In these days of tension and hope for the fate of Cecilia Sala, we have returned to talking about the Enrica Lexie case of 2012, better known as the case of the two marines Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone.

In fact, a tweet and a Facebook post were brought out that Sala, 18 years old at the time of the tweet and 20 years old when she expressed herself on Facebook, wrote on the judicial case of the two Italian soldiers: in short, Sala argued that we should let the two marines were tried in India, as we would have demanded with reversed roles if Indian soldiers had accidentally killed “Salvini’s greengrocer or newsagent in Val Pusteria”.

Saving two people, risking your own reliability, means putting many more in danger. #marò | #diplomacy

— Cecilia Sala (@ceciliasala) March 11, 2013

These statements by Cecilia Sala were brought out especially among right-wing politicians, such as the former Northern League minister Gian Marco Centinaio, who shared a post on his Facebook profile in which he stated that “we are not like her and we will do everything to save her “. Still better than some of the comments on Centinaio’s post (but there are hundreds of the same tenor) in which it is argued that “Let’s leave her there so she can think about it another time before opening her mouth”, “If they put you in jail, a there’s a reason, so you have to stay there” and in any case it’s not right that the State pays to free a woman who went looking for her (who knows why when something tragic happens to a woman there’s always someone who says that he went looking for it).

From our point of view, in addition to underlining the elegance with which Latorre himself said, in an interview with Il Giornale, that he did not feel resentment for those words written “due to his political prejudice or because of his young age”, we would like to point out two things about this comparison: that Cecilia Sala was wrong to write those social posts, and that those who compare the story of the two marines to that of the journalist are, alternatively, either in bad faith or heavily clouded by their own prejudices ( or from your own ignorance).

Because Cecilia Sala was wrong to write those posts

The mistake that Cecilia Sala made in writing that tweet and that post about the two marines is the same one that we all make or have made many times: expressing a clear and unappealing judgment on a topic about which we do not know enough.

It is no coincidence that similar thoughts expressed more recently by the journalist were not dredged up: because evidently experience has taught her to measure words, something that at twenty years old we almost never do.

That judicial and diplomatic case was much more complex than what many still think today, and dismissing the issue with “you shot two innocent Indian fishermen so now you have to stay in prison in India for the time that a local judge will decide” It’s simplistic and unfair.

Because it makes no sense to compare Cecilia Sala to the two marines

However, you don’t need long experience in politics to understand that Cecilia Sala’s case is enormously different from that of Latorre and Girone. So different that it would even be offensively superfluous to point it out, if there weren’t even former ministers who risk the comparison.

First of all, we must take into consideration the difference between the two countries, India and Iran. According to the OECD classification, India’s risk index is 3, while Iran’s is 7, the maximum possible. Therefore, if it is true that in both countries there are sociopolitical contexts of danger, there is a notable difference between a democracy, although not free from defects (none is), such as India, and a theocracy in which one ends up in prison (or worse) if you publicly criticize the government or if you are a woman and go around without a veil.

The second, substantial difference between the Sala and Marò cases concerns precisely the reasons that led to the incarceration of our compatriots in a foreign land.

That is, on the one hand, the killing of two fishermen accidentally mistaken for pirates (in an area of ​​the world where pirate attacks are not the stuff of nineteenth-century novels, so there is nothing to joke about) who wanted to attack an Italian oil tanker which the marine riflemen were escorting.

On the other hand, we don’t even know what the journalist is accused of other than a generic “having violated Islamic laws”: she probably expressed public opinions unwelcome to the Tehran regime, or went around without a veil. But in reality she was only arrested in retaliation after the arrest in Italy of an Iranian engineer on a US warrant.

We repeat: on the one hand two soldiers who accidentally killed some fishermen while carrying out their service protecting an Italian oil tanker, on the other a journalist who at most spoke out against a regime and who is in prison as a pawn in exchange for hostages. And this should also clarify the ideas of those who make another improper comparison, the one with Ilaria Salis.

Now, reiterating that the very young Sala was wrong to settle the issue of Latorre and Girone in the way she did, with what courage, ignorance or contempt for the ridiculous can the two cases be compared, even worse to say that the marines were more deserving more helpful than Sala is now? Maybe it would be better to delete certain posts, before someone brings them up in a few years without even being able to come up with the justification of naivety motivated by tender age.