[Xibizopt]

As mentioned earlier:

- Biggest GNP in the world.

- Strongest currency.

- Exports? Europe exports more to the US (much more) than the US exports to Europe.

----

Now, please site official "anti-Roma policies taking place". Be specific... what countries and what laws. I'm interested to hear about them.

[LongaDonga]

Fabrizio, for your benefit:

This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe



Italy's campaign against the Roma has ominous echoes of its fascist past, and the silence of our leaders is deafening

All comments (144)


Seumas Milne

The Guardian,

Thursday July 10, 2008

At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi's new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country's estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to "prevent begging" and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy's three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves", rather than because of their "Gypsy nature".
Official roundups and forced closures of Roma camps have been punctuated with vigilante attacks. In May, rumours of an abduction of a baby girl by a Gypsy woman in Naples triggered an orgy of racist violence against Roma camps by thugs wielding iron bars, who torched caravans and drove Gypsies from their slum homes in dozens of assaults, orchestrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. The response of Berlusconi's government to the firebombing and ethnic cleansing? "That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies," shrugged Maroni; while fellow minister and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi declared: "The people do what the political class isn't able to do."
This, it should be recalled, is taking place in a state that under Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship played a willing part in the Holocaust, during which more than a million Gypsies are estimated to have died as "sub-humans" alongside the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The first expulsions of Gypsies by Mussolini took place as early as 1926. Now the dictator's political heirs, the "post-fascist" National Alliance, are coalition partners in Berlusconi's government. In case anyone missed that, when the Alliance's Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome in April, his supporters gave the fascist salute chanting "Duce" (equivalent to the German "Führer") and Berlusconi enthused: "We are the new Falange" (the Spanish fascist party of General Franco).
So you might have expected that Berlusconi would be taken to task for his vile treatment of the surviving Roma of Europe at the G8 summit in Japan this week by those fearless crusaders for human rights, George Bush and Gordon Brown. Far from it. Instead, Bush's spokesman issued a grovelling apology to the Italian prime minister on Tuesday for a US briefing describing his "good friend" Berlusconi as "one of the most controversial leaders of Italy ... hated by many".
It has been left to others to speak out against this eruption of naked, officially sanctioned racism. Catholic human rights organisations have damned the fingerprinting of Gypsies as "evoking painful memories". The chief rabbi of Rome insisted it "must be stopped now". Roma groups have demonstrated, wearing the black triangles Gypsies were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps, and anti-racist campaigners in Rome this week began to bombard the interior ministry with their own fingerprints in protest against the treatment of the Gypsies. But, given that the European establishment has long turned a blind eye to anti-Roma discrimination and violence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, along with the celebration of SS units that took part in the Holocaust in the Baltic states, perhaps it's no surprise that they ignore the outrages now taking place in Italy.
The rest of us cannot. There are particular reasons why Italy has been especially vulnerable in recent years to xenophobic and racist campaigns - even while crime is actually lower than it was in the 1990s (and below the level of Britain). The scale of recent immigration from the Balkans and Africa, an insecure and stagnant job market and the collapse of what was previously a powerful progressive and anti-fascist culture have all combined to create a particularly fearful and individualistic atmosphere, the leftwing Italian veteran Luciana Castellina argues.
But the same phenomena can be seen to varying degrees all over Europe, where racist and Islamophobic parties are on the march: take the far right Swiss People's party, which on Tuesday succeeded in collecting enough signatures to force a referendum on banning minarets throughout the country. In Britain, as Peter Oborne's Channel 4 film on Islamophobia this week underlined, a mendacious media and political campaign has fed anti-Muslim hostility and violence since the 2005 London bombings - just as hostility to asylum seekers was whipped up in the 1990s. The social and democratic degeneration now reached by Italy can happen anywhere in the current climate.
Italy has a further lesson for Britain and the rest of Europe. Berlusconi's election victory in April was built on the collapse of confidence in the centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which stuck to a narrow neoliberal programme and miserably failed to deliver to its own voters. Meanwhile, centre-left politicians such as Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, pandered to, rather than challenged, the xenophobic agenda of the rightwing parties - tearing down Gypsy camps himself and absurdly claiming last year that 75% of all crime was committed by Romanians (often confused with Roma in Italy).
What was needed instead, as in the case of other countries experiencing large-scale immigration, was public action to provide decent housing and jobs, clamp down on exploitation of migrant workers and support economic development in Europe's neighbours. That opportunity has now been lost, as Italy is gripped by an ominous and retrograde spasm. The persecution of Gypsies is Italy's shame - and a warning to us all.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk

[vernotixas]

Its a forum where opinions are expressed. After having lived in Europe for years, and holding my ear to the railtrack, I can assure you that a critical examination is not the same as either disdain or vitriol.

Suggesting a different pair of pants to someone is different than calling someone a cow while wearing them.

Both may be inherently true, but the mode of delivery of one is unarguably better than the other.

AND more likely to get the individual to see what you are saying without hating you in the process.

There is a growing sense of unease about the Anti Roma policies taking place - everywhere, and when fellow posters (from Europe or elsewhere) point to single issue articles as backing up a one line "analysis" typed on their Toshiba or Sony computer about the rise of Asia, it does nothing more than reinforce my views. Vague reference. Be more specific and cut out the straw herrings (which, coincidentally, seem to be red). Siting one product line as a way of debunking what others have said is not a fair rebuttal. Be more specific and cut out the glib rejoinders. You know what you are doing.

It would be nice just to "talk up" whatever you hold dear, to increase its prominence or ostensible value - like realtors often do. But that would be dishonest. Most of us here want an honest debate. Then provide it. Or do you want a few more stones for your pile?

