The Nottingham case was not covered by Italian media. Italy was more concerned, during the last weeks, with its own “racial” and racism-related problems (gypsies’ camps were burned near Neaples, and yesterday, in Rome, an extreme-rightists’ squad ravaged three shops owned or run by brown-skinned foreigners). Indeed, needless to say, the Nottingham case is important for the freedom of research, for freedom, against xenophobia, not only in UK, but in Europe as a whole. This is the case’s description done by a friend in an email: “a student and a member of staff at the university of Nottingham were detained for six days under the Terrorism Act because the student in question, researching a Masters dissertation on radical Islamist groups, sent his friend an edited al-Qaeda manual downloaded from a US government website for printing (I’ve done a little hunting, and it seems it may be related to a ‘manual’ available on the Department of Justice website available at http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/manualpart1_1.pdf)”. Both the MA student and the member of the staff were released without charges after six days of detention, but the staff member is now facing a possible deportation to Algeria. I read the Nottingham University press release: it seems to me that the case was weakly handled and that the university is now trying to defend its behaviour. Banal conclusion: this is only the iceberg’s peak of an ever-hardening atmosphere of intolerance, islamophobia, maccartism in the land (Europe) where the flag of civil rights waves everyday, to show the world that we are much more better than the Others.
