Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
Threatening emails in Arabic at several Italian schools: the disinformation trap.
In recent hours, more than 40 Italian schools were evacuated after a wave of threatening emails claiming bombs were on site. The alerts proved false, but the use of partially Arabic messages reignited fears of terrorism.
Yet linking Arabic to Islamic terrorism is a naive mistake history teaches us to avoid.
A tactic as old as the Cold War Language is the easiest element to fake. In the Soviet era this strategy was known as “active measures” (aktivnye meropriyatiya): sowing misleading clues and content to shift blame onto someone else. A famous example dates to 1983, when the Indian newspaper Patriot (used as a KGB channel) published the false claim that AIDS had been created in US military labs at Fort Detrick, a fake news story later amplified worldwide by the Soviet press.
The precedents in Europe Waves of bomb-hoax emails at European schools are nothing new:
Slovakia (May 2024): over 1,000 schools targeted with threats invoking Islam, sent from Russian addresses but written in Slovak;
Bulgaria (2023): 102 schools hit in what the interior ministry called a hybrid attack traceable to Russia;
Poland (May 2019): over 600 schools evacuated during final exams. In that case, the emails were sent by unwitting users incited online, while the orchestration came from foreign intelligence services.
Who benefits from fear? In hybrid operations, the person who physically sends the message often does not know the true instigators or the real aims. Tracing who pressed “send” is not enough to uncover who is really behind it.
Investigations into the Italian cases are still at an early stage, but before pointing the finger at an ethnic group or a religion based on the language used in an email, we should ask a fundamental question: who truly benefits from a Europe that is afraid, distracted and divided within itself?
