Monfalcone, 8,000 in procession with the tricolor against the anti-Islam mayor: “We are all Italians”
Thousands of Muslim faithful took to the streets in Monfalcone (Gorizia) to protest against the policies of the mayor Anna Maria Cisint, who in recent months has launched a battle against the “Islamization and replacement” of Italians. On November 15, the mayor signed two ordinances banning prayers in the two cultural centers where the city's Muslim community met, which lack mosques.
“We are Italian citizens, we pay taxes, we speak Italian correctly and we contribute to the country's production: closing our places of prayer is unconstitutional,” the protesters, who arrived from Mestre, Pordenone and Rimini, told ANSA. “They also tried it in other cities but we turned to the TAR, which agreed with us”.
“We demonstrate against the mayor's discriminatory attitude towards our community,” declared Sani Bhuiyan, a municipal councilor of the Democratic Party, from the stage. “In seven years, he has done all possible things to us, including bans and complications, even to play cricket, attend school and benefit from rent concessions”, Bhuiyan's words quoted by La Repubblica. “Then, last summer, there was the war on the burkini on the beach and, now, the closure of two cultural centers. The mayor perhaps doesn't know that the many Bengali children who marched with us today feel more like Monfalcone than foreigners and that this also applies to Muslims arriving from the Balkan peninsula. While Monfalcone faces real challenges on a daily basis, ranging from poverty, tax evasion and gangmastering, the mayor seems to only see the fight against foreigners and focus on unfounded alarmism. We are not guests, but citizens who respect Italian law and the Constitution and we ask for radical change and mutual respect.”
The Northern League mayor continued to accuse the demonstrators of wanting to “impose their own more fundamentalist Islamic model”, speaking of an “unseemly protest based on disturbing assumptions that are worrying due to their call for intolerance towards the acceptance of our assumptions of social coexistence and legality”.
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