Nuoro (Italy) Silvio Berlusconi: anti-Semites joke of the premier

"You know that one about the concentration camp?" He asked. and now, pressing "A kapos says: 'For you I have good news and a less one. Half of you will be transferred to another camp'. At this point all shout hooray and ask what is the bad news. 'The less good is that part of you to be transferred is the one that goes from here down ', and in saying this marks from the waist down. "

ROME: Less than 48 hours after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi pledged to put 30,000 soldiers on the streets to fight crime, his defense minister said Monday that the measure was merely hypothetical for the moment and "would probably not be operative for some time."

The prime minister, who won election last year promising to crack down on crime, said Sunday that he would increase the military presence in cities after a recent series of rapes. About 3,000 soldiers have been patrolling with regular police officers since August, assisting them in fighting petty crime and illegal immigration.

But though the measure was aimed at reassuring the public that he would tackle crime, Berlusconi also irritated a large segment of the country when he quipped that the army might not be up to the anti-rape task because there are so many attractive women in Italy that it would be impossible to protect them all from sexual abuse.

"We would have to have as many soldiers as beautiful women, and I don't think that would be possible," he said.

Opposition leaders and others called the remarks insensitive and in bad taste. Berlusconi retorted that he had merely wanted to compliment Italian women. Rape, he said, "is an indignity."

Crime statistics for the past six months - when soldiers first joined police officers on patrol as part of "Operation Safe Streets" - have not been compiled, the Interior Ministry said.

But members of the opposition accuse the government of using crimes like the rapes, which were much covered by the media, to propose high-profile but ineffective solutions. Several immigrants, for example, were attacked after the rape cases became public.

Marco Minniti, who focuses on the Interior Ministry for the center-left Democratic Party, said Italy has a half-dozen police forces that have been subjected to considerable budget cuts, so there was no need to turn to professional soldiers.

"It creates a problem all around," Minniti said, adding that the costs of a military operation would be better spent on the police forces.

Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa said in a television interview Monday that the government proposal required further evaluation.

"It's clear that the armed forces couldn't come up with such a large number of soldiers overnight," he said, the ANSA news agency reported.