Italy's New Islamism Policy Shocks The Entire World

Italy didn't defend its crackdown on Islamism by talking about terrorism. It talked about women. That is what stunned the world. Not the fines, not the bans, not the raids — but the argument. Italy's governing party rolled out the most sweeping anti-Islamist legislative package in Western Europe, and instead of building it on security and borders, it built it on forced marriage, on virginity testing, on the face veil. It framed a crackdown as a liberation. And it did so under Italy's first female prime minister. In one move, Italy took the language of women's rights — the language its critics have used against the nationalist right for thirty years — and aimed it directly at political Islam. Europe didn't know what to say. Neither did the rest of the world. Because how, exactly, do you denounce a law written in the vocabulary of your own movement? To understand why this landed like a bomb, you have to understand the strange legal ground Italy was standing on.