What will happen when Europe's populations are in decline? Probably nothing - because Europe has already become the worlds greatest retirement village. Please, go further. Where are they retiring? Are kids moving out? You make a broad statement like that and there is nothing to go on. You are inviting argument, not discussion.

What do the European economies actually provide the world, except

Weapons

Design

Tourism

What do they actually make these days that Japan (or Korea for that matter) does not?

Thats not vitriol, thats just reality. Be cool. I am cool. The vitriol is not in the topic, but the dressing you choose to put on it.

You may have valid points to discuss, but using terms like "retirement village" and suggesting that the EU is noly good for the manufacturing of Weapons of Mass Tourism is not really doing more than spraying hairspray on the fire.

Looks amazing but does not really do much to keep the house warm.

I am not asking you to respond to what I am saying. I am not offering much to respond to in the thread of this topic. What I am asking you is to provide a bit more meat on your bones here.

Few people honestly listen to what you say anymore because you seem to hate too much. When someone hates everything about something, it gives their opinion less weight, especially to those that LIKE some of the things/places/people you may have defamed.

Take it as a life lesson. I am sure you know it already. You are a bright person. But just do us all a favor and try to keep everything both in context and in check.

Tell us what you LIKE about England/the EU and how they should do more POSITIVE things to make it even better.

Pulling over to the side of the road to tell a motorist who is changing a tire that he has a flat will not really help things.

And calling him stupid will really make for a fine day out!

[ovH9wfSJ]

Long but very good article from the Economist on the issue. Critical of both sides.

http://www.economist.com/world/europ...ry_id=11579339

Europe's Roma

Bottom of the heap
Jun 19th 2008 | BRUSSELS AND BUCHAREST
From The Economist print edition


AFP

The dismal lives and unhappy prospects of Europe's biggest stateless minority
THE village of Vizuresti lies 35km (22 miles) from Bucharest and on the wrong side of the tracks. For the first few miles the road from the highway is paved, passing through a prosperous district with solid houses and well-tended fields. But once it crosses the railway, leading only to the Roma settlement, the tarmac stops. The way to Vizuresti is 20 minutes of deep potholes and ruts. Life for its 2,500 people, four-fifths of them Roma, is just as tough.



Mihai Sanda and his family, 37 of them, live in half-a-dozen self-built, mud-floored huts. In his two-room dwelling, seven people share one bedroom; chickens cluck in the other room. The dirt and smell, the lack of mains water, electricity, sewerage and telephone are all redolent of the poorest countries in the world. So is the illiteracy. Ionela Calin, a 34-year-old member of Mr Sanda's extended family, married at 15 without ever going to school. Of her eight children, four are unschooled. Two, Leonard, aged four and Narcissa, aged two, do not even have birth certificates; Ionela believes (wrongly, in fact) that she cannot register their birth because her own identity document has expired.
For the millions of Europeans—estimates range between 4m and 12m—loosely labelled as Roma or Gypsies, that is life: corralled into settlements that put them physically and psychologically at the edge of mainstream existence, with the gap between them and modernity growing rather than shrinking. The statistics are shocking: a Unicef report released in 2005 said that 84% of Roma in Bulgaria, 88% in Romania and 91% in Hungary lived below the poverty line. Perhaps even more shocking is the lack of a more detailed picture. Official indifference and Roma reluctance mean that data on life expectancy, infant mortality, employment and literacy rates are sparse. Yet all are deplorably lower than those of mainstream society.



The immediate response to this (as for most of eastern Europe's ills) is to blame history. The lot of the Roma has been miserable for a millennium, ever since their mysterious migration from Rajasthan in northern India sometime around 1000 AD. With the possible exception of a principality in Corfu around 1360, they have never had a state. In parts of the Balkans, Roma were traded as slaves until the middle of the 19th century. Mirroring America's history at the same time, emancipation proved a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for freedom. The Roma of Vizuresti went from being slaves to being landless peasants. Even now, seasonal agricultural labour of the most menial kind is the main source of income; that, and begging.


But a twist of history in the next century meant that Europe's Roma suffered even more than America's blacks. Hundreds of thousands perished in the Nazi Holocaust. Compensation has been stingy, belated and badly administered.


It would be even easier to blame the Roma's plight on communism. Certainly that system largely stamped out the Roma's traditional nomadism. Countries such as Czechoslovakia also practised forced sterilisation (though Sweden did that, too). But the paternalistic structures of state socialism to some extent sheltered, if usually in the most menial jobs, those unable or unwilling to compete in a market economy. And an ostensible commitment to the brotherhood of man restrained at least some racial prejudices. For the Roma, democracy unleashed their fellow-citizens' latent hostility, while capitalism offered them few prospects.



As eastern Europe prospered, the Roma fell further behind. Their surviving traditional skills (handicrafts, horsetrading) were out of date; they lacked the administrative skills to set up businesses in the formal economy; even those wanting to work found few factories or offices willing to employ them. And European Union membership has added a new bureaucratic burden even to the businesses in which they thrive. In Balteni, near Vizuresti, the local Gypsy chieftain or Bulibasha (at the age of 84 himself a Holocaust survivor) runs an immense informal scrapyard, where tractor-trailers, car shells drawn by horses and rickety lorries deliver precariously loaded piles of rusty metal to be sorted and then sold to a nearby metallurgy plant. A vast bonfire of copper cables fills the air with fumes as insulating material is burnt off. A ragged, shoeless workforce of all ages sorts the inventory by hand. There is not a safety notice, a glove or a visor in sight, and it is hard to imagine the business or its illiterate owner managing to cope with any kind of bureaucratic inspection.

