Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – "Solidarity with Youssef Siher." This is how Ilaria Salis, an AVS MEP, began her post about the 30-year-old administrator of the October 17 Movement group, who was arrested on charges of incitement to crime, aggravated by the intention of terrorism.
“The government's repression, which is finally being met with a storm of protests, is reaching unprecedented and unheard-of levels,” Salis wrote on Facebook. “Siher is accused of incitement to crime and organized violence at public demonstrations, a crime introduced with the latest security decree.
Without any scruples regarding legal guarantees or the slightest respect for the presumption of innocence, he has been portrayed by almost all networks as the 'mastermind' of October 17th and subjected to a media pillory with strongly racist and Islamophobic tones, which the Government has unleashed and is complacently riding on”.
“In reality,” continues the AVS MEP, “far from being the ‘leader’ of a movement (a ridiculous accusation: as we saw last Saturday, movements don’t need leaders to take to the streets), Siher seems to merely embody the ideal scapegoat.
A second-generation Italian, racialized, Muslim, a political activist, and a precarious worker. Exactly the target the government propaganda needed to delegitimize the protests and discourage popular participation.
For Salis, "the logic of moral panic and the enemy's criminal law is now fully deployed in Meloni's Italy. This authoritarian drift concerns us all, because it calls into question the fundamental rights and freedoms of each individual."
“You don't have to share Siher's ideas – and in fact I don't share some of his positions – to recognize the gravity of such an episode of repression and denounce what is happening.
Let's not bow our heads,” concludes Ilaria Salis.
Yesterday, a storm erupted against the secretary of the Communist Refoundation Party, Maurizio Acerbo, for his statements on Siher and for having written in a Facebook post: "From reading the newspapers, I don't understand what would motivate the arrest of Youssef Siher. What is he accused of? Of having issued a 'V for Vendetta'-style proclamation, proclaiming himself a Movement? Of being pro-Hamas? But then they should arrest politicians and editorialists who support Netanyahu. Isn't a citizen free to think that Hamas is right? That's not exactly my opinion, being a communist, but I defend freedom of opinion." And again, in the debate on X: "Is it forbidden to praise Hamas?"
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