In Italy, an Antisemitic Law Professor Calls for Cutting All Ties with Italian Jews

Luca Nivarra is a law professor in Palermo, Italy, in the past charged by the police with embezzlement and forgery, and a deep-dyed antisemite, who on Facebook has now called for Italians to “cut all ties” to Italian Jews, whatever those Jews may think of the war in Gaza, as a way to collectively punish them for Israel’s war. More on this antisemitic law professor and criminal can be found here: “Italian Law Professor on Facebook: ‘Unfriend All Your Jewish Followers,'” by Ildikó Bíró, European Conservative, August 30, 2025:

Boycott initiatives against Israel by Western progressives are no novelty. Italy’s leftist intelligentsia is no different in this respect. From open endorsements of  the ‘selfie yacht’ mission to ‘break the siege of Gaza’ to calls for the rejection of Israel-produced medicines, and the campaign to exclude two actors from the Venice Film Festival for their support of Israel in its war against Hamas, the instances of virtue-signalling are almost endless. But what a Palermo university professor did earlier this week took the anti-Israel activism to the next level.

“Let’s start making our Jewish friends feel alone; let’s unfriend them on Facebook,” Luca Nivarra, professor of law at the at the University of Palermo proposed.

Nivarra’s shocking post on Facebook literally referenced a “Palestinian Holocaust,” telling his followers that the gesture of removing their Jewish friends from among their followers could be “a signal, however modest,” and stressed the unfriending should include all Jewish acquaintances, “even the ‘good ones’ who declare themselves disgusted by what the Israeli government and the IDF are doing.”

Nivarra, who by the way in 2017 was arrested by the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian law enforcement authority dealing with financial crime,  on charges of embezzlement and forgery according to Corriere della Sera, also said in his diatribe on social media that “they,” supposedly all (Italian) Jews, “lie, and with their lies, they help cover up the horror: it’s a small, tiny thing, but we’re starting to make them feel alone, face to face with the monstrosity to which they are complicit.”

Jews “lie.” All of them. And it is our duty, according to Luca Nivarra, “to make them feel alone, face to face with the monstrosity to which they are complicit” — complicit by the mere fact of being Jews. This is pure antisemitism.

The rector of Palermo University, Massimo Midari, immediately distanced himself from Nivarra, stating that “His proposal risks fuelling the very dynamics he claims to want to counter. On complex issues such as the conflict in the Middle East, the path forward must be one of dialogue and critical debate, not isolation and what approaches ideological censorship.”

That statement does not go far enough. Nivarra is a deep antisemite. He is not calling for “ideological censorship” — he says himself he doesn’t care what Jews in Italy think about the war in Gaza. In his view, just for being Jews, they should be shunned.

But the university has in fact been wishy-washy over the Israel-Hamas war, adopting the stance of condemning ‘both sides,’ with the University’s Senate and Board of Directors approving several motions on the conflict in Palestine, “condemning both the brutal and senseless attack by Hamas on October 7th and Israel’s subsequent military action in Gaza.”…

This equivalence made by the university’s administration between Hamas, a terror group guilty of rape, torture, mutilation, and murder, and the embattled Jewish state that has only one aim — to prevent Hamas from ever again being able to harm the people of Israel — is grotesque.

Of course, as all terrorism apologists on the Left, Nivarra has since also claimed his post was not antisemitic, arguing, again, typically for progressives, that criticizing “Israelis” cannot be equated with antisemitism. And, as an ultimate argument, the professor even cited to Corriere della Sera his membership in the (since mercifully defunct) Italian Communist Party “since the 1970’s” as proof that he cannot be an antisemite.

He can’t be an ”antisemite,” he claims, because he was once a member of the Communist Party. What can he be thinking? The Soviet Union was famously antisemitic; think only of the fate of Natan Sharansky, of the “Doctor’s Plot,” of the murder in the Lubyanka basement of the Jewish writers during the “Night of the Murdered Poets” on August 12, 1952, when Stalin’s regime executed thirteen prominent Soviet Jews, including five Yiddish writers. Or think of the Communists in European countries who sided with the Arabs in all of their wars against the Jewish state.

When Luca Nivarra calls for a boycott of all Italian Jews, the cutting of all ties, personal and professional, to them, not because of their views, but solely because they are Jews, he has gone beyond the pale. Does he have tenure at the University of Palermo? He ought to be fired, on the grounds that his antisemitism is so extreme that he is a menace to Italian society, poisoning the minds of his young charges. The university would not keep an ardent admirer of Mussolini or Hitler on its staff. Why should it keep on its staff someone who supports the terror group Hamas and is full of such hatred for the Jews of Italy?