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What Mussolini’s Jewish Lover Knew

Oct. 23 2014

Margherita Sarfatti, a Venetian Jewess, was Benito Mussolini’s mistress and confidante from 1912 until the 1930s. Sophisticated, educated, and politically engaged, she was unique among the dictator’s many lovers in advising him on political matters. (She fled Italy in 1938 after the fascists enacted anti-Semitic legislation.) The historian Brian Sullivan has published a series of postwar autobiographical articles written by Sarfatti, with extensive annotations and commentary. Although her reminiscences contain much colorful detail, Sullivan makes the mistake, according to Michael McDonald, of believing and further embellishing her exaggerated picture of her own importance. And there is also much that the book omits:

Sarfatti’s memoirs are regrettably silent on many major issues, such as anti-Semitism. Mussolini had Jewish backers among the industrialists and big landowners who helped finance him at the start of his career. Indeed, about 200 Jews took part in the March on Rome. But the fascist movement became increasingly anti-Semitic, to the point that Sarfatti’s sister and her husband died on the way to Auschwitz. Other relatives also died in the extermination camps. Sarfatti sheds no light on how Mussolini—who had for years mocked Hitler for his anti-Semitism and denied the existence of a Jewish problem in Italy—came to impose anti-Jewish legislation in 1938.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Anti-Semitism, Benito Mussolini, Fascism, Italian Jewry

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic