Killing Innocent Civilians
Satire Alert!
Washington, DC, August 15, 1943 (Reuters): The largest Italian-American organization in the United States today published an open letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt protesting the continued ground war and the bombing of Italian villages throughout Sicily. “The Italian people never wanted this conflict,” Umberto Ciambrello, chairman of CAIR (Council on American-Italian Relations) reminded the president. “It was only [Benito] Mussolini and the Germans who desired war; not the Italian people.” In the letter Ciambrello acknowledged that it was “justifiable for the so-called Coalition forces to strike at German troops in Sicily,” but that the “United States and its British ally ought not to attack Italian civilians or blockade Italian ports.”
The letter also accuses the Roosevelt administration of leading the United States into an “unjust and unnecessary war.” Ciambrello asks: “Why is it that the United States, struck by the Japanese, had to go to war with Italy on the other side of the globe?” The letter notes: “Were there any Italian pilots in those planes at Pearl Harbor,” Ciambrello demands to know. “Isn’t it true,” the CAIR chairman inquires, “that the United States had a secret ‘Europe-First’ policy, and maneuvered Japan into the attack of December 7, 1941?” “No less an authority than the eminent American historian, Professor Charles Beard (in his book Backdoor to War: President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War), has shown that the Pearl Harbor strike was forced on Japan by the higher-ups in the administration,” Ciambrello notes. “American foreign policy,” Ciambrello writes, ought to serve the interests of the American people, and not “a group of neo-progressives, many of whom are of Jewish ancestry.” “There are millions of German, Japanese, and Italians in the United States,” Ciambrello points out, “but only a handful of Jews.” “Why do they have so much influence?” he asks; “wouldn’t it have been far better to have relied on the League of Nations to resolve these disputes?”
Simultaneously, the Young Italians of the United Kingdom (YIUK) published an open letter to “The Prime Minister and American Poodle Winston Churchill.” The YIUK letter issued a veiled threat to Churchill, warning that “if the British government continues to pursue belligerent and anti-Italian policies, kills more innocent Italian civilians, and ignores the wishes of its own Italian community, no one should expect people with surnames that end with vowels living in the UK to sit idly by and take no action.”
Both letters also called for the release of all Italian soldiers captured thus far by the Allies. “Some of these poor men have been held for years in detention camps, without warrants and without being brought to trial.”
