The PMLI expresses its condolences to the innocent victims of the horrible attacks in Istanbul, Dhaka and Baghdad and its solidarity to their families. At the same time, however, it refuses to join the hypocrite chorus of imperialist governments in the self-styled “international community” and the mass media at their service, that put all the responsibility on terrorism by the Islamic State (IS), as if it was a demon born out of nowhere—a monster to be destroyed with steel and fire, an alien and malignant tumor grown inside a “healthy” body. Uprooting it, according to them, will be enough to bring back peace and friendship among the peoples.

This is the false scenario that the imperialist holy alliance of States, including Italy, which has long declared total war on the IS, has been telling the masses, in order to hide its own responsibility and imperialist barbarity, which in turn generates and fosters barbarity from its Islamic enemy. This is why, while not agreeing with the terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic anti-imperialist fighters when they are led by religious fanaticism and target innocent civilians, we call on the masses not to passively fall in the trap of imperialist propaganda, and to think carefully about the reasons and causes behind these and other similar attacks, separating causes and effects, main contradiction and secondary contradictions, in order to fully understand these dramatic events, apparently bound to repeat endlessly, becoming active parts in handling the issue.

What imperialist propaganda is hiding behind the narrative of senseless terrorism is that there is a war going on, and that these attacks are not blind and illogical acts led by plain madness, as they want us to believe. They are, on the contrary, real acts of war, carried out in response to the war waged by the imperialist holy alliance against the Islamic State. This war is conducted with heavy and indiscriminate air bombings that cause thousands of victims among the civilian population as well as huge destructions in the cities and territories that are bombed. No one, however, attaches any importance to this, as if imperialist bombings were all “surgical”, able to hit only Islamic anti-imperialist fighters with no innocent victims at all. Innocents are just considered “collateral victims” and “inevitable consequences”, as recently said by Obama himself.

Terrorism is no abstract entity, no international monster come out of the dark, as it is portrayed by imperialist propaganda. It is, on the contrary, a war method, always used in just wars as well as in unjust wars, and the Islamic State in particular is using it to bring war inside the countries of the imperialist coalition and to its rear, in order to respond to the military siege and bombings threating its survival. This is openly proclaimed by the Islamic State in the clearest terms: “O crusaders, you, your families and your friends, you are all targets, we will kill you even in your dreams”—this is the message, terrible but clear and easy to understand, launched on the Internet by the Caliphate referring to the Dhaka massacre.

It should be added that boasting daily about the destruction and the loss of territories of the IS, as the imperialist coalition does, to the point that the IS has been depicted on the brink of defeat, and expecting that it will not react with every means at its disposal, is like expecting your enemy, with no aircraft carriers, missiles and fighter-bombers, to fight with tied hands and blindfolded. There is a precise reason for this huge fiction: they want to conceal from peoples the fact that they have also been involved by their governments in this war, otherwise they could rebel and ask to leave the fight not to be exposed to the inevitable terrorist reprisals by the IS.

It is no coincidence that one of the most recent terrorist massacres occurred in Turkey, ruled by the fascist Erdogan, a country deep into the Middle Eastern conflict and the war against the Islamic State. For months now Turkey has been bombing IS outposts on the Syrian border, and has granted the NATO base in Incirlik to US plains to bomb the IS in Syria and Iraq. Right on the eve of the attack against the Istanbul airport, Turkey had reopened diplomatic relations with the Nazi-Zionist government of Israel, and started new talks with Putin’s Russia, a staunch ally of Assad’s and sworn enemy of the Islamic State. Turkey is also getting closer to hangman Al-Sisi’s Egypt, after relations between the two countries were frozen by the persecutions against the Muslim Brotherhood.

Bangladesh appeared to be less involved in this war, but the intensive exploitation forced upon its people by the Western multinationals in the textile and fashion industry, with salaries lower than 70 dollars per month, an extremely poor labour force, including children, with no rights and working in terribly unsafe conditions (as proven by the fire in a textile factory in 2013 that left 1,129 dead, mostly women between 17 and 20 year old) evidently created a fertile ground to the expansion of Islamic jihadism. The fact that it was a Dhaka restaurant where Italian businesspeople used to go to be hit, can be seen, as some observers have noted, as a warning to Italy, not only as one of the countries most involved in the exploitation of local labour force, but also for its growing involvement in the war against the IS in the Middle East and Libya (just think of the deployment of troops at the Mosul dam, the installation of Italian missiles at the Turkish-Syrian border, military preparations for an intervention in Libya, etc.). Foreign Minister Gentiloni even had to deny these rumors, saying that the Dhaka attack “is not an attack against Italy, but against the Western community”.

Yet the patriotic and warmongering tune of new duce Renzi and Mattarella’s official statements prove that Italy is increasingly involved in this war with no way out. During a press conference, Renzi called the victims in Dhaka “brothers of Italy who have fallen”, as if they were soldiers killed in action. He also said that “the Italians have been hit but not bent” and proclaimed that “terrorists want to take our daily life away from us, we have the duty to respond with even greater resolve and determination to defend our values”. The President of the Republic himself said that “barbarity and terrorism are truly borderless, and terrorism with its barbarity represents the main danger for today’s world. We need a united commitment with a lot of determination to defeat it and reaffirm the predominance of the values of respect for human life, freedom and pacific coexistence in the world”.

On the contrary, we must stop war declarations against terror, which prepare only new imperialist military interventions, and urgently pull back, if we want to break free from this endless imperialist war–terrorist attacks spiral. If we truly want to put out the fire that is devouring the Middle East, it is necessary to retreat all the foreign forces and weapons from that region and open peace talks with all sides, including the Islamic State, that is legitimately claiming a re-definition of the borders and balances arbitrarily decided by the big colonial powers after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.

And Italy must immediately pull away from the war against the Islamic State. This is the only way to prevent our country and our people from becoming targets of other attacks and other massacres such as Istanbul, Dhaka and Baghdad.