Criminal suspicions


The most conspicuous problem for the Roma is lack of education, which keeps them out of jobs. Others include hostility from the majority population, apathy in officialdom, dreadful public services and infrastructure, and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness. It is hardly surprising that many tens of thousands of Roma have moved west in search of a better life. But if they did not fit in well at home, they adjust even worse to life in western Europe. Begging on the street, for example, often with young children, scandalises the citizenry, as do Roma encampments in public spaces such as parks or road junctions. A delegation of top Finnish politicians visiting Romania this month publicly complained. “In Finland, begging is not a job,” the country's president, Tarja Halonen, told her hosts with Nordic hauteur. Maybe not, but for Roma it may be the only choice they have.



West Europeans also tend to believe that Roma migrants are responsible for an epidemic of pickpocketing, shoplifting, mugging—and worse. In Italy, public patience snapped earlier this year after reports of gruesome muggings, rapes and the alleged stealing of a baby. Such reports were not matched by any change in the crime statistics. But coupled with some incendiary statements by the incoming right-of-centre government, they were enough to provoke something close to an anti-Roma pogrom in May in Naples and other cities. Rioters burned Roma caravans and huts; the authorities followed up with arrests and deportations.


West European attitudes differ little in essence from those of the ex-communist bureaucrats in the east. They want the problem to go away. Emma Bonino, a feisty Italian politician and former EU commissioner, says that Roma make a “perfect scapegoat” for politicians who have failed to deal with Italy's other, graver problems. The authorities' response has been milder than their rhetoric suggests, she says, but she laments the lack of any programme to help the Roma integrate into Italian society. The biggest danger, in her view, is that politicians have made anti-Roma racism respectable for the first time: “When you go down that road, you will not stop it just by saying ‘Enough is enough’.”


That is not just a moral cop-out. It is also bad economics. Excluding an Ireland-sized group of millions of people from the labour market, particularly when they typically have much larger families than the average in fast-greying Europe, is a colossal waste of human potential. But those looking for encouraging signs have to hunt hard indeed.
Europe is supposedly in the middle of a “Decade of Roma Inclusion”, launched in 2005 when the governments of the countries with big Roma populations (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia) agreed to close the gap in education, employment, health and housing. Fully €11 billion ($17 billion) is available from the EU's social fund, with a further €23 billion earmarked from the regional development fund in coming years.



Yet the main effect so far has been to create a well-paid elite of Roma lobbying outfits, fluent in bureaucratic jargon, adept at organising seminars and conferences and nobbling decision-makers. It has had little effect on the lives of the Roma themselves. As the Open Society Institute, funded by George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist, says in a recent report, most governments see the answer to the Roma problem in terms of “sporadic measures” rather than coherent policies. An official in Brussels says: “We don't lack the laws and we don't lack the money. The problem is political will.”

Unwillingly to school


Certainly a bit of willpower can work wonders. In Vizuresti, for example, only 6% of the children never go to school at all—a triumph by local standards. But it is still nothing to cheer about. “When the girls reach nine or ten they are ready to get married, and it is shameful for them to come to school,” explains a local, firmly adding that “marriage” in this sense means betrothal, not conjugality. “The boys don't come if they are busy helping their fathers to collect scrap,” he continues, “and the boys drop out at 15 because then they have completed the eighth grade, which you need to get a driving licence.”


In much of eastern Europe Roma children are packed off to special schools for “backward” children, reinforcing stigma and prejudice and guaranteeing that they enter the labour market with a third-class ticket. Another obstacle is the lack of birth certificates: schools that do not want Roma children can simply refuse to register those without official papers. But perhaps the biggest barriers are parental reluctance and poverty. Children in school can't work. They need expensive uniforms and books. It may even be embarrassing if they can read when their parents can't. So why bother?


A well-run country can try to spend large amounts of taxpayers' money on alleviating social problems. The results may be patchy, but at least in western Europe they have got somewhere. Spain, for example, is regarded as a big success story. Its Roma were marginalised and neglected under authoritarian rule; now a mixture of good policy and generous EU funding has brought widespread literacy, better housing and integration in the labour market. But the ex-communist countries have much weaker public administration, and neither politicians nor voters consider Gypsies a priority.


Vizuresti is doing better than most places. Thanks to a charismatic and impressive head teacher, Ion Nila, lack of documents is no barrier to registration at the village school. His teachers go door to door in the mornings, cajoling parents into sending their children to class. The real breakthrough, he says, will come if he can get Roma children to attend the nursery attached to the school. But, says Mr Nila, parents are reluctant to send their young children, as they don't have the money to buy them shoes. He hopes that hot midday meals will be an incentive, if he can find the money to pay for them.


So, at the top, billions of euros are being pumped in; while, at the bottom, a teacher struggles to find the tiny amount needed simply to feed his charges. Indeed, most of the progress in Vizuresti comes not from taxpayers' money, which soaks away into bureaucracy far from the village, but from the work of a charity, Ovidiu Rom, headed by a fiery American philanthropist, Leslie Hawke. The charity, not the state, has paid for and helped with IDs, teacher training, student workbooks and a special summer programme designed to prepare 20 of the poorest children and their often illiterate parents for what seems, to them, scary school life.

Bound only by music


So why is Europe floundering? The conventional answer is that the Roma's biggest problem is racism pure and simple. Enforcement of tough anti-discrimination laws, Roma-friendly curriculums in schools, cultural self-esteem, positive discrimination in both officialdom and private business are the necessary ingredients for change, say the politically correct.
But that is not the whole story. Even defining what “Roma” really means is exceptionally tricky. Europe has plenty of marginalised social groups, often with traditions of nomadism and their own languages: Irish Tinkers, for example, who speak Shelta. Their problems and history may in part be similar to the Roma's, but they are not the same. Even within the broad category of Roma (meaning those with some connection to the original migrants from Rajasthan) the subdivisions are complex. Some prefer not to use the word Roma at all, arguing that “Gypsy”, sometimes thought derogatory, is actually more inclusive. The impressive catalogue to the Roma Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale insists that Roma is too narrow a term, excluding as it does “Sintis, Romunglo, Beas, Gitanes, Manus etc”. Even ethnographers find it hard to nail down the differences and similarities between such groups.


