WHEN THE IRANIAN PRESIDENT Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared last month that “Israel should be wiped off the map,” Giuliano Ferrara, director of Il Foglio, a conservative Italian newspaper close to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, took immediate action. He quickly announced a public protest defending Israel’s right to exist outside the Iranian Embassy in Rome. (The protest took place on November 3.) Many foreign intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Alain Finkelkraut quickly lent their support. In Italy, over a hundred of the country’s most prominent politicians supported the protest, including not only Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini and the European Union Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini–both allies of the center-right Berlusconi-led government–but also center-left opposition leaders such as Francesco Rutelli and Piero Fassino, in what quickly became a bi-partisan event. The emergence of an almost universal consensus in favor of an initiative promoted by a conservative newspaper was a newsworthy event.

Even more newsworthy, however, is the fact that this protest came from Italy, Iran’s foremost economic partner within the European Union. In 2003 alone, Italian exports to Iran amounted to almost 2 billion euros, while imports from Iran stood at 1.9 billion euros. Italy relies on Iran for 90 percent of its oil.