In the small town of San Dona di Piave near Venice last Friday, an imam, Raoudi Albdelbar, asked Allah to, "Kill them all (the Jews), down to the last one; make poison of their food; transform the air that they breathe into flames, and put terror in their hearts."
The imam was so proud of his sermon that he made a video of it and posted it on his Facebook page — from where it went viral. Earlier this week, Italian antiterrorist police showed up and arrested the imam on charges of inciting violence, and began the process of expelling him to his native Morocco.
There's a doleful, five-century-old parallel to the iman's prayer. In his "Trials of the Diaspora," Antony Julius, a polymath British lawyer, has taken Shylock's trial in the Merchant of Venice as the trial of diaspora Jews, seeing in it a subtle re-imagining of the old blood libel. In Shylock's pitiless pursuit of a pound of flesh cut from the merchant Antonio's body, Julius detects another instance of Jews seeking Christian blood.