Moreover, those more narrowly defined as Roma have surprisingly little in common. The Roma tongue—originally related to Sanskrit—has splintered into dozens of mutually incomprehensible dialects. The sprinkling of internationally active Roma activists have developed their own version (sometimes derisively known as “NGO Roma”), but it bears little relationship to the creoles still spoken in the settlements. The strongest common culture is traditional Roma music, where it survives. But its haunting chords and rhythms do not conquer tone-deaf bureaucracies.


The boundaries between the marginalised groups and “normal” society are fluid. One reason that a Roma middle class, which supposedly would provide role models, lessen prejudice and increase social and economic mobility, has failed so far to take root is that most Roma who become middle-class drop the “Roma” label at once. Hopes for a change rest on the new generation of thousands of young Roma graduates, who may be less shy about their origins.


Similarly, those not born into the Roma world can end up there—by marriage, adoption or choice. In Balteni, a blonde girl, Roxana, shyly shows off a necklace of seven big gold coins given to her as a mark of impending puberty; not born a Roma, she was adopted from an orphanage into the family of a local patriarch. A Roma—which comes from the Romani word “Rom”, meaning husband—is, ultimately, anyone who wants that label.
Furthermore, as Zoltan Barany, author of a controversial but acute book on the Gypsies of eastern Europe, points out, Roma lobbyists tend not to notice that the Roma's own habits and attitudes may aggravate their plight. Speaking off the record, a westerner engaged in Roma welfare tells the story of an exceptionally talented teenage pupil at her country's top academy. She was bound for university and a stellar career, but her family decided that this was too risky: she was bride-snatched, taken to a remote village, raped and kept in seclusion. From there she was trafficked to western Europe, where she is now in a group of beggars camping out near one of Europe's best-known stadiums. Well-wishers tried to rescue her, offering a safe-house where she could continue her studies; she refused, frightened that her family would find her.


The result of that is what a senior official dealing with the issue calls “self-decapitation”. A handful of Roma politicians have emerged, including a couple of impressive members of the European Parliament. But even their symbolic value is limited. The vast majority of Roma do not even vote in elections, let alone join the campaigns waged on their behalf. There is no sign of a Roma Martin Luther King, let alone a Barack Obama. But, notes the official, “There are lots of angry young men.”


Amid all this, the EU is tottering forward. A report due to be issued next week will criticise the “implementation gap” in the worthy policies conceived so far. It will rebuke governments for slow progress. Controversially, it is likely to say that formal equality before the law is only a starting point, and that American-style positive discrimination will be needed.



That may prove a risky course. As in America, race and a history of slavery make a potent combination, entrenching stereotypes and attitudes on all sides. But also as in America, it is unclear how far the problem is race, and how far it is a matter of poverty and other factors. Stop treating Roma as a racial minority, Ms Hawke argues, and concentrate on the poor level of public services they receive in housing, health and particularly education.
Seeing the problem only through an ethnic lens is great news for the “Roma industry”, as the campaigning groups are sometimes derisively known. Their activities turn all too quickly into a theoretical, nit-picking discussion about politically correct language, complete with internecine feuds between different lobbies. It plays badly with voters, who already tend to blame the Roma for their own misfortunes. In most ex-communist countries, polls show striking degrees of prejudice: as many as 80% of those asked say they would not want Roma neighbours, for example. In Hungary, the commendable idea of integrating Roma and non-Roma children in the same schools has sent parents scurrying elsewhere.


But there are some shoots of hope. One is that the violence in Italy has highlighted the Roma issue in a way that would never have happened if the misery had remained concentrated in the slums and ghettos of eastern Europe. “Just as Putin has galvanised Europe on energy policy, Berlusconi has galvanised Europe on Roma policy,” says Andre Wilkens, a thoughtful Brussels-based observer of the region who heads the Open Society Institute's Roma efforts. He believes that the new member states of the EU have a chance to derive advantage from the Roma by finding an economic niche for them—for example, by turning their tradition of scrap-dealing into the basis for a modern recycling industry.


Such hopeful nibbles abound. But even an optimist would have to concede that Europe's biggest social problem will persist for the lifetime of anyone reading this article, and probably far longer.

[JosephEL]

Thank you for that penetrating revelation, but what do you think of the anti Roma business going on at the moment as identified by Seamus?

PS You can leave your comments about why Fujfilm and Cosina are making Hasselblads and Voightlanders and the general movement of technical mastery of a lot of the worlds industries from old Europe to Japan to another thread. And why did Prada choose LG to make its phones? What would those Koreans know to do?

Nothing has changed in Europe.

Im German and Im better than you, language culture etc. No, Im French and Im better than you. No, Im Italian and Im better than you, language culture blah blah blah.

With that sort of culture, its no wonder the lucky ones left for the New World.

And its no wonder this Anti Roma business is going on now.

[iiilizium]

Don't confude Italy or some other countries with the whole Europe.
Italy is a country of immigration since few years, In 2007 700,000 legal immigrant enters in this country (that's a way more the USA by capita).
Before Italy was a country of emmigration (Italian mainly immigrate in USA, Canada, France, Australia...)
Immigration is a new thing.
Of course it don't excuse this extrem racist policy.

