I have posted here before about Italy’s Forconi (the pitchforks), the latest protest group to emerge in the euro zone (where the crisis is, of course, over), but I missed this less-than-delightful detail, which was reported last month in the International Business Times:
Italy’s Jewish communities have hit back at the spokesman of the anti-austerity Pitchfork movement, who described Italy as being “enslaved by wealthy Jewish bankers”.
The Pitchfork protestors’ spokesman, Andrea Zunino, who made the anti-Semitic comments, represents thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets in towns and cities across Italy to voice anger at austerity measures….
Earlier, Zunino had claimed: “We want government resignation. We want sovereignty over Italy which is now the slave of bankers, like the Rothschild: it is odd that five or six among the world’s richest people are Jews.”
The Pitchfork movement, which started with a loose group of Sicilian farmers concerned about rising taxes and cuts to agricultural state funds, has evolved into a nationwide umbrella grouping of truckers, small businessman, the unemployed, low-paid workers, rightwing extremists and football supporters….
One of the justifications for the introduction of the single currency was (ludicrously and insultingly) that it would help ensure that Europe would never again revert to the horrors of the twentieth century past.
Awkward, that.