Magnifico! The Italians finally found a crime they won’t prosecute — as long as the criminal has a student ID.
Back in September, roughly 15,000 demonstrators flooded the streets of Milan after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni refused to follow other spineless European nations in recognizing Palestine as a state. What started as a “protest” devolved into a full-scale riot within hours. Agitators dressed in black hurled street cobblestones and glass bottles at cops, ripped a pole off a bus shelter — or a street sign, or a grandma’s walker, who even knows at this point — and used it to smash windows at Milan’s central train station. They threw chairs at officers. They chanted “it will be Intifada here too.”
Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said the attacks were “deliberate” and that “numerous troublemakers” exploited public sympathy over Gaza to “commit the usual acts of pure and simple violence.” Police fired tear gas. About ten people got arrested. Sixty officers landed in the hospital with injuries ranging from bruises to broken bones.
And now a judge has decided that the people who did all of this should walk free because punishing them might ding their transcripts.
Let’s call this judge what he is: an absolute clown operating a catch-and-release program for people who put cops in the emergency room. We don’t even know his name because Italian courts apparently protect the identities of judges who make insane rulings better than they protect police officers from flying cobblestones. Let’s just call him Judge Homework. Sixty officers got hospitalized on his watch and Judge Homework’s biggest concern is whether some masked thug can still make it to office hours on Friday.
Bob would be furious right now if Bob were an Italian cop. Actually, Bob is furious right now and Bob is an American sitting at a keyboard.
Now here’s the part that should make your blood boil. While rioters who hospitalized sixty cops stroll back to campus with clean records, Italy treats actual peaceful expression like a terror threat. In January 2024 — on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, of all days — a student named Mihael Melnic hung a sign from his apartment window that read “Free Gaza from Hamas.” Two police officers showed up at his door, walked into his apartment, identified him, and tried to rip the sign down.
A sign. Supporting the rescue of hostages from a terrorist organization. Two cops dispatched to his living room.
An Israeli student named Jasmine Kolodro got hauled into the police station in Padua for the crime of displaying an Israeli flag near a pro-Palestinian demonstration. She held up a flag of a sovereign nation that Italy officially recognizes, and Italian police responded like she’d detonated a pipe bomb.
So here’s how Italy’s justice system actually works in practice. Hold up a sign against Hamas? Cops bust down your door. Wave an Israeli flag? Summoned for interrogation. Attack sixty police officers with rocks, bottles, bicycles, and furniture? Go home, sweetie, you’ve got a paper due Thursday.
Antisemitic attacks in Italy have nearly QUADRUPLED — from 241 incidents in 2022 to 877 in 2024. Jewish people in Italy are four times more likely to get attacked today than they were two years ago, and the Italian government’s big law enforcement priority is… prosecuting a kid with a window sign. Two Jewish teenagers, one wearing a kippah, got beaten and robbed by three attackers in Milan. A Jewish man got jumped because someone spotted his Star of David necklace. A craft store — a craft store — hung a sign reading “Zionists and Israelis are not welcome.”
Walker Meghnagi, president of Milan’s Jewish community, told reporters that Jewish tourists now avoid Milan entirely because of “the climate of hatred and the fear of being attacked.” Can’t imagine why.
And here’s the kicker. Among those September rioters? Guys wearing vests from the “Association of Palestinians in Italy,” led by a charming fellow named Mohammad Hannoun — a man the U.S. Treasury sanctioned in October 2024 as Hamas’s literal money collector in Italy. This guy walks around wearing a vest with his organization’s name printed on it like he’s working the floor at Best Buy, and Italian law enforcement can’t seem to locate him. Maybe they’re too busy raiding apartments looking for Israeli flags.
Someone spray-painted “Shoot Giorgia” on a bank in Milan during the riots. That’s a direct threat against a sitting prime minister. I’m sure Judge Homework was deeply concerned that prosecuting that particular artist might interfere with their finger-painting elective.
This is the same country where a court ordered the government to pay a German NGO €76,000 for temporarily detaining one of its illegal migrant transport ships. The same country where a Rome court blocked the deportation of an Algerian man with twenty-three criminal convictions and ordered Italy to compensate him for the inconvenience. Twenty-three convictions. They owed him money. (We told you Europe was cooked, right?)
Meloni talks tough about these left-wing anarchists — she genuinely seems to despise them — but her own judiciary keeps setting them free like it’s some kind of revolving-door community service project. President Trump designated Antifa as a terrorist organization. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán did the same. Meloni needs to stop giving speeches about law and order and start figuring out why her judges think a rioter’s GPA matters more than a cop’s broken ribs.
Sixty injured officers. Zero consequences. And somewhere on a Milan campus right now, a kid who threw a cobblestone at a cop’s face is sitting in a lecture hall, scribbling notes on “restorative justice.”
We’re sure he’ll get an A.
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