The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday that Peter Martland of Cambridge University discovered that Mussolini was paid 100 pounds a week by Britain in 1917 – equal to about 6,000 pounds ($9,600) today.

The late Samuel Hoare, in charge of British agents in Rome at that time, revealed in his memoirs 55 years go that Mussolini was a paid agent. Martland found more details in Hoare’s papers, including that Mussolini also sent Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

“The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the 4 million pounds Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash,” The Guardian quoted Martland as saying.

The salary detail also was in historian Christopher Andrew’s newly published history of the British intelligence agency MI5, to which Martland contributed.

In 1917, the future Italian dictator was editor of the Il Popolo d’Italia newspaper, which campaigned to keep Italy on the allied side in the war.

A new exhibition by an Italian artist, which includes a praying Adolf Hitler, has sparked outrage from Jewish groups worldwide

jpost.com

If you look through the bars of the locked gate at 14 Prozna Street in Poland’s capital, a place that was the center of the Jewish ghetto 70 years ago, you may spot a small statue of a figure kneeling in prayer. That figure is Adolf Hitler.

“Amen,” a new exhibition by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which includes the praying Hitler, has caused outrage among the Jewish community in Poland as well as among Jewish and Catholic organizations worldwide that regard the exhibit as extremely offensive.

Cattelan, 52, an Italian-born sculptor living in New York, is known for his controversial work. One of the most famous is “La Nona Ora” (“The Ninth Hour”) depicting Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite.

Last month, Cattelan opened a show at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.

Most of the exhibits are displayed inside the museum, which is elsewhere in Warsaw. Only the praying Hitler has been placed in the middle of the former Jewish ghetto.

The Center for Contemporary Art has a description of Cattelan’s exhibition on its website: “In a Warsaw ravaged by the cataclysmic 20th century, Maurizio Cattelan’s works take on a particular dimension; they become an artistic commentary on the Catholic credo. What, in fact, does love thy enemy mean? What does forgive those who trespass against us mean? Evoking the traumas of history, they deal with memory and forgetfulness, good and evil.”

Cattelan’s decision to put the Hitler figure in the former Jewish ghetto has angered many in Poland, Jews and Christians alike. The organizers of the international film festival Human Docs being held in Poland and dedicated to human rights, have decided to hold a debate on the question “What’s Hitler up to in Poland? The moral impact of provocation in art.”

Historians and artists have tried to explain Cattelan’s decision to place the figure in one of the most sensitive places for Jews in Poland and to resolve the question of whether it is a legitimate art exhibit or an offensive provocation. Some said the kneeling figure appears to be vulnerable and ambiguous. On one hand, the hero is an icon of evil; on the other, the view of Hitler kneeling may evoke sympathy in the viewer. Viewing this object, they say, provokes mixed feelings.

A few days after the Hitler figure was placed in the yard of 14 Prozna Street, someone covered itsface and hands in an attempt to obscure its identity, perhaps fearing the reaction it would produce.

Another sign of the strong emotions the figure has raised is that, despite there being no public access to the exhibit, the museum’s management has mounted 24-hour security around it.

Maria Poprzecka, an art historian, said: “Cattelan is a provocateur, to some extent, but it is definitely not a blasphemer. He is one of a few artists who have won fame not because of their artistic activity, but because of scandal caused by politicians.

“In the exhibition ‘Amen’ he is trying to deal with such subjects as suffering, martyrdom and death. That’s the reason his other works present a crucified woman and a wounded horse.”

The controversial exhibit has aroused great interest, and hundreds arrive every day to look though the gate at the praying figure. Two women, both aged 81, read about the exhibit in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and came to see it with their own eyes. “We want to believe that the statue is intended to show Hitler repenting or apologizing for his evil actions,” they said.

Another passerby wondered: “Why did the artists decide to put a praying child here? Is he praying for those who lived here? It must be a Christian, because Jews do not pray on their knees.”

When she heard that the “child” was in fact Hitler, she said angrily: “Hitler did not have the right to ask for forgiveness.”

