The agency advertised for "500 pleasing girls between 18 and 35 years of age, at least one metre 70 high." The women were asked to dress elegantly but soberly, with both miniskirts and cleavage-revealing decolletage firmly banned.
Role models? Gaddafi brought his contingent of female bodyguards to the event.
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi invited hundreds of attractive Italian "hostesses" to a villa in Rome last night for an evening at which he urged them to convert to Islam and told them Christianity was based on a fraud, Italian reports said today.
The Libyan leader is in Italy to attend a United Nations summit on world food security. Reports said that Colonel Gaddafi's aides phoned an agency which provides elegantly dressed young women to act as hospitality staff at events.
The agency was asked to send 500 women to the residence of Hafed Gaddur, the Libyan ambassador in Rome, where Colonel Gaddafi is staying, over a series of evenings during the three day summit.
The agency advertised for "500 pleasing girls between 18 and 35 years of age, at least one metre 70 high." The women were asked to dress elegantly but soberly, with both miniskirts and cleavage-revealing decolletage firmly banned.
Those who replied were offered €60 (£53) to attend an evening at the villa for an "exchange of opinions" and to "receive a Libyan gift", which turned out to be a copy of the Koran. They were given nothing to eat or drink, however.
Paola Lo Mele, a journalist with the Italian news agency ANSA who posed as a hostess to enter the villa, said the 200 women who attended yesterday had to pass through metal detectors, before being ushered by white turbanned Libyan staff into a "sumptuous drawing room" with white and red divans arranged in a semi-circle in front of Colonel Gaddafi. He arrived an hour late. He sat next to an interpreter and two of his renowned female guards.
The Libyan leader said it was "untrue that Islam is against women" according to Corriere della Sera. He urged the women to convert to Islam, pointing out that whereas there were four different Gospels, there was only one Koran.
He then observed - to "general incredulity" - that Christ had not died on the Cross and been resurrected, as Christians believe, because the person crucified had been "a look-alike" who was substituted for the real Jesus.
"Convert to Islam. Jesus was sent to the Jews, not for you. Mohammed, on the other hand, was sent for all human beings," he reportedly said. "Whoever goes in a different direction than Mohammed is wrong. God's religion is Islam, and whoever follows a different one, in the end, will lose," Colonel Gaddafi added, according to La Stampa.
He said women must do only "what their physical condition allows them", and spoke about the role that women played during the Second World War. He claimed that in the West women "have often been used as pieces of furniture, changed whenever it pleases men. And this is an injustice." He then invited the women to travel to the Islamic holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
As the soiree broke up at midnight he handed out copies of the Koran, his own Green Book on the Libyan revolution, and a pamphlet entitled How to be a Muslim.
The city council in Gorantalo, central Indonesia, has ordered its Muslim civil servants to read the Koran - Islam's holy book - every Friday. Gorontalo mayor Adhan Dambea said Saturday that he was not yet satisfied with the implementation of his instructions.
"Some civil servants are still unable to read the Koran fluently," he said. Dambea said his administration would provide religious teachers to improve the civil servants' ability to read the Koran.
However, he promised that public service would not be affected by the new Koran reading activity in his administration.
Italy's interior minister Roberto Maroni from the anti-immigrant Northern League party said he would not back a proposal to teach Islam in Italian schools to improve integration.
"The Northern League is absolutely against the proposal of an hour of Islamic religion in Italian schools," Maroni told the commericial TV programme Mattino 5.
The proposal was put forward by the deputy minister of economic development Adolfo Urso.
"While the hour of Catholic religion represents an entity, the Church, which has a hierarchy and contains clear, well defined values that can be conveyed, Islam on the other hand is a completely different case," Maroni said.
"The imam can freely interpret the Koran, there is not a series of tenets, there is not a clear message to convey...If the proposal served to improve integration, we would be all in agreement, but this is clearly the wrong way to do it," Maroni.
ROME, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Italy's defence minister warned the country's Muslims to stop further "provocations" after thousands held prayers in public squares in Milan during pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past week.
Ignazio La Russa, from the right-wing National Alliance, said he did not oppose protests or want to deny anyone the right to pray, but called the public prayers a challenge to peace.
"I say enough of the provocations of Islamists in Milan," he told Il Giornale newspaper on Sunday. "In Milan, a legitimate demonstration ended in a deliberately provocative mosque under the open sky."
