A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI - Umanita Nova: Giacomo Gobbato DON'T LOOK THE OTHER WAY (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The tragic death of Giacomo Gobbato has hit the headlines nationwide, 
but it is still useful to summarize the facts. ---- On the night between 
September 20 and 21, in Mestre, two friends see a woman being attacked 
by a man for the purpose of robbery and intervene to help her: they are 
Giacomo and Sebastiano; Giacomo is stabbed to death, while Sebastiano 
only suffers minor injuries. The woman comes out unharmed.

From the very beginning, institutional and party figures, in addition 
to superficial mourning, use what happened to emphasize that "we need 
more police", "we need more controls" etc. etc., while racists are 
unleashed on social media shouting "enough immigrants".

But who are the protagonists of this story? A homeless Moldovan, a drug 
addict; a woman of Colombian origins who was punched and robbed, who 
asked for help and now blames herself because "if I hadn't screamed, 
that 26-year-old boy would still be alive today"; a Japanese tourist who 
was the victim of a second robbery, threatened with the knife still 
stained with Giacomo's blood; an Albanian man who managed to scare off 
the murderer. And finally them, Giacomo and Sebastiano, two activists 
from the Centro Sociale Rivolta in Marghera, two comrades or - as they 
would say on the other side of the fence - two ticks.

This picture already leads us to a first consideration: who are "the 
foreigners" and "the Italians" in this story? What we see are people, 
who live or pass through the same city and who share, each with their 
own path and personal history, the difficulties of every day, in this 
increasingly desperate, anguished, frightened, impoverished society. 
Even the murderer.

Many people these days have spoken of "heroism" and "exemplary gesture", 
but I disagree. Using terms like that implies thinking that what Giacomo 
and Sebastiano did is something out of the ordinary, within the reach of 
only "supermen" or something like that. The two friends instead did the 
most normal thing in the world: they saw a person in difficulty and 
didn't think "it's none of my business". They acted directly, in a way 
that perhaps not all people can do: maybe if they had been two elderly 
women they wouldn't have felt like it (or maybe they did). But perhaps 
the point is not so much what you do, but the fact itself of asking 
yourself the question, of trying to act in some way, of not considering 
only immediate personal interest. A spontaneous movement of solidarity 
that should be the norm and that instead becomes "exemplary" in an 
increasingly atomized world, in which social relations between people 
often and willingly reflect the values ​​of capitalism and authority, 
namely oppression, violence and indifference.

I didn't know Giacomo, but I could have. The very evening of his death I 
discovered that we were "friends" on Facebook. I looked and looked at 
his photos to see if I remembered him, but nothing. However, I saw the 
images of him in the front row at hardcore concerts in Veneto, the same 
concerts I was at: most likely we supported each other during the stage 
diving and screamed side by side under those stages. Twenty years of 
difference between the two of us, and yet just looking at those images 
is enough to understand that we shared the same passion, the same fire 
inside, the same determination to fight for a better world, even in very 
different political contexts. It is precisely this commonality that 
struck me. Because in Giacomo and Sebastiano's place there could have 
been any of us. And this is exactly the way in which, in my opinion, we 
should remember Giacomo: a boy who made the choice, that night as in his 
entire life, not to look the other way, to fight for a world in which 
violence, discrimination, poverty and exploitation are only a distant 
memory.

Ciao Giacomo

https://umanitanova.org/giacomo-gobbato-non-voltarsi-dallaltra-parte/
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