 

news.yahoo.com

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to four years in jail on Friday for tax fraud in connection with the purchase of broadcasting rights by his Mediasettelevision company.

The 76-year-old billionaire media magnate, who was convicted three times during the 1990s in the first degree before being cleared by higher courts, has the right to appeal the ruling two more times before the sentence becomes definitive.

That process is likely to be lengthy and he will not be jailed unless he loses the final appeal. Even then, because the crime was committed when an amnesty to prevent prison overcrowding was in place, the maximum possible jail time would be one year.

The ruling comes two days after Berlusconi confirmed he would not run in next year’s elections as the leader of his People of Freedom (PDL) party, ending almost 19 years as the dominant politician of the centre-right.

Milan judge Edoardo d’Avossa told a packed court that between 2000 and 2003, there had been “a very significant amount of tax evasion” and “an incredible mechanism of fraud” in place around the buying and selling of broadcast rights.

The court’s written ruling said Berlusconi showed a “natural capacity for crime”.

During a phone call to an evening news broadcast on one of his own channels, Berlusconi said there was no link between his decision pull out of politics and the Friday ruling, and slammed the court for being politically motivated.

He called the verdict “political and intolerable,” and said it showed Italy had become uncivilized, barbaric and was no longer a democracy.

Berlusconi lawyers Piero Longo and Niccolo Ghedini said the ruling was “totally divorced from all judicial logic”, adding that they hoped the “atmosphere” at the appeals courts would be different.

Berlusconi, one of Italy’s richest men, became prime minister for a second time in 2001 after winning a landslide election victory. Even while he was prime minister, he remained in effective charge of Mediaset even though he had handed over control of day-to-day operations, the court said.

The four-time prime minister and other Mediaset executives stood accused of inflating the price paid for TV rights via offshore companies controlled by Berlusconi and skimming off part of the money to create illegal slush funds.

The investigation focused on television and cinema rights that Berlusconi’s holding company Fininvest bought via offshore companies from Hollywood studios.

The court also ordered damages provisionally set at 10 million euros ($13 million) to be paid by Berlusconi and his co-defendants to tax authorities.

“POLITICAL HOMICIDE”

The flamboyant Berlusconi, who is still on trial in a separate prostitution case, resigned as prime minister a year ago as Italy faced a Greek-style debt crisis, handing the reins of government to economics professor Mario Monti.

Angelino Alfano, secretary of the PDL, said the ruling proved once again “judicial persecution” of the media magnate, while political rival Antonio Di Pietro, a former magistrate, hailed the decision, saying “the truth has been exposed”.

Should the ruling be confirmed on appeal, Berlusconi would also be forbidden from holding public office for five years, and from being a company executive for three years.

“This is not a sentence, but an attempt at political homicide,” Fabrizio Chicchito, the PDL’s chief whip in the Chamber of Deputies, said referring to the ban on holding office.

Now that Berlusconi has said he will pull out of politics, he may be focusing more on his business empire, which includes Mediaset, AC Milan soccer club, and Internet bank Mediolanum.

Shares in Mediaset, Italy’s biggest private broadcaster, fell as much as 3 percent after the ruling, and are down about 50 percent in the last year.

The broadcaster has been struggling against rivals like News Corp’s broadcaster Sky Italia and a host of online media, while its core advertising revenues are feeling the pinch of the recession.

The court acquitted Mediaset chairman and long-term Berlusconi friend Fedele Confalonieri, for whom prosecutors had sought a sentence of three years and four months.

Berlusconi has owned AC Milan since 1986 and the club have been European champions five times under his leadership. But the its fortunes have dipped in the past couple of seasons amid cost cutting, prompting repeated rumors of its possible sale.

He also is still on trial in the separate “Rubygate” case in which he is accused of paying for sex with a teenaged nightclub dancer when she was under 18 and thus too young to be paid legally as a prostitute. He denies the charges.

Italy’s highest court on Wednesday upheld guilty verdicts against 23 Americans for the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian Muslim cleric while he was in Milan, in the first criminal convictions for the US’s post-9/11 “extraordinary rendition” program.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US used extraordinary rendition to send suspects to countries that would torture them. In 2003, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian imam, was snatched from the streets of Milan by the CIA and flown to Egypt where he was tortured for seven months.

