Obscene and shameless — the silence of the media lackeys and the governments they serve.
Let us ask ourselves: who is more obscene and shameless — a disturbed individual who opens his raincoat in public to expose himself, or a settler wrapped in a flag blocking food from reaching a people dying of hunger?
Is obscenity found in profanity, or in lies?
Certainly obscene and repugnant is the leader of a so-called democratic government who, together with his ministers, declares that Palestinian children are enemies and must be killed — every last one of them.
Obscene and shameless is our own government, which with its majority led by a woman-mother-Christian fails to take a stand against those committing genocide.
But obscene, too, is Mentana — who doesn't dare call "settlers" those who have been colonizing Palestinian territory for decades with weapons and murderous violence.
Obscene is anyone who quibbles over the meaning of the word genocide.
"Don't talk to me about genocide!" Mentana warns, with imperious arrogance. Two reasons, he says: first, because Palestinians are not a minority; and second, because genocide is something else — it's "the planned extermination on paper of an entire people."
So according to this supposedly authoritative journalist, until Benjamin Netanyahu actually picks up a pen and writes on a piece of paper: "Agenda: genocide" — it isn't genocide. And the fact that the perpetrators of the genocide announce it openly on television and in newspapers isn't even sufficient.
Mentana is not alone. The list of practitioners of the "fine distinction" is very long, and the same brazen faces keep appearing.
Those who maintain that the Holocaust cannot be compared to the "extermination" of Palestine argue that Hitler organized across all of Europe the systematic search, rounding up, deportation and murder of the Jewish people. True. But the Jews at that time had no land of their own. And Hitler did not possess the weapons and the technology available today to Benjamin Netanyahu. In a certain sense, he wouldn't even have wanted to gather them all in one place and bomb them so directly. He hunted them, deported them, sorted them with monstrous sadism, gathered them in multiple concentration camps, killed some immediately, exploited others if they were exploitable, tortured and humiliated them, starved them, infected them with disease, turned them — as Primo Levi put it — first into "Muselmänner," creatures both living and dead, and finally sent them to the gas chambers, or directly into the furnaces.
Given the later attempts to erase every trace of the horrors committed, that filthy, loathsome murderer Hitler was perhaps, in some warped way, trying to save face.
The obscene, contemptible murderer Netanyahu made an attempt at saving face in the early stages by saying that when he destroys a Gaza hospital it's because Hamas terrorists are inside. But since nobody with any sense believes that repugnant lie anymore, he now insists on the necessity of exterminating all Palestinians because they are all terrorists — including newborns, women and children.
An obscene and shameless West
There are far too many direct testimonies reaching us — despite the brazen assassinations of journalists and humanitarian workers being perpetrated in that poor land.
Dear Mentana: if Netanyahu doesn't write out a genocide agenda on a piece of paper, it's because he has them all together in a single strip of land and is exterminating them with bombs, drones, snipers, starvation, thirst, disease — massacring even all those who try to help them.
And what does the West do? We ordinary people — the no-ones — write what we can, take to the streets, wave the Palestinian flag, try to make our shame and our horror heard. But with what results?
During the Second World War, Pius XII did nothing of substance against the genocide of the Jews — so much so that John Paul II later said: "We have sinned against you, our Jewish brothers, and we ask your forgiveness."
Now, since his inauguration, Leo XIV appears more direct and unambiguous. But the West that counts — Europe? Let's leave aside that buffoon Trump. What can we expect from a country that wages proxy wars across the globe to protect its own filthy interests? But you — Italian politicians, European politicians — you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Scandalously, the obscenities are downplayed by our media without a blink — complicit silence and official narratives across the board.
I ask myself only how we can go on being indifferent to all of this. But above all, how we can keep accepting it.
From aircraft flying over Nazi extermination camps, you could barely make out what was happening below — and it was being concealed. But today, thanks to social media, the visual documents of the horror of Gaza, of the abuses in the West Bank, are not hidden. They are in front of everyone's eyes. These are documents, not gossip.
Alessandro Ippolito