza and to the belief that, to prevent the “Middle Eastern war” from triggering waves of migration to Europe, border and warfare technologies (including the direct elimination of perceived threats) must be employed. Within the framework of state-sponsored anti-racism, my article reinterprets the relationship between ‘constitutional’ anti-antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism, and their deployment to support a particular vision of a national imagined community, one that upholds the myth and daily narrative of Italians’ whiteness and Western identity as besieged by barbarism.
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anti-semitism, islamophobia, whiteness, coloniality of the present, Italy
Pages
61-75