The far-left pro-open borders association Baobab Experience has targetted populist anti-mass migration Interior Minister Matteo Salvini claiming he has been spreading “hate speech” with his rhetoric.
Earlier this week, the association claimed to have reported the League leader to the authorities for “the criminal dissemination of ideas based on ethnic or racial hatred”, Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.
The group said that because one of Salvini’s speeches had contained the phrase “… you have to go away” when referring to migrants, that the populist Interior Minister was “spreading ideas based on ethnic or racial hatred… Salvini foments an alarming social intolerance”, they said.
“Human rights cannot be put in check by men or political parties that aim to gain consensus on racist propaganda. Human rights are not a commodity of exchange but inviolable rights that no one can put questioned, not even the Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini and his party,” they added.
The issue of hate speech was also brought up by Italian Family Minister Lorenzo Fontana on Friday following an alleged racist attack against a female athlete of African descent which later turned out not to have a racial motive.
Minister Fontana said that the incident, which was widely reported as an example of a racist attack by the mainstream media, called into question the use of hate crime laws.
“The events of the past days make it increasingly clear that racism has become the ideological weapon of the globalists and their lackeys (some journalists and mainstream commentators, certain parties),” Fontana said.
He added that cries of racism were being used “to point the finger at the Italian people, falsely accusing them of every abomination, to make the majority of the citizens feel guilty for their vote and for the intolerable distance from the rhetoric of the groupthink”.
Instead, Fontana argued that the “real racism” in Italy focused on the anti-Italian attitudes of the media. “The reason? A people that do not think all the same way and that are aware and conscious of their own identity and history are scary to the globalists because they are not exploitable,” he noted.
The case against Interior Minister Salvini is not the first in which a far-left NGO has attempted to bring hate crime charges against a major politician.
Earlier this year in France, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra) brought charges of hate speech against right-wing politician Nicholas Dupont-Aignan for his comments referencing a “migrant invasion” of France. The Debout la France party leader was found guilty and given a suspended 5,000 euro fine.