The American officials involved – 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot – were never actually extradicted to Italy and were tried in their absence. They were sentenced to seven years in jail, except former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was sentenced to nine years.

They are believed to be in the US and are not likely to serve their sentences. But if they travel to Europe they risk being arrested.

“We have one of the highest courts in a European country upholding convictions of CIA agents for really egregious human rights violations,” Amnesty International’s Julia Hall said.

“Our hope is that the United States would… begin to cooperate with people who are trying to reveal the truth about what happened during the Bush era.”

jta.org

After Toulouse attacks, Italy cannot cry and forget, Italian Integration Minister tells Jewish leaders in Rome.The Italian government plans to introduce new legislation to beef up measures countering anti-Semitism and hate speech in cyberspace.

Italian Integration Minister Andrea Riccardi told Jewish leaders at Rome’s main synagogue during a meeting Monday that he was working with the country’s justice and interior ministers to “give a clear response to those who disseminate hatred via the Internet.”

Riccardi said he planned to introduce measures that could allow the postal police to block racist websites and also target regular visitors “to these shameful web pages.”

The increase in the number of websites with racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic content, he said, “requires the government to update the measures currently in force.”

The government, Riccardi said, wanted to send “a strong message: We want to intervene. We have this responsibility, particularly after the attack in Toulouse.” He was referring to the March terror attacks in France that killed three students and a teacher at a Jewish school, in addition to two Muslim soldiers.

“You can’t just cry after every massacre and then forget the tears,” he said during the roundtable discussion. “Tears have to become concrete commitments to fight against the sowers of hatred.”

At the same meeting, Rome Jewish Community President Riccardo Pacifici called on Parliament to take steps to pass a law banning Holocaust denial.


Negotiations between Israel and the Holy See on the fiscal status of Catholic institutions in Israel seems to make no distinction between the two sides of the Green Line.

ed note–as much as the church in the person of Benedict XVI think that by giving in to Israel’s demands of recognizing Jerusalem as part of Israel, all he is doing is setting himself up for an assassination later at the hands of ‘AY-RAB’ terrorists in order to bring about the ultimate ‘clash of civilizations’.

Haaretz

The draft of an economic agreement between Israel and the Vatican contains no distinction between sovereign Israel and the territories occupied in 1967. The lack of a preamble containing such a distinction is at the center of heightened tension between Palestinian Christian denominations and the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Vatican.

Palestinian sources told Haaretz that the agreement meant indirect recognition of Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and of the imposition of Israeli law in part of the West Bank.

France, which has special standing as custodian of holy Christian sites and Christian communities, is also said to be concerned at the apparent latent recognition of the annexation and the economic implications for the communities, and particularly its Christian institutions in the country and the people who are part of them.

However, a well-informed source told Haaretz “there is nothing in the agreement to harm the rights of the Palestinians,” and that the agreement was made with the sovereign State of Israel in its internationally recognized identity, and therefore there was no need for a clarifying preamble.

The Bilateral Permanent Working Commission between the Holy See and the State of Israel is to meet in Rome on Monday and Tuesday. They are to continue talks that took place in Jerusalem last week on matters of disagreement.

Negotiations toward an agreement on the fiscal status of Catholic institutions in Israel have been underway for 13 years, 11 more than the original two years allocated in what is known as the “fundamental agreement.”The signing of that accord by Israel and the Vatican on December 30, 1993, led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel.
Over the past few months, NGOs and members of various Christian denominations in Israel have begun to receive details about the draft agreement, which has been presented to them as a lapse and a failure by the Vatican. Haaretz was told that the people who informed Palestinian Christians and NGOs of their concerns preferred not to approach the Palestinian Authority immediately because they did not believe the PA could act on its own in this diplomatic and legal realm.

Members of the Christian community in Jerusalem and the West Bank have held a number of emergency meetings recently and have contacted the Vatican to make clear that the agreement under discussion is not merely a fiscal and a technical agreement, and that a lack of distinction between occupied territory and Israeli territory could have severe implications.