Now there is also country like France or U.K where is immigration is very old.
There is some good and some bad but as a french ethnic minority the good is bigger than the bad.

Just for saying that generalisation are not a good thing, it is exaclty that italian politicts do with Roma.
According some racist sources, most crime are commited by roma, so most roma are criminal.

[softy54534]

Tell us what you LIKE about England/the EU and how they should do more POSITIVE things to make it even better.

The term flogging a dead horse comes to mind Ninja.

After reading Fabrizio's post about the walls built to keep Mexican's and central Americans out of the US, why are certain individuals on this forum pointing a guilty finger at Europe and condemming us for the treatment of Gypsies / immigrants here?

The term 'double standards' comes to mind.

Millions of immigrants have led happy successful lives here, and contributed to their adoptive nation. Problems arise when some of their number refuse to adjust to their new country or try to impose their way of life / religion on others, a particular problem with radical Islam.

[ionitiesk]

Gregory Tenenbaum: I asked if you could post official "anti-Roma policies".
Yet you haven't.

The article you posted sites none. And please: There is no fingerprinting of Roma going on. None. Italy must follow European rule about such things. Gypsy camps destroyed? There are over 700 (!) such camps in Italy alone. Many recieve electricity and water for free from their host communities. Unsanctioned camps will be closed.

As for: "Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma..." This is a gross distortion of a judge's individual ruling in a court case in Verona. As it is his fuling recieved plenty of criticism but it has nothing to do with official policy.

Is there tension in some communities? Yes. Official anti-Roma policies? No.

-----
In the meantime in the US there is a mass arrest of nearly 400 migrant workers:
http://www.latinalista.net/palabrafi...nder_sieg.html

And BTW: I am not criticizing the US's handling of such situations or the Mexican border wall and so forth. The US has a right to protect it's borders. And so do we.
---

Now, I'll ask again, will you please post some specific anti-Roma policy in effect here in Europe.

Thanks.

[dwestemesse]

There are, but because the governments keep changing every 6 months they are never fully carried out.

Italy wins again. Congratulations.

[Mowselelex]

Thank you.

[Feelundseenna]

welcome back, F ...

[BenBoobmers]

There are, but because the governments keep changing every 6 months they are never fully carried out.

Italy wins again. Congratulations.

Let me get this strait.

There are laws and regulations in Italy against Roma, but since they keep changing the rules and laws and regulatory bodies, these laws never get put into effect?


Isn't that saying that THERE ARE NO LAWS against them?




Greg man, you don't do much to help your rep when you post things that can't be backed up, rant on them when challanges, and then spit at the people who proved you wrong as you run away.

Please GT! Drop the bitter old man routine. It may work in person, but it does not translate well online.

[Alexunda]

welcome back, F ...

Dufus!

[XangadsX]

Let me get this strait.

There are laws and regulations in Italy against Roma, but since they keep changing the rules and laws and regulatory bodies, these laws never get put into effect?


Isn't that saying that THERE ARE NO LAWS against them?




Greg man, you don't do much to help your rep when you post things that can't be backed up, rant on them when challanges, and then spit at the people who proved you wrong as you run away.

Please GT! Drop the bitter old man routine. It may work in person, but it does not translate well online.

Allow me to get something straight

Quit the personal attacks

Just a friendly hint.

Italian constitutional law is something that I and many others on this forums wouldnt find easy to understand just by considering it for 5 minutes.

How about settling the hell down and contributing to the topic.

[cliceperperIa]

Allow me to get something straight

Quit the personal attacks

Quit the derogatory, demeaning flame bait.

friendly hint. That is a threat.

constitutional law is something that I and many others on this forums wouldnt find easy to understand just by considering it for 5 minutes. Then don't post a rant on a country that will insult those that live, or come from there, after only looking at it for 5 minutes.

You know what you are doing.

How about settling the hell down and contributing to the topic. You mean flaming Italy? I am telling you the same thing. DISCUSS the topic rather than look for a reaction from people.

[Adollobdeb]

Italy's New Racism

http://www.thenation.com/doc/2009020...tsideaccordian

Rome



Emmanuel Bonsu Foster comes from Ghana. He was 13 when he settled in Italy with his parents. One sunny afternoon in late September, Foster, now 22, was sitting on a park bench in Parma waiting for his classes to begin at a nearby technical institute. Seven men--plainclothed police officers, although he didn't know that--suddenly appeared and knocked him to the ground. They beat and kicked him, beat him some more in the police car, strip-searched him at the station, taunted him with "monkey" and "negro," took Abu Ghraib-style photos of the cowering "criminal" and finally, after six hours, released him. His left eye was hemorrhaging, and he was carrying an envelope with his personal effects on which the cops had scrawled "Emmanuel Negro." It seemed Foster wasn't a pusher, after all. He was just black.

Once upon a time, this Catholic country prided itself that Italians were brava gente, good people, tolerant. No more. The right's snarling emphasis on "security" in the run-up to last April's elections (for "security," read: "protecting Italians from immigrants and Gypsies") sent a message that police have been quick to act on. Muslim immigrants should go "piss in their own mosques" was how the notorious deputy mayor of Treviso, Giancarlo Gentilini of the racist, xenophobic Northern League, put it. When Minister for Reforms Umberto Bossi remarked that Italians don't want "the Bingo Bongos" living here, the barroom racism of the third Berlusconi government was official.
Small wonder, then, that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, during a press conference with Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on November 6, felt emboldened to make his little barroom joke too. "He's young, handsome and deeply tanned," quipped Silvio of the newly elected Barack Obama. If what the Italian press reported is true, it took many days of patient diplomacy before Berlusconi could finally have his routine congratulatory phone call with Obama.



