Valditara, 'yesterday I was in Piazza Duomo and I risked getting a stone on my head'

"Yesterday I was here, in Piazza Duomo, and I almost got hit on the head by a stone.

I believe that an important integration problem has clearly emerged." This was said by the Minister of Education and Merit Giuseppe Valditara, on the sidelines of the inauguration of the international summit on artificial intelligence in schools, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, responding to a question on the crackdown on citizenship and preventive detention for minors after the violence in the city centre.

"They are certainly a response" to what happened, said the minister, underlining that "we must recognize citizenship to all those who want to share our reference values, not to those who want to devastate a city and have no intention of integrating". Valditara cited "those who believe that men and women should not have the same rights, those who consider it legitimate to force a woman to wear the niqab or those who believe that the State should be confessional and that sharia can be used to resolve private disputes". Positions which, according to the minister, are "incompatible with an extension of citizenship".

As for the preventive detention for minors, Valditara explained that "it is a security measure", recalling what is happening in France: "The French police uses decidedly harsher methods, which the opposition would probably even have defined as fascist. Yet France is a democratic republic. These are security tools widely used in many democracies", concluded Valditara.