Thousands of Muslims knelt with their heads bowed to the ground in prayer before Milan's central train station in one of several pro-Palestinian protests on Saturday.
A week ago, Muslims held prayers in front of Milan's central cathedral, angering right-wing politicians in the overwhelming Catholic country who called it an affront to Christianity.
Muslim leaders later apologised, saying no offence was intended. There are about 1 million Muslims in Italy, making up almost two percent of the population.
"What would have happened if a group of Christians gathered together to pray with a rosary before Mecca? They probably would have been stoned," said La Russa, who described himself as a practicising Catholic who attends Mass almost every Sunday.
Milan's deputy mayor issued a similar warning to Muslims, saying four protests in seven days was too much.
"Enough with pro-Hamas marches now," said Riccardo De Corato. "Milan is not a province of Gaza and has no intention of reluctantly instituting this type of 'Gaza Saturdays.'"
Around 500 Tamils took part in the Pongku Thamizh (Tamil uprising) rally in Milan in Northern Italy this summer.
Anti-immigration Northern League Party of Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is seeking a moratorium on the building of mosques as a preventative measure to future terrorist attacks.
The demand for blocking mosque building comes as a reaction to the recent arrest of two men suspected for planning attacks in Milan, Italy's northern financial hub.
La Stampa, a local Italian newspaper quoted Maroni on Thursday stating that "Islamist terrorism" runs deep in Italy and must be stamped out.
"These arrests show that Islamist terrorism is entrenched in Italy, and that we must be vigilant," Maroni told the paper.
"Unfortunately it is not easy to distinguish between places of worship and those that recruit terrorists and finance the planning of attacks," he added.
Ally of the conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Northern League began a motion in the lower house of parliament banning the construction of places of worship for Muslims and cultural centers in Italy.
The motion comes as a preliminary step to curb the increasing number of mosques until parliament passes an official law on their establishment.
A Roma (Gypsy) woman begging in Milan. Recently, the Italian government decided to fingerprint all Gypsies, including children. What began as a targeted campaign against Muslims is now spreading to become a larger, white supremacist movement under color of a Fascist political takeover.
Salaam writes: Gabriele Marranci is an anthropologist who was born and raised in Italy. He is currently doing research in Singapore, but he frequently visits and is closely attuned through family and friends to Italy. Link to complete essay after excerpt.
Gabriele Marranci writes: In Italy, in a new and unrecognisable Italy, everybody is losing. Yet only few Italians seem to notice this. Italy is today probably the most concerning and least friendly country of the EU, marked by the return, from bottom-up, of a fascination with a defeating, and defeated, past called Fascism. Notwithstanding the similarity in the terminology, dress styles, and references (the Lega Nord, the most social nationalist party of Italy, has 'green shirts' only because it cannot refer to brown ones), this revival of fascism is not like the historical one.
The progressive stages of xenophobia that has marked the home of pizza and 'bel canto' began with the fear of Muslims and their cultures. The great majority of Italians, though not hating Muslims, have formed chimerias about Islam. Fallaci helped after September 11 to develop them from 'concerns' and 'fear' of a different unknown religion, to hate for whomever practiced that religion. She wished to bomb mosques, or at least one of them. Although Fallaci and others (in particular within the Lega Nord ) were responsible for, not always cleverly disguised, ideological incitement toward violence, there were other individuals who decided (as usually happens) to make real, what Fallaci and others fantasised about.
The reality is that Italians, the majority of them, do not care. Too busy with economic issues and social instability, endemic unemployment, workers alienation and unbelievable exploitation (my sister had to work without salary for months as 'probation' before she was granted a temporary contract of three months), the majority of Italians remain silent; a minority celebrated the beginning of the new crusades, and a few others, often from the radical left, protested. Lega Nord, with the European MP Mario Borghezio took part in the planned, but than forbidden, Nazi event against Islam organized in Cologne. An event that even Robert Spencer felt the need to distance himself from and rejected.
Lega Nord is a social nationalist, populist party, and a dangerous one, whose main force comes from the fear of others and the idea that immigrants can take over the white-celtic man. Vulgar in its language, reminiscent in its populism of Fascism, Lega Nord, mixes a fake Celticism (to replace Aryanism) with a new idea of the- again fake and historically nonexistent- superior nation, the Padania, Lega Nord shifts recently from targeting mainly Muslims to all not-white (hence non-Celtic) foreigners.
