Mafia bosses have 'declared war' against migrants on the holiday paradise of Sicily as one thousand new arrivals pour on to the island every week.

Life imitates art, as the underworld rises up against a foreign enemy. That was the plot of Humphrey Bogart's patriotic 1942 movie All through the Night , in which "Runyonesque Broadway gamblers turn patriotic when they stumble onto a cell of Nazi saboteurs," as IMDB summarizes it. The motives for the version underway in Sicily may be somewhat less nationalistic, as Jake Wallis Simon reports in the U.K. Daily Mail :

The feared Cosa Nostra are desperate to maintain supremacy after African crime gangs arrived with the migrants – and they are engaged in a deadly turf war. An innocent Gambian man was shot through the head by an assassin in broad daylight sparking fears of a wider bloodbath.



Scene of the assassination (credit: Roland Hoskins)

The background of this turf war suggests larger stakes:

Mayor Leoluca Orlando told MailOnline: 'Palermo is no longer an Italian town. It is no longer European. You can walk in the city and feel like you're in Istanbul or Beirut.' Immigration to Italy soared by 90 per cent in the first three months of the year. The migrant population in Ballaró, the part of Palermo where the shooting took place, has risen from approximately five to 25 per cent since the migrant crisis began. ... Mobsters claimed that police were targeting their activities while leaving African gangs alone.

Political correctness? Certainly, there is no shortage of that in E.U. But I suspect that fear and habit have as much or more to do with it. Police have a lot of information on Mafiosi and probably little on the immigrants, whose native languages they don't understand and who can hide within the huge immigrant communities of Palermo and other cities.

Sicily was conquered and ruled by Muslims for 75 years more than a thousand years ago, and many of the obstacles to peace and prosperity in Sicily have something to do with resistance to that rule and with the brutality of the re-conquest by Norman crusaders. The very word "mafia" is believed to be derived from the word "ma'afir," an Arabic word meaning "shelter" or "place of refuge."

Stay tuned. Everything that is old is new again, as many in Islam continue to try to conquer Europe and further the global caliphate.