Protests outside editorial offices against views expressed by newspapers is something that is in vogue these days. It is often a tool of Islamists, as we have seen most recently in Turkey, or years ago with the extreme violence against Charlie Hebdo in Paris, with those targeting editors and journalists claiming to be defending their religious ‘values’ against perceived defiling. And the targets are normally liberal outlets.
Well, their Western European fellow travellers (often called ‘useful idiots’) have taken a liking to this practice, too, and their targets are conservative voices, as in the case of the recent intimidation campaign against MCC Brussels.
Just a few days ago, on July 10th, a smallish crowd of people belonging to an organisation brandishing the revolutionary-sounding name Potere al Popolo (’Power to the People’) and to one called Cambiare Rotta (’Changing the Course’), a communist youth group, showed up outside the editorial offices of right-wing Italian outlets Il Giornale and Libero Quotidiano in Milan, Italy. The reason? The two media publish news stories that are in line with the Meloni government’s policies (meaning, rather than defending criminals, they endorse law enforcement doing their job), and, unsurprisingly, they do not denounce Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
The 36 people (counted by the targeted newspapers’ staff) held placards featuring the faces of the two outlets’ journalists (a concerning violation of the media workers’ personality rights, by the way) onto which police hats had been photoshopped, with the inscription ‘In the service of lies.’
The angry demonstrators chanted insults like “You are propaganda outlets in the service of the government”—a familiar accusation against right-wing media across Europe wherever a conservative government is in power. They also yelled the usual pro-Palestinian slogans, full of thinly-veiled antisemitic tropes, such as “You are not journalists, you are the servants of the Zionists, and you have blood on your hands,” and “You are the greatest fans of Netanyahu the criminal, and you are accomplices in the genocide in Palestine.”
After about an hour of chanting, the pro-Palestinian activists concluded their performance with a theatrical act: they proceeded to tear out page after page of copies of the Il Giornale and Libero papers, while shouting about the destroyed publications being “disgusting” and the reporters working for them “the slaves” of “millionaires.”
According to Il Giornale’s account, a rather sizeable police force was deployed during the protest to prevent it from escalating, and it indeed ended without any physical confrontation, although there was a “heated exchange” with one of the Il Giornale reporters.
While the entire exercise must have been somewhat pathetic, given the small number of the protesters, what happened is disturbing and was certainly meant to be intimidating. One wonders how we got to a point where those on the radical Left are completely incapable of tolerating different viewpoints and show zero respect for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of expression. And they do so, of course, in the name of ‘the people’ they claim to be representing.
But what if the majority of the people agree with the positions of the two targeted newspapers? Will the neo-Communists “dissolve the people and elect another,” as Bertolt Brecht famously said?