Italy today is experiencing an unprecedented (and unusual in its violence even during historical fascism before the German-imposed racial laws) racism and xenophobia. So unexpected and violent has been the phenomenon that even a post-Fascist like Gianfranco Fini (today president of the Parliament) had to raise the alarm. There is no area of Italian civil society which has not been affected by this new wind of xenophobia and violent racism.
Recently during the match for the World Cup qualification in Sofia, the Italian supporters started to invoke the 'Duce', sung 'Fascist songs' and attacked the hosts because they were 'communist', despite the historical changes in Bulgaria. Children are not spared from this white supremacist new culture: finger prints for little Roma (Gypsy) even when they are Italian, vandalism of children's work representing their perception of multiculturalism, attempts to form 'migrants only' classrooms and impose an 'Italian-ness test' for entry into Italian schools on children of legal migrants. I have been informed of racism within school and even Sunday Church schools.
What began as a hate for a religion, Islam, has moved on to race, ethnicity and old fashioned hatred of different skin colours.
Milan, Italy, (ANSA): A landmark Italian trial into the 2003 CIA abduction of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr from Milan went ahead Thursday after the judge rejected a suspension request from Italy's former top military spy.
The request was presented by the defence team of Niccolo' Pollari, the former head of Italian military intelligence SISMI, which is now known as AISE.
Pollari argued the trial should be halted pending the result of a suit filed by Silvio Berlusconi's government against the judge.
The judge, Oscar Magi, ruled that there was no compelling reason for the trial to be halted.
However, he ordered that 20 prosecution witnesses, mainly SISMI agents, should be heard behind closed doors. Earlier, arguing against the suspension request, Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro highlighted the importance of the trial, the keenly awaited first judicial examination of the controversial US practice of 'extraordinary rendition'. ''We have a trial that the Council of Europe and the European Parliament want us to carry out,'' Spataro said.
The Council of Europe, Europe's human rights body, has called Nasr's case a ''perfect example of rendition''.
Nine Italians including Pollari are on trial with 26 CIA agents for Nasr's abduction.
Nasr, the former head of Milan's main mosque, disappeared from the northern city on February 17, 2003.
Prosecutors say he was snatched by a team of CIA operatives with SISMI's help and whisked off to a NATO base in Ramstein, Germany, on board a Gulfstream jet belonging to the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
Dr Marranci writes: One of the features of the hot Italian summers, the so called 'vu cumprà' (literally 'do you want to buy?') were indefatigably patrolling the empty streets of Italian cities or the busy shores of the increasingly expensive (and restrictive) bathing establishments.The so called ' vu cumprà' are in majority Senegalese immigrants, whom use the summer to sell their, often fake, products while looking for a more remunerative job, or while trying to collect enough money to send to their families for the winter. It is not a nice work to do, particularly in a country such as Italy that is facing a very aggressive anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim campaign. To be Senegalese means to be both.
At the same time, we have to recognise that for the Italians left in the boiling metropolises, because of the economic crisis, or for those who have used their few savings to have some relaxing days on our ever-busy beaches, the continuous assault of the vendors, often offering nothing more than junk, is stressful. The situation helps to form stereotypes and increase tensions on both sides.
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In Senegal unemployment is very high and the country is suffering, as many of its neighbours, political and economic crises. Politics in Senegal have been marked in the last few years by both hopeful optimism and disillusions, often expressed through music. This has pushed many young people to look for a better life, or an escape from the intolerable misery that they and their family suffer, by migrating towards Europe, and in particular Italy, both as legal and increasingly as illegal migrants. Often the result is tragic, with many losing their lives to the sea and their family being left without support or hope.
Nonetheless, it is not just politics or bad African economy and management which is creating one of the worst crises in Senegal. The European Union, and among them countries such as Spain, Italy, and Portugal, are responsible for the increasing hardship that the Senegalese people endure, the increase of illegal immigrants, as well as the death of many of them.
To understand the dynamics, we need to know that one of the main dietary necessities for the Senegalese people, and one of the few proteins, is fish. Fish is essential to the survival of Senegal and its people. Until recently, fishing in Senegal was a rewarding experience and families could both sell their products at the markets and provide lunch and dinner for their own family with the classic dish of very piquant rice and fish.
However, since the year 2000, Senegalese fishermen have noticed a drastic reduction in the number of fish available. The reason behind this depletion of fish stocks is that the Senegalese government has agreed with the European Union a deal in which large European trawlers are permitted to exploit Senegalese fishing resources with techniques and methodologies which are not even allowed in European waters.
