DDL Delrio: an anti-democratic law conceived in the Democratic Party

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The Bill signed by Senator Graziano Delrio e co-firmato da più di una decina di senatori del Partito democratico italiano rappresenta un tentativo di tappare la bocca, per legge, a quei milioni di italiani che in questi due anni hanno protestato contro il genocidio del popolo palestinese risalendo alle cause profonde dello stesso: la Culture coloniale e razzista, della quale il sionismo rappresenta una propagaggine; la volontà scientifica di annichilimento di un popolo, che segna tutti i genocidi della Storia a cominciare, in ordine non cronologico, da quello contro la popolazione ebraica in Europa durante gli anni ’30 e ’40 del secolo scorso; la battaglia tecnologica e tecnocratica per instaurare nel Ventunesimo secolo nuove forme di autoritarismo di stampo progressista nella tecnologia, nazifascista nei valori e nei metodi, travestite da democrazia nella propaganda.

The PD senators who signed that law constitute a faction., as we immediately pointed out, within the parliamentary group; their actions cannot be dismissed as a “personal initiative” and our hope for the Democratic Party's members is that they succeed in creating enough opposition to get the law withdrawn. We don't know if they'll be able to do it, the party's cumbersome mechanisms don't help them. But we know it would be the right thing to do.

Even out of respect for other representatives of the PD, such as the delegation led by Laura Boldrini che è stata recentemente in West Bank, e che è stata direttamente involved in the blind violence of the Israeli army against Palestinians. Violence that unfolded while at the same time their party comrade – let's say colleague Piero Fassino, from Tel Aviv, praised Israel as an “open, free, and democratic society”.”. Contraddizioni così stridenti che è impossibile non chiedersi se davvero sia da applaudire la vocazione “testardamente unitaria” di Elly Schlein e non, piuttosto, da ritenere una strategia di soffocamento della dialettica politica – in the name of governability – including when positions become irreconcilable with each other.

The chariot of Israelisation

The senators who signed that law represent the rush to jump on the regime's bandwagon. Tribal and neo-archaic which is already taking shape on the world stage, and which begins precisely with the State of Israel: a tribe-state, based on racial supremacism, whose population is entirely militarised, in which the concept of civil society has been nullified in favour of a deep identity-based adherence to the country's mythologico-existential narrative, and in which colonial capitalism carves out spaces through the destruction and annihilation of all human communities that impede its progress.

Since we were born, on this publication we have denounced that what we are living in this era is The Israeli-isation of society and the shift from the concept of citizenship to tribalism.

Il disegno di legge Delrio rappresenta un ulteriore impedimento all’esercizio della cittadinanza, giacché censura in quanto “antisemita” l’esercizio di una lunga serie di diritti garantiti tuttora – fino a quando? chiediamocelo – dalla Constitution italiana. Il diritto di espressione del pensiero, la libertà di stampa, la libertà accademica, il diritto all’espressione della personalità umana, il diritto al dissenso e alla critica.

How does it do it? By submitting the expression of thought, as incredible as it may seem given that the proposal comes from a senator of the Party democratic, precisely at those “authorisations and censorships” that for our founding fathers and mothers represented the very emblem of fascism. Our “never again”.

The concrete reality of antisemitism

Let's see how. The Bill begins with a preamble regarding the rise in antisemitism worldwide, without framing it within a much broader and more general issue, namely the increase in racism worldwide, overall. As evidenced by dozens of Report and studies in different countries, including Italy where some government bodies are tasked with systematising racist hatred every day. Racial persecutions are growing overall, also due to the increasingly uncontrolled power in the hands of supremacist bodies, when not directly inspired by Nazism or Fascism.

The issue of rising antisemitism, if no mention is made – and in law, none is made – of the rise of Islamophobia and many other forms of racism, thus becomes a straw man argument, which only serves the interests of a closed and in turn racist identitarianism, as it continues to separate Jewish belonging from the rest of humanity. Not to mention that, upon careful analysis of the forms of antisemitism analysed by the CDEC (Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation), analysis which we already realised on Kritica several months ago, the count of antisemitic incidents also included cases that were fabricated, such as the (invented and disproven) assault on the Bologna synagogue on 12 February 2025.