There's an abyss in Italy these days between the many who think Berlusconi's a riot--and those who understand that Obama's victory means "the default mode is no longer white," as one commentator here put it. Hundreds of Italians posted "not in my name" messages on the web against Berlusconi's casual racism. Demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci, who has argued eloquently for the many benefits of immigration, observed that Obama's multicultural example will surely be good for Italy, which needs, he said, that evolution "brought about by integration and the blending of different social and ethnic groups."
"The shock waves from across the Atlantic" will change a lot of things, wrote the distinguished opinionist Barbara Spinelli in La Stampa, "and not only in politics, but in habits and public language." The xenophobe, she added, is "a creature of Spinoza's doleful passions: resentment, fear that voids the future, inability to hope or even to desire.... An Obama victory [is] good not only for America and not only because he is black...but because he shakes up that stasis that makes every civilization stagnate and perish."



Nevertheless, with just one Afro-Italian in Parliament, Jean-Léonard Touadi, and very few foreign-born Italians in its political class, Italy is struggling to represent the 4 million foreigners--6.7 percent of the population--who live and work in this country. These include people like the farmworkers in the tomato fields of Puglia, who labor in virtual bondage and sometimes disappear forever. Like the six Africans gunned down on the street by Camorra mobsters in Castel Volturno north of Naples one day this past fall, just to warn blacks there was no place for them in the drug trade. All those whose lives are made precarious by the so-called Bossi-Fini immigration law (named after Northern League chief Bossi and Gianfranco Fini of the "post-Fascist" National Alliance), which instantly transforms the legal immigrant who loses a job into an illegal immigrant, subject to immediate expulsion or else to serious exploitation as a shadow worker. Now the government is planning segregated schools for the children of immigrants, so they too can be shadow Italians. When the Northern League recently thundered against building new mosques, the only authority who spoke up in favor of Muslim immigrants was Milan Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi--and he was immediately dismissed as a "communist."
Although immigrants have little political voice, Italy does have a small but influential group of foreign-born intellectuals and public figures. These include writers like Algerian-born Amara Lakhous, author of Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, and actor-playwright Moni Ovadia, born in Bulgaria, who brings his Jewish identity to bear on Italian racism against groups like the Romany. But then there is Egyptian-born Magdi Cristiano Allam, a 2008 convert to Christianity and conservative editorialist for Corriere della Sera, who recently launched a political party, Protagonists for Christian Europe. As the party name suggests, Allam, born Muslim, is now a crusader against multiculturalism and radical Islam, a true believer in Europe's Christian roots.
In his witty, exhilarating "what if" novel of 2008, L'inattesa piega degli eventi (An Unexpected Turn of Events), Enrico Brizzi brilliantly sums up the dusty, antiquated and ferociously reactionary attitudes of today's right, describing an Italy of 1960 in which Mussolini, having made peace with the Allies, has reached a ripe old age along with his Fascist government and its African colonies. While the mainland is frozen in a time warp along with its senile Duce, anti-Fascist revolt is brewing among the Ethiopian underclass...



Were it not for the patient work of historian Angelo Del Boca, Italians would know little about their brutal treatment of Africans in the past. Del Boca's 2005 book, Italiani, brava gente?, documents the mass slaughters--graves with as many as a thousand bodies have been uncovered--the use of chemical weapons and other atrocities the Italian army committed in the 1930s to subdue the tough Abyssinian and Libyan resistance. The hard questions that Germans have asked themselves about Nazism, or Americans about slavery, have never been asked here.
Yet perhaps these crimes do linger in the murky recesses of the collective unconscious. It's at least one way to explain the knee-jerk racism of "Bingo Bongos," the weird continued popularity of the obscenely jolly Fascist song "Faccetta Nera" (Little Black Face). But you have to wonder: does the Berlusconi government really not understand that in a world in which Barack Obama is president of the United States, a G-8 country that pursues racist policies risks becoming a pariah nation?
* * *
Emmanuel Bonsu Foster needed an operation to save his eye. He has received many death threats and is seeing a psychologist, unable to go back to work or his studies. At least he's alive, unlike Abdul Salam Guibre. Born in Burkina Faso, naturalized an Italian citizen, Guibre, 19, died in Milan in September. Two owners of a mobile street bar, father and son, beat him to death because they thought he had stolen a packet of biscuits.
Racism, they insisted, had nothing to do with it.

____________________________________________

I have seen on this very thread, and in other places, the reluctance of many Italians to even acknowledge an issue much less deal with it.
Deny, Deny, Deny. And after denying, just point the finger at some other country's shortcomings.
Say something about racism or intolerance in Italy (or any other country in Europe) and all you will get are statements about America.

[arriplify]

Italy does not want to become 'multi-ethnic' says Silvio Berlusconi


Previous Left-wing governments had "opened the doors to clandestine migrants coming from other countries, with an idea of a multi-ethnic Italy," Mr Berlusconi said.
But that kind of society was "not our idea", he added, as he sought to reassure Italians who were alarmed at the number of immigrants pouring into the country, particularly from eastern Europe and Africa.



The prime minister's vision of Italy was condemned by the centre-Left opposition. "Yes, Mr Premier, we have a different idea of Italy: multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free," said Giovanna Melandri, of the Democratic Party.
"A country in which the colour of your skin, or race or religion doesn't matter, but, rather, honesty and sincerity of heart do." Since launching a tough new policy on boat people last week, Italy has turned back six boats carrying a total of 1,500 immigrants and asylum seekers which were trying to reach the country's southernmost outpost, the island of Lampedusa.
The vessels were escorted back to Libya, the most popular jumping off point for clandestine immigrants, by the Italian coast guard and navy.



