An Italian teacher has been
suspended after some of her students compared Interior Minister
and rightist populist League party leader Matteo Salvini's
security and migrant decree to the Fascist racial laws on
Holocaust Remembrance Day in January.
Rosa Maria Dell'Aria, 63, a 30-year teacher at a Palermo
industrial school, told ANSA "I consider what has happened the
greatest bitterness and the biggest wound of my professional
life".
The students said "the images in the power point presentation
were not chosen by the teacher who only gave us a hand in fixing
the text from the linguistic standpoint".
Voicing solidarity with the teacher, they said "no one was
forced to do the project".
Centre-left opposition Democratic Party House deputy
president and their culture committee chief Anna Ascani said
"some students link Salvini to Fascism, something that Salvini
himself often does, a friend of (neoFascist group) CasaPound,
and the ministry decides on a very harsh sanction, with a
suspension and halving of pay for the teacher, accused of not
preventing that comparison.
"Is the next step a return to the (Fascist youth
organisation) Opera nazionale balilla?
"The Palermo episode calls for an immediate official
clarification from the education ministry."
"Do some people want to turn Italian schools into barracks?".
Another PD MP, Carmelo Miceli, called on Education Minister
Marco Bussetti to "clear up an extremely serious incident".
Salvini said "I don't know who it was who proposed,
controlled, ordered, or suggested, but for someone to put on a
par Interior Minister Matteo Salvini - who may be likeable or
unlikeable - with Mussolini or even Hitler, seems absolutely
demented to me".
The education ministry said later that Bussetti had tasked
his offices to look into the matter with the territorial office,
noting that it was the provincial office that suspended
Dell'Aria because she allegedly was not sufficiently vigilant on
the work of her 14-year-old charges.
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