Nicholas Farrell
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Grillo, on other hand, gives every indication of hating not only Israel, but Jews, too. To him, as to millions of net-curtain twitching lefties, it seems that the Jews are the symbol of parasitical capitalism.
During the European election campaign he posted a photograph of the entrance to Auschwitz on his website replacing the words on the gate ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ with ‘P2 Macht Frei’. It was a reference to the Italian P2 masonic lodge — a favourite punchbag of the Italian left these past 30 years. Just a joke, of course. As usual. Everything is, innit? But it caused outrage nonetheless.
Renzo Gattegna, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said that such behaviour, especially during an election campaign, was ‘anti-Semitic’ because it poisoned people into thinking that a Jewish plutocracy runs the banks and big business. Italy’s leading Jewish journalist, Gad Lerner, writing in La Repubblica, defined Grillo’s post as ‘a racist outrage masquerading as a joke’.
Grillo’s internet political movement, fascistically not defined as a political party, came within a whisker of forming the Italian government after it came second in the country’s general election last year. And it came second once again at last month’s European elections.
One of his pet hates, it appears, is the ‘Jewish Lobby’. Recently, for example, he wrote on his website: ‘Who is behind this lobby, who is behind the banks…? This financial power causes Holocausts once a year, once a month, once a day.’
In 2006, he posted a picture of Mein Kampf on his website and wrote: ‘If sleeping reason generates monsters, then today the monsters have put reason to sleep… Let us listen to a voice from the past to understand the present.’ He then quoted a hefty chunk of the Hitler bible which included these words: ‘So, well-armed and confiding in both the good Lord and the unshakable stupidity of the electorate, we can begin the struggle to reform the State.’
His supporters are more nakedly prejudiced. His website has millions of visitors — more than any other in Italy, it is said — and pullulates with anti-Semitic comments. OK, he is not their author, but he is their agent provocateur — or pied piper.
Here are some examples:
‘If I were in power I would bombard Israel day and night and make them yearn for a return to the methods used by Uncle Adolf.’
Or this: ‘The Shoah must go on.’
Or this: ‘Hitler was certainly a crazy man but what prompted his idea of eliminating the Jews was to eliminate their financial dictatorship.’ And this: ‘If the world had balls, Israel would have already disappeared two decades ago.’
Enrico Sassoon, former partner of Grillo’s intellectual guru and internet wizard, Gianroberto Casaleggio, is Jewish. When the two men fell out a few years ago he was demonised on Grillo’s website for his Jewishness. Subsequently, in a letter to the Corriere della Sera, Sassoon warned of a return to the dark days of the alleged ‘Tsarist and Hitlerian pluto-giudaic-masonic conspiracy’.
In January last year the Comunità Ebraica di Roma condemned Grillo and his movement as ‘crudely anti-Zionist’ and linked psychologically to ‘certain forms of radical Islam’. That March, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France denounced them as ‘nauseating’ and ‘profoundly anti-Semitic’. The Conseil went as far as to say that the Movimento 5 Stelle was supported by people who believe that ‘all the evils of the world’ are caused by Jews and that Grillo has ‘without ambiguity never hidden his anti-Semitism’.
Many Italian commentators compare Grillo to the French ‘far right’ black comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala — famous for his upside-down Nazi salute, known as la quenelle — who in January this year became one of the very few people ever to be barred from entry to Britain. Dieudonné, famous for mocking Jews and the Holocaust, claims he is ‘anti-Establishment’ rather than anti-Semitic — just like Grillo.
Perhaps, though, the most disturbing thing about Grillo and his millions of voters is their fanatical belief in conspiracy theories and their desperation to identify and exact revenge on the perceived elite — which includes Jews, but not only Jews — for the ills of the world, all those supposed sinister puppet masters, in other words, who control everything dietro le quinte (behind the choir stalls).
Nigel Farage is not anti-Semitic, as far as I can tell. So the question is simple: why has he teamed up with somebody who, at the very least, does a great impression of a stand-up Jew-hater?
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