The boat people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and the Horn of Africa, trek across the Sahara and pay people smugglers thousands of pounds in the hope of securing a new life in Europe.
In the past, Italy would accept the immigrants and take them to the mainland for processing and identification before deciding whether to grant them asylum or some other form of protection.
The new approach was condemned by the UN's refugee agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Vatican and Italian opposition MPs, who called it "a disgrace".


Mr Berlusconi, 72, dismissed the criticism, saying that from now on only those who met conditions for political asylum and set foot on Italian soil would be allowed into the country.


"I see no scandal," he said. "It's clear that in the sea we will lend assistance" to boat people. When migrants were rescued in international waters, Italy had the right not to take them in, he said.


On Sunday another boat, this time carrying 240 immigrants, was stopped by Italian patrol boats and escorted back to Libya.


The interior minister, Roberto Maroni, who is a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, part of the ruling coalition, hailed the return of migrants as "historic".


He added that the "get-tough policy will continue as long as the boats set out" from the North African coast.


The government also has plans to force doctors and teachers to go to the authorities if they suspect their patients or pupils are illegal immigrants. Previous Left-wing governments had "opened the doors to clandestine migrants coming from other countries, with an idea of a multi-ethnic Italy," Mr Berlusconi said.


The prime minister's vision of Italy was condemned by the centre-Left opposition. "Yes, Mr Premier, we have a different idea of Italy: multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free," said Giovanna Melandri, of the Democratic Party.
"A country in which the colour of your skin, or race or religion doesn't matter, but, rather, honesty and sincerity of heart do." Since launching a tough new policy on boat people last week, Italy has turned back six boats carrying a total of 1,500 immigrants and asylum seekers which were trying to reach the country's southernmost outpost, the island of Lampedusa.
The vessels were escorted back to Libya, the most popular jumping off point for clandestine immigrants, by the Italian coast guard and navy.

[Lxbsvksl]

The US had decades of strife because of these issues, Italy and the rest of Europe will too. It's only natural.

This country has gone from an insignificant immigrant population to a genuine presence in only 5 years or so. Italy has so many success stories with immigration and is generally doing a good job (considering it is starting from zero in a sense)... and most of the recent immigrants that I know will agree.

Probably more than most on this thread I'm in personal contact daily recent immigrants... the Albanian guys I shop fruit and vegetables in the piazza who are genuine friends, my Romanians friends (construction) I have lunch with a couple of times a week, the Albanian brothers who sell used furniture who sometimes join us, the Romanian lady I buy bread from, the Cuban sisters who have one of the most successful pastry shops in town (authentically Italian recipes). I helped an Albanian family with the Caritas (Catholic Charities) taking them there and acting as interpreter. So I do have some experience in seeing what that's like. And the list goes on.

Although my home and work is like most urban professionals, you guys won't believe it but my friends and social life are overwhelmingly lower working class. It is my taste and my choice.

So I hear stories constantly and everyone I know is happy with their decision to immigrate here.

Berlusconi: he's a good 30 percent ridiculous... but his effort to protect Italy's borders are excellent.... the clandestine immigrants must be turned back. The gypsy camps must be dismantled. I agree with many of his immigration policies: including free health care on demand... no questions asked.

_____


This is a fascinating article about Prato's (Florence) Chinatown... illustrating the positive and the negative:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...,1337042.story

[arerrurrY]

the clandestine immigrants must be turned back.

I agree with this, no country should be forced to receive immigrants within its borders at any time.

[ensuppono]

Anti-immigrant and Europhobic – far right parties ride populist wave

In Europe's biggest port, where nearly half the population of 600,000 is of immigrant origin, Geert Wilders appears to be knocking on an open door.The platinum-blond, Islam-baiting populist is soaring in opinion surveys in the Netherlands, hammering the anti-immigration message to double his ratings this year to the point where his Freedom party is challenging to be the strongest in the country, according to a leading weekly tracking poll.


Wilders' acolytes are also poised to enter the European parliament for the first time after elections for the EU's sole democratically elected institution, covering 375 million people across 27 countries, take place next week.


"He's a clown, crazy," said Aarjen Heida, a Rotterdam banker, of the *iconoclast banned from Britain for "hate speech" and facing trial in the Netherlands. "But he's dangerous. A lot of people will vote for him. People are unhappy with the way things are going here and often that has to do with foreigners."


Hans Oole, a retired Rotterdam food engineer, insisted he would not vote for Wilders next week. "I don't like the way he says things. But sometimes he's right. Most Dutch people are really afraid of Islam and it is coming all over."


According to city statistics, ethnic Dutch residents will be a minority in Rotterdam within a few years. At present just over one third of children under 14 are ethnically Dutch. Wilders, who likens Islam to fascism and the Qur'an to Mein Kampf, exploits such figures to argue that the Netherlands is being swamped by immigration. He also hates the EU, pledging to try to abolish the European parliament when his party *colleagues take their seats in July. He hopes to win five of the 25 Dutch seats.


Wilders' success represents, in part, a souring of traditional Dutch enthusiasm for the EU. It also appears symptomatic of a broader insurrectionary mood across Europe that is expected to favour extremists, *mavericks and populists in the voting taking place over four days from next Thursday. Overt racism and the calculated use of Nazi language are featuring in what is otherwise a lacklustre campaign.


In Austria, the hard-right Freedom party of Heinz-Christian Strache, tipped to take up to 20% of the vote, is pandering openly to antisemitism. "A veto of *Turkey and Israel joining the EU," declare the party posters despite the fact that Israel, unlike Turkey, is not negotiating to join.


Last week in the Czech Republic, state television broadcast a campaign slot from the small, fascist National party calling the large Roma community "parasites" and echoing Nazi formulation of the Holocaust policy from 1942 by demanding "a final solution of the Gypsy question".


