Youssef Siher: social media strategist behind the Adidas revolution and the looting? There are many doubts.

Perhaps it is because he kindly sent us a CV and an article on Pakistan – the Foreign Affairs desk considers it not half bad; perhaps it is due to the exculpatory testimony from his professor, who holds the multilingual student in high regard, noting that his only ‘radicalism’ lies in his studies; or perhaps it’s down to the somewhat muddled accusatory language of our friends, the Milanese public prosecutors, and above all our specific ignorance of the seedy underbelly of this case – for which we apologise and warn the reader – but ultimately, we cannot be so sure that this Youssef Siher is the ‘Primula Pal’ or the ‘super Muslim Brother’, in short, the dream strategist who ‘knows how to use Telegram’. One suspects there are a couple of million such ‘experts’ out there, capable of being apprehended as the masterminds and social media organisers behind the ‘Adidas’ revolution and the looting. It is difficult to discern the individual who, with his bare hands, challenged the Republic at the very heart of its commercial system, shaking up the entire puppet show and the shop. Caution is advised to avoid misinformation—and this is not the first time such caution has been necessary. Intelligence services and law enforcement perform essential work: they aggregate data of varying reliability, identify suspects, and follow leads, and they deserve respect, because when they are correct, they are emphatically correct. However, that is not always the case. Sometimes they proceed with haste, to stop at the first rest stop to catch our breath, and it can happen that we mistake a couple from Brescia—who deserve all the condemnation of right-minded people who have no love for rampages and social media maps used to navigate the grotesque simulacrum of urban guerrilla warfare that has come to disrupt a Milanese weekend lacking in other events and aperitifs—for conspirators of the worst Salafist sort, but in the end they might turn out to be nothing more than crafty pro-Palestinian agitators, dressed to the nines for the anti-Israeli uprising that’s so fashionable – and there are heaps of them, mingling with the eager crowd, trying to exploit yet another incident stemming from social unrest, perhaps putting down anti-genocide roots in Barona but, when the opportunity arises, swarming through the finest universities and secondary schools. 

Siher may have a face that deserves a slap, perhaps, but no more than that; he doesn’t seem any worse than Ginevra Bompiani, for example. Any evidence that might incriminate him must be irrefutable; a prison sentence should not be sought lightly for a man from the Brescia countryside who came from Morocco, and for his wife, a cultural mediator, as stated and signed. For example, the phrase used by the distinguished Dr Viola and his colleagues, which identifies Siher as ‘the mastermind behind the 17 October social media channel’, especially when associated with the notion of exceptional expertise in organising street protests capable of ‘developing a revolutionary strategy’, well, as if he were a reincarnated Toni Negri, or a Karl Radek, a Zinoviev, a Trotsky – the impression is that we are at the embryonic stage of a certain political-insurrectional illiteracy. Pietro Calogero got a lot of things wrong but he knew a thing or two, and the ‘nights of fire’ following the famous raid of 7 April did, after all, come to an end. It remains uncertain whether detaining an individual like Siher will ensure that the restless teenagers of 17 October—emulating the Parisian sixth-formers and the ‘casseurs’ from across France—will remain at home during upcoming weekends in the absence of Telegram. The impression that this odd couple has crushed the serpent’s head—thinking of the bespectacled, highly educated and master manipulator from Brescia—whilst not knowing whether there is more to it than that, could be extremely unwise.