Remembering this means returning to the bare facts. Not to deny that anti-Jewish hatred is spreading in society, or that it is being rekindled where it had never truly died down; this hatred exists, it expresses itself online, and those who defend the Palestinian people from genocide are not immune to it. The case of Cecilia Parodi's conviction for having directed antisemitic remarks against Senator Liliana Segre, he probably represents its peak, to date.

The normalisation of genocide

To remember this means to state that, as we have often done on these pages, the normalisation of a genocide taking place live on television for years and years is now a licence for the normalisation of all forms of violence; a collapse, legitimated and permitted, of a taboo that, after having violated it with the most brutal slaughter in History – the Second World War – the victorious powers had sought to re-establish through international law and through democracy. But they had done so by leaving wide loopholes for violating their own rules, whenever they deemed fit. And the State of Israel, the apartheid and the colonial occupation of Palestine, have represented since 1948 that door left ajar by democracies to the denial of their own principles, should they have wished to.

Today it should be clear that that door is wide open, Pandora's box has been opened, and as concepts like “forced conscription” and “ethnic cleansing” are being re-normalised, the impunity of the strongest is also being re-normalised. And the fact that it is the strongest who dictates what can and cannot be said.

Le contraddizioni dell’International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

The Delrio law is a blatant attempt to allow the strongest to dictate what can and cannot be said. The definition of antisemitism drawn up by the IHRA – International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – represents a decalogue that, as its own author stated, once placed in the hands of the strongest, it offers them a cudgel to be used to censor opinions and ideas that have full legitimacy based on freedom of expression as a universally declared right.

C’è un elemento su cui la definizione di antisemitismo dell’IHRA insiste molto, ed è che sarebbero antisemite “Le manifestazioni che possono avere come obiettivo lo Stato di Israele perché concepito come una collettività ebraica”. Se non fosse grottesco e molto amaro, sarebbe quasi divertente constatare, qui, che in base a questa definizione – stilata nella plenaria dell’IHRA del 2016 – a costituire una espressione di antisemitismo è la stessa Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People 2018, which enshrines the nature of Israel as a “Jewish state”.

Indeed, if the IHRA states that “manifestations that can be aimed at the State of Israel because it is conceived as a Jewish collectivity” are antisemitic, what more blatant manifestation of this is there than a law that actually sanctions it? Under the Delrio Bill, if taken seriously, the publication of the Basic Law of Israel – along with a host of other Zionist manifestations – would become punishable and censurable, as it not only draws that parallel deemed antisemitic but has even made it law.

The IHRA definition carries this paradox with it: those who drafted and approved it did not consider that the antisemitic radicalisation, as they themselves stigmatise it, namely the tracing of an adhesive coincidence – what in English they call conflation – from Judaism and Israelism would have been carried forward in the first place within Israel itself, by Zionists.

Not coming to terms with what Israel would become

At least a couple of articles of the IHRA's working definition opened the door to censorship from the outset, so they were and are fully debatable. But if the definition has become effectively censorious and extremist, it is first and foremost because Israel itself has sharpened and taken to its extreme consequences its racist, Jewish supremacist connotation. And that is why so many of us have been saying for a long time that the principal factory for producing antisemitism in the world is Israel; and it is intentional, because it intentionally attributes the actions of a terrorist state to the entire Jewish world, and claims to act on behalf of Jews, when it acts and speaks only and solely on behalf of the Zionists.

Should the law ever pass, the Zionists themselves might often end up sanctioned for antisemitism, therefore. We wonder if Delrio and his senators have calculated this.

Logical fallacies

The most problematic and unacceptable articles within the IHRA definition are two. The first defines antisemitism also as “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

This is a serious logical fallacy, because it states that the State of Israel in itself constitutes the “right to self-determination of the Jewish people”, when in fact numerous components of the Jewish world have always denied the State of Israel any right to represent them as a people; and, even more seriously, the article censures the right to observe that, in the realisation of this “existence” – a term inadequate in itself to speak of a State, which does not represent a subject, let alone a living subject, but rather constitutes the composition of numerous subjects – expressions of racism may have occurred.

