Summary:
Since the October 7th massacre perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis in the south of the Jewish State, the anti-Israel propaganda at street demonstrations and on the internet boosted throughout Europe and Italy is no exception.
The Mediterranean country, which is a “bridge” between North Africa and Europe, has seen a peak in such activity in multiple sectors such as universities, some media, part of the political arena and, indeed, among the Islamists active in the country.
As any counter-terrorism expert knows, extremist propaganda is the prelude to possible violent actions, it is the gasoline that fuels terror acts, and authorities should therefore intervene as soon as the problem manifests itself. However, this does not always occur, unfortunately.
Giovanni Giacalone is a senior analyst for the Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issues and Managing Emergencies-Itstime (Catholic University of Milan) and for of the Kedisa-Center for International Strategic Analysis based in Athens, Greece. From 2014 to 2016, he was an associate researcher for Istituto Studi Politica Internazionale-Ispi’s “Observatory on Terrorism”. He is a graduate from the University of Bologna, MA in Islamic Studies from Trinity Saint David University of Wales and a further specialisation in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism from the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism-IICT. Giacalone was a country-coordinator for the Globsec European project “From criminals to terrorists and back”, with the objective of analysing the crime-terror nexus among jihadist foreign fighters. He currently collaborates with the media and he is an author of several books and chapters on jihadism in Italy, the Balkans and Russia. He has lectured security managers and law enforcers on Italian soil. He is a contributor for the analysis website InsideOver and in 2020 he co-founded the Security and Terrorism Observation and Analysis Group.
