[hacyOrgachbic]

June 25, 2008
Abroad
Italy Gives Cultural Diversity a Lukewarm Embrace
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/ar...r=1&ref=travel

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ROME — An exhibition of art from India was being installed here the other morning, at the Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. Beyond the mah-jongg, Chinese music and Andean ritual dancing displays, Putli Ganju; Juliette Fatima Imam; and Juliette’s mother, Philomina Tirkey Imam, were hanging their paintings of animals and fish.

“You’re not my type,” the elder Ms. Imam said. She was explaining the meaning behind her work — simple, hieratic and airy — of a bird turning away from a deer. Ms. Ganju’s scene of jungle life, next to it, was more elaborate, with curlicues and filigree.

“We’re from different tribes,” Ms. Imam said, “and in her case everything is mixed up, and in mine everything is separate.”

Ms. Ganju, a small, silent woman wearing a colorful sari, smiled benignly.

Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial. The latest Italian government came to power two months ago on a platform promising to crack down on illegal foreigners, who immigration opponents here say are associated with crime. Last month the Italian police arrested hundreds of migrants living in shantytowns. Vigilantes attacked Gypsy encampments near Naples in May after reports of a 16-year-old Gypsy girl’s trying to steal a baby.

All across Europe attitudes are stiffening toward immigration, nowhere more so than here. About eight million illegal immigrants are estimated to live in the European Union. This past week the union’s parliament passed tough rules for expelling and detaining them. And here, the far right wing of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s new government has just proposed one of the strictest anti-immigration laws on the Continent, provoking heated opposition from human-rights organizations, the Vatican, the United Nations and also Italian prosecutors fearing courts swamped by criminal cases.

But with plummeting birth rates and an aging populace, Italy can hardly survive now without foreign laborers. Albanians and Romanians care for the elderly. Indians working in Emilia-Romagna tend the cows producing the milk for Parmesan cheese.

The problem is that fears about crime by immigrants, inflamed by the news media and populist politicians, have combined with one of the largest waves of foreigners in Europe. The Northern League, a political party that once advocated the secession of Italy’s north, joined Mr. Berlusconi’s ruling coalition this spring after distributing posters around cities like Siena showing an American Indian next to a warning that Italians will end up, as the Indians did, penned into reservations if they don’t stop immigrants from taking over the country.

Here in Rome the first conservative mayor in years, Gianni Alemanno, won on a similar platform that advocated being tough on crime and illegal immigration. He has said almost nothing about culture and the arts, except that he would be cutting funds to the city’s summer festival. Nobody can remember the last time an incoming mayor of Rome had entered office without some big, unaffordable cultural scheme.

Rome, an ancient magnet for foreigners, is naturally more integrated than most Italian cities and, unlike most of the country, it has taken at least a few steps in recent years to come to terms with its multicultural reality, among them instituting a public library program to reach immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign cultures. The question now is whether such efforts will continue.

“We always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is our present and future,” said Franco Pittau, an official of Caritas, a Roman Catholic social service and development association that, among other things, monitors immigration here.

Franca Eckert Coen echoed that remark. An Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with Jewish art, she was in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ms. Coen recalled a year when Chinese celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

“The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,” she said. “So we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year.”

“It was the same with the Sikhs,” she added. “We had a public event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example, had someone play Polish music at the museum.”

“Little things,” she called them. “They can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a positive.”

Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now. It subsists on an all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music. Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a spaghetti-with-ragú diet now that an intercultural city program to serve one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the nutritional value of falafel and curry.

People here remember the last time the Italian government promised to deal with illegal foreigners, in 2002. Expulsions, 45,000 that year, dropped to 23,000 by 2006, while 640,000 new immigrants were legalized as part of the largest one-time legalization in the history of Europe. You could say that Italy, in its paradox, is going through the sort of culture shock the United States experienced a century ago, when millions of Italians, among others, immigrated to America. Romanians now make up the fastest-growing immigrant population here. There were 75,000 at the end of 2001. Since then, hundreds of thousands have arrived.

Romanians also account for 5.7 percent of the prison population. More than a third of all prisoners in Italy are foreigners. Foreigners are charged with 68 percent of rapes, 32 percent of thefts.

Politicians and the news media have latched onto this connection, trumpeting calamities like the murder last fall of a 47-year-old Italian woman, Giovanna Reggiani, near a Gypsy shantytown, leading to a spate of anti-Gypsy racism. But, in fact, crime overall has not risen since 1991. Thefts have gone up, but murders are down, to 620 last year, from 1,695 in 1990.

