Italy Considers Legalizing Vigilante Groups
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Nick Pisa, London Telegraph, November 10, 2008
Unauthorised patrols of several northern Italian cities have been underway for the last year and authorities have turned a blind eye to them as concerned locals fight back against rising crime rates.
Under the proposals by the anti-immigration Northern League, the vigilante patrols would have the backing of the local police. The plan is now to be considered by the Italian Upper House.
Another controversial proposal by the Northern League the introduction of a referendum before a mosque or other place of worship is built.
The League is part of centre right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition. Mr Berlusconi was elected on a tough law and order campaign.
Northern League MP Mario Borghezio said: “Thanks to the initiatives of the Northern League these ronde (vigilante) patrols will soon be working with the forces of law and order.
“Now all honest citizens will no longer feel that they have to hand over the areas where they live to criminals, drug dealers and prostitutes. It’s a very proud day.”
The Northern League, is led by firebrand Umberto Bossi, who once said the Italian navy should shell boats carrying immigrants. In April’s general election it doubled its national vote to more than 8 per cent.
The League capitalised on the fear of immigration with its election posters which showed an American Indian in a feathered headdress, with a caption saying: “They suffered immigration: Now they live in reserves.”
Many of the vigilante groups are based in the Veneto region which has a high proportion of Muslims and the outcry against the building of mosques has been stronger there than anywhere in Italy.
Last year the League’s Roberto Calderoli suggested a ‘pig day’ against new mosques across Italy. The idea was that a pig should be taken to any land where Muslims proposed to construct a mosque.
He said:”We will walk up and down on the land where they want to build, after which it will be considered infected and no longer suitable.”
The League has also proposed that no mosque should be able to have a minaret or loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer, and sermons must be in Italian, not Arabic.
Given that many of the one million Muslims who are in Italy live in areas with a heavy Northern League influence, if passed the legislation is almost certain to mean no new mosques.
(Posted on November 13, 2008)
Comments
“The League capitalised on the fear of immigration with its election posters which showed an American Indian in a feathered headdress, with a caption saying: “They suffered immigration: Now they live in reserves.”
A very effective poster because it’s true.
Posted by at 7:44 PM on November 13
No new mosques? GASP! They might actually be forced to build their new mosques in places like Egypt or Algeria. What a novel concept.
Posted by jewamongyou at 8:10 PM on November 13
“Vigilante” has become a bad word in the English lexicon, but the fact remains vigilantism only flourishes in societies where law and order are breaking down.
What is happening now in Italy is not without precedent in American history. From the Regulator Movement of late 18th-century South Carolina, where citizens (in the absence of any government law enforcement) took it upon themselves to apprehend bandits and try them in courts of their own creation
http://www.bartleby.com/65/re/Regulato.html
to the citizen’s committee of the late Anthony Imperiale, that protected Newark, NJ’s White North Ward from the thuggery of the so-called Black Panther Party during the turbulent 1960s
http://www.politickernj.com/post-riot-community-council-election-10264
freedom-loving, law-abiding citizens have seldom hesitated to resort to vigilantism when the need arises.
What leftists fail to understand (or don’t want to admit) is that in a healthy society vigilantes would be unnecessary, since the state would carry out its primary function of enforcing law and order. Therefore, when vigilantism is the order of the day, something is seriously wrong with that society on the government level.
Posted by at 9:07 PM on November 13
The first good defense of a country since 9/11. Go Italy!
If USA had good sense this would have been exercised immediately after 9/11. V
Posted by at 11:05 PM on November 13
What Italy is doing is merely, on a small scale and to a limited extent, what has been an essential tradition in American history, viz. not vigilante activity, but what has been known for centuries as the foundation of a free republic, the citizen militia. Ultimately the only possible way to prevent the permeant destruction of the American Republic would be for the state militias to once again be reestablished, as they uniquely combine local government with military power, the only combination capable of resisting the many forces which promote the transformation of the American republic into a completely federalized central state authority which recognizes no other and destroys the very notion of state government which is the foundation principle of the American republican system.
Clearly, recent American history has been an uninterrupted process of greater and greater centralization of state power on the federal or central government level, culminating in the current situation in which the various states exist at the whim of the federal power’s largess. This is the complete antithesis of what the founders wished to and did establish through the constitutional convention and the creation of the final US Constitution which regarded a “well regulated militia as the only sure foundation of a free state”.
The concept of the state militia was always the foundation of the legitimacy of the individual states and with its collapse we have witnessed a revolutionary transformation of our form of government, beginning with the drastic, unconstitutional moves towards centralization by the Lincoln administration and culmination in today’s farce of a mulatto, marxist parading as “president-elect” of the United States.
Obama’s proposed “youth corp” of volunteers is little more than a ruse for a new generation of “brown shirts” or Soviet “new men” formed along the principles of the Checka. Anyone who fails to recognize this basic truth is deluding himself, and there are, indeed, many deluded Americans today—-They are the same “Americans” who will loose something which they have never really knew,. a much despised feature of what was once American life and for which millions of Americans have died over the many decades of our nation’s existence,viz., something once known as “liberty”.
It is a thing which the current crop of Obamatrons would not recognize if placed in front o their noses, and which, if recognized, would inspire only horror in their pathetic, PC filled “minds”. We have certainly come a long way from the days of American liberty, a concept which was forever crippled by the North’s unjustifiable war of aggression against the Confederacy in 1860, a date which will forever live in “infamy” to those who believe in the original constitutional republic of the founders.
Posted by at 11:24 PM on November 13
I recommend making some of these posters of our own here. It might make the electorate think a bit before voting for another open borders type…..Of course we had two of those this time so it didn’t matter.
Posted by at 1:55 AM on November 14
What’s the difference between a Scruff Magruff-style “neighborhood watch” and “vigilantes”? The color of the criminal’s, I guess.
Only when whites fight back against non-white crime are crime watch patrols considered “vigilantes” by the media. When Philadelphia announced its intention to have 10,000 black men patrolling crime-ridden areas, no one screamed “Vigilantes!!”
In fact, the media was very postitive towards the idea.
[Unsurprisingly, few volunteers showed up, see http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/07/falling_short_o.php}
Posted by Jill at 2:17 AM on November 14
Harsh perhaps, but necessary.
As another poster said, vigelantism only exists where the government is failing to do what it is supposed to do. If they were doing their jobs properly, there would be no need for it.
Thus, its existence is an embarassment to the government because it points out the government’s failure to be effective.
Posted by voter at 9:15 AM on November 14
I was recently in Italy. The Italians are serious about this. And the police do turn the other way. Avanti il Popolo!
Posted by at 11:38 AM on November 14
San Francisco was a crime ridden out of control barbarian encampment from 1848 to about 1855 when the vigalantes were formed. They hunted down the worst of the criminals and hung them. They established curfews and stopped suspicious looking persons.
Within a year law and order reigned.
One thing about Italy. They leave the country or move across the country for a job, but they very seldom move within an area. Many live in homes their family has owned for a couple hundred years. They generally don’t pick up and move to the suburbs when their neighborhood gets bad.
They form self defense groups. What they are doing is an old Italian custom.
Posted by at 12:18 PM on November 14
It’s good to see Italy turning the corner. Italy is truely one of the bright spots in Europe. Viva Italia! Send the illegal invaders packing!
Posted by Sardonicus at 11:48 AM on November 17
The existing mosques need to be destroyed and the Muslims driven out of Italy. Muslims contribute nothing positive whatsoever to the West and they must be confined to their own countries at all costs…
Posted by at 8:19 AM on November 19