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We are in the throes of a serious and unexpected political crisis. Fazio, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, was found to favour under-capitalized Italian prospective buyers of a bank over the better qualified Dutch banking giant ABN Amro. A leaked transcript of a phone call with the chief Italian bidder showed the supposedly imartial guardian of Italian banking law calling a bidder by his first name and coordinating strategies to shut the Dutch out. This shocking revelation has split both majority and opposition, with the majority of both demanding that Fazio resign. However, a leading MP from Berlusconi's own party, Guido Crosetto, party spokesman on banking (!), took Fazio's side against his own leader (unusual enough in that party, which was invented to give Berlusconi a political base).
Brace yourself, because you might just throw up when you find what this piece of filth actually said. Many people, he stated, "are slobbering after Italian banks; above all the great Jewish and American freemasonry which is practically knocking down our city gates." Asked to clarify his views, Crosetto pointed at Merrill Lynch, "a peculiar kind of banking institution, whose shareholders are... specifically Jewish." He also charged Romano Prodi, opposition leader and former chairman of the European Commission, with being their "hired hand".
In front of this vile outburst, which also entailed the kind of party disloyalty which Berlusconi would not normally tolerate, the Prime Minister has done precisely nothing. He has not slung the scum into the outer void. He has not even deprived him of his party office, which he could and should have. He has only written a bland newspaper article in which he says that "nobody could possibly imagine us to be anti-Hebraic, when we are the best friends of the State of Israel." Which, apart from being a political version of "some of my best friends are Jews", is only true in that the Italian right is not quite as savagely pro-Arab and anti-Israeli as the undisciplined hordes of the left. But just as you were beginning to think that perhaps there is something to be said for the Berlusconi coalition (or at least, that the left are just as unqualified to govern), this sort of thing reminds you how far down the scale of ignorant rabble they really are.
Brace yourself, because you might just throw up when you find what this piece of filth actually said. Many people, he stated, "are slobbering after Italian banks; above all the great Jewish and American freemasonry which is practically knocking down our city gates." Asked to clarify his views, Crosetto pointed at Merrill Lynch, "a peculiar kind of banking institution, whose shareholders are... specifically Jewish." He also charged Romano Prodi, opposition leader and former chairman of the European Commission, with being their "hired hand".
In front of this vile outburst, which also entailed the kind of party disloyalty which Berlusconi would not normally tolerate, the Prime Minister has done precisely nothing. He has not slung the scum into the outer void. He has not even deprived him of his party office, which he could and should have. He has only written a bland newspaper article in which he says that "nobody could possibly imagine us to be anti-Hebraic, when we are the best friends of the State of Israel." Which, apart from being a political version of "some of my best friends are Jews", is only true in that the Italian right is not quite as savagely pro-Arab and anti-Israeli as the undisciplined hordes of the left. But just as you were beginning to think that perhaps there is something to be said for the Berlusconi coalition (or at least, that the left are just as unqualified to govern), this sort of thing reminds you how far down the scale of ignorant rabble they really are.
