“These acts not only injure art, but undermine the value of Memory [of the Holocaust], which is essential for building a conscious and just society,” Italy’s Holocaust memorial museum, the Fondazione Museo della Shoah, said in a released statement on Tuesday about the defacement.
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Mural of Italian Holocaust Survivors Defaced in Milan
A partial view of the mural in Milan, Italy, before (left) and after it was vandalized. Photo: Piero Fassino via X/Twitter screenshot
A mural in Milan dedicated to two Italian Holocaust survivors has been defaced by vandals who scratched off the two faces and yellow stars in the artwork.
The mural depicts Italian senate member Liliana Segre, who was named senator for life in 2018, and author Sami Modiano, both of whom survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. In the mural, the Holocaust survivors are wearing striped uniforms, worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps, underneath bulletproof vests that feature the yellow star of David with the word “Jude” in the center, which were badges that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. The mural was painted by Italian artist and activist aleXsandro Palombo in Piazzale Loreto, a major city square in Milan, in late September. It is titled “Anti-Semitism, History Repeating.”
“Vandalism against the mural dedicated to Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano in Milan, scratched by unknown people, is a vile and insane act,” added Mario Venezia, president of the museum. “These thugs tried to distort the sense of memory, but they failed. A scratch doesn’t erase people, or what was. They can damage the walls, but the history and its teachings remain intact.”
Democratic Party politician Piero Fassino also commented on the vandalism in a post on X. “The outrage against the mural dedicated in Milan to Senator Liliana #Segre and Sami #Modiano demonstrates the level of cowardice and cowardice that anti-Semitic impulses that are manifesting themselves with ever greater aggressiveness reach,” he wrote on Monday. “Impulses that must be rejected and opposed in the most firm and uncompromising way.”
Last month, Palombo unveiled a mural on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel and it depicted Vlada Patapov, who survived the Nova music festival massacre. That mural was defaced by vandals who painted over Patapov’s face and half of her left leg.
In November 2023, a month after the deadly massacre in southern Israel and the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Palombo painted a mural that featured Holocaust victim and teenage diarist Anne Frank alongside a girl from Gaza. He simultaneously revealed another mural of a Gazan boy dressed up as a Hamas terrorist who is standing next to an adult terrorist as they both point their guns at a young Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
“The antisemitic fury unleashed by Hamas is overwhelming Jews in every part of the world, this horror that re-emerges from the past must make us all reflect because it undermines freedom, security, and the future of us all,” Palombo said at the time. “Terrorism is the very denial of humanity and has nothing to do with resistance, it uses people with aim to divide and drag them into the abyss of its evil, into an infernal vortex that has no end. There can be no peace until terrorism is eradicated; legitimize it means condemning to death the whole humanity.”
Palombo’s latest mural, outside Iran’s consulate in Milan, shows Iranian student Ahoo Daryaei, who was arrested by the regime’s morality police after walking outside in her underwear in Tehran as an act of defiance against the country’s mandatory hijab laws. That mural has also been defaced.
The post Mural of Italian Holocaust Survivors Defaced in Milan first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
The post Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
The post Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
The post Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.