The party is not expected to get into the European parliament, but in *Hungary the far-right Jobbik, which boasts black-shirted paramilitaries and maintains relations with the British National party, has been using Auschwitz slogans and running a lurid anti-Gypsy campaign.


It, like the BNP, could make an electoral breakthrough and win a seat in the parliament which is sited alternately and at great cost in Strasbourg and Brussels.


If the far right is making inroads, the hard left, too, may benefit from the disenchantment with mainstream parties, notably in two of the core EU countries, Germany and France.


The new anti-capitalist party of a postman Trotskyist, Olivier Besancenot, is predicted to win around 10% of the vote in France, while the New Left in *Germany – former East German communists allied with West German social democratic defectors – could do likewise. Both *parties' gains will hurt the mainstream social democrats.


The chances of the Europhobic extremists entering the parliament are strengthened by the wretched turnout expected next week.
"The low turnout means that those who do vote have very strong opinions.

That will bring in more extremist politicians," said Sara Hagemann, a Danish analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels. "You'll see a lot of protest *voters in Europe and a lot of apathy towards political elites."
The lack of interest in the election, or protesting by abstaining, could spell a *crisis of legitimacy for the parliament and of credibility for the EU more broadly.


It is virtually certain that voters will stay away in record numbers, making participation the lowest since voting for the parliament started 30 years ago.


A Eurobarometer poll predicts a turnout of 34%, more than 10 points down on 2004, but that may prove to be optimistic since the pollsters have consistently overestimated participation rates.


A poll-tracking study being run by the London School of Economics and *Trinity College Dublin predicts a turnout of around 30%, meaning that more than two out of three voters across the EU will boycott the ballot.


"The risk of abstention is that it allows Eurosceptics and extremists to take over our debate and our future," José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, warned recently.


Mobilising voters is made more difficult by the fact that the election does not decide a government, nor are the 736 MEPs elected able to initiate European laws, reinforcing the popular notion that the parliament is a remote, irrelevant talking shop.


In fact, voter turnout is in inverse proportion to the parliament's growing powers. Turnout has fallen in each of the seven elections since 1979, while every treaty reshaping the way the EU is run has increased the parliament's clout. It now has a say in shaping around 75% of European law.


From next year, if the Lisbon treaty is implemented following a second referendum in Ireland in October, it will be empowered to "co-decide" almost all European laws, making the parliament one of the big winners of the Lisbon streamlining reforms.


In what already looks like a doomed attempt to combat indifference and drum up interest in the ballot, the parliament itself – as opposed to the competing parties – has hired a German PR firm and spent some €18m (£15.6m) of European taxpayers' money trying to sell the election.


"Come on! It's just a few minutes, maybe you can combine [voting] with a walk in the park or a drink in a cafe. Not much effort to tell Europe what you want," pleads the parliament propaganda.


It is falling on closed ears. The *lavish spending only compounds the *parliament's problems, reinforcing the conviction that MEPs are either wasting taxpayers' money or pocketing it.


With around 9,000 candidates running for the 736 seats and with each national ballot turning on the idiosyncrasies of 27 vastly different countries, variations in voting behaviour will be marked.


In Germany, for example, the poll will be analysed closely for what it portends for the general election in September, Europe's most important political contest this year.


In France, it is likely to be seen as a referendum on two years of President Nicolas Sarkozy, while in Italy, the election will be scrutinised to see if Silvio Berlusconi's marital breakdown is damaging his popularity.


Despite the national variations, trans-national trends are discernible as voters look like venting their anger on incumbents because of the economic crisis, and growing unemployment.


The French, Italian, and Polish governments may be the big exceptions to this trend. But Euroscepticism, previously a British and, to a lesser extent, a Scandinavian characteristic, is spreading even into the historical heartland of the EU, such as the Netherlands.


"The Dutch have become very cantankerous. It's very sad," said a senior EU official. "They've gone from being the most pro-European country to one of the most anti-European."


While Wilders pledges to destroy the EU "from within", the hard-left Socialist party's pitch is for "more Netherlands, less Brussels". And among the centrist parties in government in the Netherlands, there is little positive being said about Brussels or the EU. "Even among the non-extreme parties, scepticism has crept in," said Hagemann.


Leading this new movement of Eurosceptics and seeking to establish it as a more powerful transnational political force in Europe are David Cameron's Conservatives, who are pledged to end two decades of alliance with the mainstream European centre-right (the European People's party) and form a new caucus of European Conservatives.


The entry of several dozen extremists and populists will make the parliament a more raucous, bad-tempered place, but will not substantively affect the balance of power between Christian Democrats, social democrats and liberals.


But Cameron's move should have more impact. He has been helped by the entry of central European countries in 2004. He will depend on rightwingers from Poland and the Czech Republic and a few other countries to set up the new grouping, which will signify the biggest change in the new five-year parliament.


The LSE-Trinity College study predicts more than 60 seats from up to nine countries for the new Conservative caucus, making it the fourth biggest in the parliament. It will be loud in its condemnation of the Lisbon treaty and will campaign for the "repatriation" of powers from Brussels to national capitals.


"We will be very united in limiting European power," said Konrad Szymanski, a Polish MEP from the rightwing Law and Justice party which will supply the second biggest bloc of MEPs after the British.


The election will usher in a busy few months at the top of European politics – Barroso's expected renomination as head of a new commission a fortnight later at a European summit; a German election; an Irish referendum; and probably a contest for the two plum posts of first European president and foreign minister.


But the low turnout and predicted gains for anti-Europeans will get this burst of high-powered politicking off to a bad start.