Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini on Thursday slammed a cabinet colleague who has been wearing a T-shirt bearing the Mohammed cartoons that have caused a firestorm in Muslim countries.
"An Italian minister should adhere to serious and responsible behaviour at such a difficult and delicate time
in relations between Europe and the Islamic world," Fini said in rapping Reforms Minister Giuseppe Calderoli of the devolutionist Northern League.
"Any provocation that may be seen as offensive against any religious sensitivities must be stigmatised," said Fini, who heads Italy's biggest rightwing party, the National Alliance.
Calderoli has been wearing the T-shirts with stencilled copies of the Danish newspaper cartoons all week.
He designed and commissioned them himself in a move that gained him headlines worldwide.
Calderoli said he wanted to express solidarity with newspapers and firms that have suffered from Islamic protests and boycotts - as well as showing that the West could not be cowed into abandoning its tradition of
free speech. Two weeks ago the same minister came under fire for referring to a well-known TV journalist - Rula Jebreal - of Palestinian descent as "the tanned one" during a talk-show debating the images, claiming he had forgotten the journalist's name.
The minister's T-shirt idea followed a domestic row in which he said immigrants to Italy - the majority of whom are Muslim - had been rightly barred from a government 'baby bonus' scheme.
Calderoli called the immigrants - who had been applying for the benefit after receiving congratulatory letters from Premier Silvio Berlusconi - "Ali Babas" who were stealing houses and jobs from native Italians.
The minister said he was "proud" of barring the immigrants from the scheme - apparently without informing his boss. Calderoli said the 1,000 euro pay-out for babies born last year was "being paid for by the work of Italian citizens and clearly not by the Johnny-come-latelies who have claimed council houses and jobs ahead of Italians and now want to benefit from their taxes."
"All these Ali Babas should turn to Allah, or to their own governments - if they (the governments) find time to devote to the needs of their people rather than the atomic bomb or buying arms."
The Northern League, a junior partner in the Berlusconi government, is sometimes accused of being xenophobic (anti-foreigner).
Protests against the cartoons - one of which features the Prophet with a bomb on his head instead of a turban - continued on Thursday in Pakistan. As part of the earlier outcry, the Danish embassy in Syria was torched and several people were killed in riots in Afghanistan.
Islam forbids any representation of the Prophet.
