An old video showing Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni saying that the Islamic culture is not entirely “compatible” with European civilisation, are now going viral on social media forums.
“I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilisation,” she said in the old video, whose exact date is not revealed.
The Brothers of Italy party leader further added in the video: “The Islamic cultural centres in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe, there is a very Islamisation process distant from the values of our civilisation.”
The video has re-surfaced after the Italian prime minister hosted a political festival organised by her Brothers of Italy party in Rome which had UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in attendance.
Separately, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system and warned that the threat of a growing number of refugees could “overwhelm” parts of Europe.
He warned that some “enemies” were deliberately “driving people to our shores to try and destabilise our societies”.
“If we do not tackle this problem, the numbers will only grow. It will overwhelm our countries and our capacity to help those who actually need our help the most,” Rishi Sunak said, adding, “If that requires us to update our laws and lead an international conversation to amend the post-war frameworks around asylum, then we must do that.”
Among others, billionaire business magnate Elon Musk was also present at the annual gathering.
“Immigration isn’t enough to combat population shrinking,” he said, explaining, “There is value in cultures, we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear, we want to maintain a reasonable cultural identity of those countries or they won’t be those countries,” Musk added.
The video is not the first time Meloni made headlines for a controversial reference to Islam.
In September 2019, Meloni wrote a foreword to the ‘First Report on Europe’s Islamisation’, which was presented by the Farefuturo Foundation think-tank, where she wrote: “Because we fear the ‘prophecy’ of [Michel] Houellebecq, if Europe, and Italy which concerns us closely, do not decide to have policies and tools to preserve itself, may inevitably turn into reality.”
French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in a satirical novel, imagined a France of the near future in which the citizenry, starved of the meaning of Christianity, elects a Muslim leader into power who converts the country en masse to create a French Islamic theocracy. European leaders often refer to Houellebecq as ‘Islamophobic’.
According to a report, Italy neither supports the construction of Muslim religious buildings nor does it recognise Islam legally.
Present-day Italy, however, recognises the Catholic Church as an independent and sovereign authority. It has signed contracts of recognition with a total of 13 religious communities, including Hindus and Jews. But Muslims lack similar legal recognition.
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