The legal agreement, known as the “Legal Personality Agreement” was signed on November 10, 1997, but was never ratified by Israel.

Meetings on fiscal issues began in 1999 and have still not concluded. They relate to property rights, actions involving property by church bodies, and Issues of taxation and tax exemption. The parties decided to exclude a list, known as “Schedule 1,” of institutions on both sides of the Green Line from the text of that agreement, with regard to which they felt they would not be able to resolve differences soon. Among the sites and institutions on the list are those in which ownership and possession are in dispute, such as properties that Israel has expropriated or whose owners were declared absentees and the Church wants to take possession of again, or sites that Israel has declared open to the public and the Church believes should remain in the private sphere.

A draft of the agreement, dated January 25, 2012 which Haaretz has obtained, does appear to address Israeli law in a general way, without relating to or alluding to Israel’s status as an occupying power according to international law. That is also the case with regard to sites in East Jerusalem. A Palestinian lawyer who reflects the position of the Palestinian Christian denominations with regard to the agreement now being formulated told Haaretz that in bilateral agreements with Israel there is a clause defining what is meant by “Israel” from which a distinction clearly emerges between the two sides of the Green Line. For example, the bilateral agreement for the avoidance of double taxation between Israel and Switzerland, a clarification states: “The term Israel means the ‘State of Israel,’ and when used in a geographical sense, the term ‘Israel’ includes its continental shelf and other maritime areas over which it exercises sovereign rights and jurisdiction according to international law” (that is, as an occupying power). Accordingly, the Palestinian lawyer said, the term “Israeli law” without any kind of codicil or restriction, is a dangerous precedent and implies recognition of the annexation of East Jerusalem and Israeli civil rule over areas of the West Bank (where a number of the sites on Schedule 1 are located).

A well-informed source rejected this interpretation and told Haaretz that the agreement contains no geographical reference to any institution it mentions and there are no negotiations underway over the status of institutions in East Jerusalem. He said the agreement recognizes that “the Vatican has some obligations but [also] some immunities because of the special character of the Church and religion.”

A Foreign Ministry official who is not familiar with the draft said that the Vatican’s position is clear and is known to the ministry, and has not changed: The Vatican does not recognize Israeli sovereignty beyond the Green Line.

Ekemeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which has 57 member-countries, and who was informed of concerns over the agreement, wrote a letter to Archbishop Dominque Mamberti, who is the secretary for relations with states of the Holy See.

The archbishop answered in early May that “the eventual agreement will not represent a change in the position of the Holy See.”

Mamberti also wrote: “The Church, with particular attention to fiscal questions, is asking the State of Israel to treat her institutions in a fair manner, wherever the State of Israel exercised its authority de facto without taking into consideration or determining whether it does so as a sovereign state or as an occupying state, thus without entering into the political aspect of the question.”

Mamberti wrote that the Church remains “extraneous to all merely temporal or political conflicts…unless the contending parties or the international institutions make concordant appeal to its mission of peace.”

This is the response the members of the Christian denominations in the country heard, which only increased their concerns over what they see as erosion of the Church’s position.

A number of Palestinian Christians have complained that the Church and the spiritual authority of the Vatican should have taken into consideration the special situation of Christians under Israeli occupation – and it has not done so. As a state, they say, the Vatican is obligated to international law, and it did not take this into account in formulating the accord with Israel.

The draft to be discussed over the next few days has undergone changes since January 2012, but Palestinian sources believe that these changes are not dramatic. In fact, the lack of distinction between the two sides of the Green Line was already in the legal agreement (which was not ratified).

Rabbi David Rosen, the international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, who worked for the establishment of diplomatic ties, viewed precisely this as an achievement for Israel. In an article published in 1999, he wrote “the Catholic Church thereby not only reaffirmed its recognition of the sovereignty of the Jewish people in its historic homeland, but also registered and placed its institutions under Israel’s legal authority and protection [including its]…institutions in East Jerusalem.

Religion News Service

By Alessandro Speciale