In May 1971, dozens of members of the Jewish Defense League filed into a Brooklyn federal courtroom. Their leader, Meir Kahane, had ostensibly founded the group to combat antisemitism, particularly in the Soviet Union, though it soon became a full-blown Zionist extremist outfit, advocating for the mass expulsion of Arabs from Palestine. The league engaged in vigilantism and violence, leading federal prosecutors to indict Kahane and six of his associates for allegedly trafficking weapons and explosives.

Also into the courtroom walked Joseph Colombo, purported leader of one of the infamous New York City crime families. He brought a crew of his own: members of the Italian American Civil Rights League, which Colombo had founded, supposedly to resist what the group deemed anti-Italian discrimination. (Its most notable advocacy involved scrubbing “defamatory” terms like “Mafia” from popular culture.)

Kahane’s and Colombo’s groups formed what Kahane described as a “brotherhood” to push back against federal “harassment.” As Colombo put it: “We’re defending our people.”

The strange bedfellows found camaraderie in their mutual adherence to a reactionary worldview then pervasive among white American ethnic groups. The Holocaust was a recent memory at the time, as was Anglo-American racism toward Italian immigrants; historical oppression, the logic went, made these men and their causes all but infallible. Their communities had experienced injustice, and it was further injustice to accuse them of brutality, corruption, prejudice, or crime.

Fifty-five years later, Kahane’s movement has made an industry out of that worldview. One of its adherents is Israel’s national security minister. Kahanists have killed Palestinians and pulled American and Israeli Zionism ever violently rightward, often in the name of righting the wrong of Jewish suffering.

This playbook is more or less well-known. Less widely interrogated is how Italian-Americans have deployed it. Many within our community still do, even though few living today can remember a time of significant anti-Italian prejudice in the United States. Their lack of self-awareness borders on the absurd—but it offers valuable insight into the cynical politics of white victimhood.

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The latest embarrassment started earlier this month. As part of a World Cup promotion, the New York City tourism office released a map of some of the five boroughs’ “immigrant enclaves.” The map shows 30 of the most prominent sub-neighborhoods with foreign-born populations, like Queens’s “Little Egypt,” Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti,” and Manhattan’s “Little Senegal.”

Sparing no opportunity to manufacture outrage at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, conservatives whipped up a controversy that the map didn’t honor the white immigrant groups that made up some of the largest foreign-born populations of generations past. Descendants of the founders of the original “Little” were particularly incensed. Even though New York’s Little Italies haven’t housed significant numbers of Italian-born residents in decades—a 2000 census could not find a single resident of Manhattan’s Little Italy that had been born in Italy—members of the local Italian-American establishment complained that the map didn’t pay proper homage to their history.

The most strident complaints were leveled by none other than the leaders of the recently revived Italian American Civil Rights League (IACRL), including Colombo’s grandson. They went on right-wing cable news and published a statement accusing the popular socialist mayor of “cultural erasure.” A New York Post opinion piece went further, simultaneously accusing him of antisemitism and “anti-Italian hate.” Apparently seeing no point in fueling the outcry, Mamdani said the city would update the map.

In traditional media outlets, the IACRL leaders expressed disappointment at being excluded from an accounting of New York City’s immigrant heritage. “There is nothing wrong with celebrating today’s immigrant communities,” they wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Examiner. “Every generation has enriched New York with new cultures, new traditions, new businesses, and new dreams. They deserve to be welcomed, celebrated, and embraced.”

On social media, however, they let their real feelings hang loose. On Elon Musk’s X, the IACRL’s account is a repository of sloppy anti-immigrant screeds. It condemns “third-world Islamists” and demonizes African immigrants. One post baselessly accused “foreigners” and “third-worldists” of committing an unsolved arson for which police hadn’t named a suspect.

Central to the league’s narrative is the idea of Italians as the good, “patriotic” immigrants. They came to the US “the right way,” overcame prejudice, and “assimilated.” While today’s Pakistani immigrants steal business and Somali immigrants protest, Italian immigrants and their descendants stand hand over heart, pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, according to the IACRL.

The narrative is overtly racist and MAGA-friendly. It’s also ahistoric. The story of Italians’ mass migration to the United States is multi-faceted. Many made it their project to climb the nation’s racial hierarchy, establishing Italian-American associations in police departments and creating a mythology around their connection to the continent’s genocidal “founder.” (Christopher Columbus is another sore spot for the IACRL and their allies, who decry his demystification as another form of anti-Italian hate.)

Other Italian immigrants, however, rebelled against US racial capitalism. They organized against big business and were critical to the growth of the labor movement. They also led the US’s anarchist movement, including its violent elements. In fact, those revolutionaries faced the most egregious persecution of Italians in America, but you’ll never hear the people yelling about the New York City map mutter a word about Nicola Sacco or Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Those stories aren’t convenient for conservative descendants of Italian immigrants, who demand both the privileges of occupying America’s top racial caste and deference to the prejudice their ancestors endured before ascending to it. Pay no attention to their own hate. Our people had it worse, they say. They overcame. They made this country; today’s Black and brown immigrants are destroying it.

What a farce. In the same way the brutality of the genocide in Gaza has laid bare the cynical weaponization of antisemitism, hollow cries over “anti-Italian hate” expose Italian-American right-wingers for what they are: anti-immigrant reactionaries trying to launder their own racism by feigning victimhood.