However, in the concrete manifestation of the right to self-determination, many peoples give rise to expressions of racism. Even in Rojava, the Kurds, in establishing their administration, have produced expressions of structural racism nei confronti dei siriani. E se vogliamo dirla tutta, c’era razzismo e c’è ancora persino nel modo in cui i catalani concepiscono la loro indipendenza dalla Spagna. Quindi qui la definizione dell’IHRA contraddice sé stessa. Da una parte insiste che le critiche rivolte a Israele siano come quelle rivolte contro tutti gli altri Stati. Dall’altra, impedisce di svolgere una critica che rivolgeremmo invece facilmente anche a moltissimi altri Stati. Il primo dei quali, neanche a dirlo, sono gli Stati Uniti d’America, il cui process di costituzione tramite settler colonialism This calls into question the very foundation of Israel's establishment.

Another article from the IHRA definition also considers antisemitism to be “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” Again, upon closer examination, it would be revealed that quite a few Israeli Zionists have invoked Nazism to speak about the Netanyahu government, so as a critique, quanto come invocazione: per esempio quando David Azoulai, sindaco di una cittadina del nord di Israele, ha dichiarato due anni fa che l’intera Gaza Strip avrebbe dovuto essere “emptied and razed to the ground, just like Auschwitz“Which, incidentally, is precisely what happened. Delrio cannot legally prevent analogies: the brain produces them anyway, if it has the tools to do so. Otherwise, we ask ourselves: how would the masterpiece film about Nazism, “The Zone of Interest,” be treated, whose director Jonathan Glazer, a British Jew, has explicitly stated he links it to the current Palestinian situation? Should AGCOM fine Glazer?

Che fine fa l’articolo 21?

Yes, because the Delrio DDL left nothing to chance and provides for bodies responsible for monitoring anti-Semitism.

In primo luogo, il governo Meloni: “il Governo è delegato ad adottare, entro sei mesi dalla data di entrata in vigore della presente legge, uno o più decreti legislativi volti a disciplinare i diritti degli utenti e gli obblighi delle piattaforme, nonché le modalità di intervento dell’Autorità per le garanzie nelle comunicazioni (AGCOM) in materia di prevenzione, segnalazione, rimozione e sanzione dei contenuti antisemiti diffusi sulle piattaforme on line di servizi digitali in lingua italiana”.

Dentro le scuole e le Università compaiono gli ispettori del pensiero: “L’organismo di vigilanza di ogni università individua al suo interno un soggetto preposto alla verifica e al monitoraggio delle azioni per contrastare i fenomeni di antisemitismo, in linea con il codice etico della stessa università e in conformità con quanto previsto dalla Strategia nazionale per la lotta contro l’antisemitismo”, e “Le istituzioni scolastiche comunicano annualmente, attraverso i sistemi informativi del Ministero dell’istruzione e del merito, i dati circa le azioni attuate per contrastare i fenomeni di antisemitismo, in conformità con quanto previsto dalla Strategia nazionale per la lotta contro l’antisemitismo”.

E per quanto riguarda il giornalismo? Il DDL insiste con una lunga serie di obblighi che devono fare capo alle “piattaforme online di servizi digitali in lingua italiana”. L’espressione si riferisce alle Platforms regulated by the Digital Services Act; ma, i nostri lettori capiranno bene, interviene direttamente sul work delle testate giornalistiche, ciascuna delle quali fa viaggiare i suoi articoli attraverso le piattaforme stesse. E interviene su quel “giornalismo personalistico” che tanti professionisti fanno attraverso i loro profili individuali. Qualsiasi contenuto prodotto dalle testate giornalistiche e divulgato attraverso le piattaforme sarebbe sottoponibile alle ispezioni dell’AGCOM e alle lunghe trafile di controllo che Delrio vorrebbe imporre alle piattaforme. Ecco dunque che le “autorizzazioni e censure” contro la stampa, proibite dalla Costituzione, fanno il loro ritorno in grande stile.

COVER PHOTO CREDITS: ANSA/RICCARDO ANTIMIANI