Gabriella Sanna directs a multicultural library program here, which was started on a shoestring budget of about $120,000 in 1997. Today it survives on less, she said. It began by collecting Italian translations of world fiction and other foreign books and organizing school visits by first- and second-generation immigrants to teach Italian children about different cultures.

Then, as the immigrant population boomed, it started buying books in Romanian, Polish, Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Chinese. Foreign-language sections opened in nearly a dozen libraries where immigrants lived. Some 8 percent of foreigners, Ms. Sanna estimated, now use the public libraries in Rome.

She was diplomatic when the conversation turned to the recent election and whether her program would survive. “This is a new experience for us because we’ve always worked in a favorable climate,” Ms. Sanna said. Her dour expression suggested she wasn’t optimistic.

Across town, at the Indian art show, where the three artists discussed their work, the museum was empty. It occupies a sunny Modernist marvel from the late Fascist days on the outskirts of the city center. The place, devoted to foreign cultures, is splendid but underfinanced and underappreciated. Roman schoolchildren are dragged there on class trips, then fail ever to go back. Their parents, if asked about the last time they visited, look like guilty relatives reminded of a kindly aunt they haven’t checked on in years.

Ms. Imam’s daughter, in her 20s, the most Westernized of the three Indian women, hearing her two elder colleagues describe their pictures, piped in. “I learned from my mother and from Putli,” she said. More complicated than the others, her painting suggested a melting pot. It was full of shapes and figures. At the center were two birds, entwined.

She gazed at them, letting the message sink in.

“Two birds,” she said. “In India, we say if you see two birds together, it is good luck.”

[goctorsurger]

This aricle is older but relates to the one above. All over Europe, immigration is forcing Europeans to deal with issues resulting from a departure from monoculture. I think it's a fascinating topic to explore.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3940192.ece

Gypsy shanty towns burn in Naples as Italian police swoop on illegal immigrants

Firemen hose down a camp of Roma people that was set on fire on the outskirts of Naples
Richard Owen in Naples
Italian police began a nationwide round-up of nearly 400 illegal immigrants from the Balkans and North Africa yesterday in the midst of a series of arson attacks on Roma gypsy camps in the suburbs of Naples.

The first step in a drive on crime promised by the new centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi targeted temporary encampments on the outskirts of cities from Naples to northern Italy. Some 118 people held in the operation were ordered to be expelled immediately for offences ranging from drug dealing and robbery to prostitution.

But in Naples local people have anticipated the new policy, taking the law into their own hands.

This week’s assaults on Roma shanty towns by scores of youths on scooters and motorbikes wielding iron bars and throwing Molotov cocktails were sparked off by the capture of a 17-year-old Roma girl who last weekend entered a flat in Ponticelli and tried to steal a 6-year-old girl. Chased by the mother and neighbours, she had to be rescued by police from being lynched.

The city erupted in fury, with local women leading the marches on the Roma camps to the chant of “Fuori, fuori [Out, out]”. Night after night young men — allegedly acting on the orders of powerful local clans of the Camorra, the Naples Mafia — have set the sites ablaze, blocking attempts by the fire brigade to put out the fires, with exploding gas canisters completing the destruction. The women jeered at the firemen, shouting, "You put these fires out, we start them again”.

Plumes of smoke were still rising yesterday from the smouldering, blackened ruins of a Roma gypsy camp attacked and burnt to the ground by local vigilantes in Ponticelli, a rundown industrial suburb in the east of Naples in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.

The charred remains of the makeshift wooden shacks at the site on Via Malibran crunch underfoot. The only sign of life is dogs scavenging through the neighbouring mountain of uncollected, rotting rubbish.

There are similar scenes of devastation at camps nearby, including one in the incongruously named Via Virginia Woolf. At one squalid “nomad camp” beneath a motorway flyover, intact but deserted, a policeman guarding the site said that the inhabitants had fled during the night to avoid being attacked.

The signs of hasty panic were everywhere, with doors to the shacks left open and the ground strewn with clothing, shoes, bicycles, plastic bottles, pots and pans and children’s toys.

Hundreds of Roma families have fled for their lives with their belongings piled on to small pick-up trucks or handcarts. Some have been taken under police protection to a former school used to house illegal immigrants in a northern Naples suburb. Others have found refuge at Roma camps elsewhere in the Campania region, while a few have been taken in by Naples residents shocked at this outbreak of “xenophobia”.

The Naples arson attacks, however, are the result of long-festering anger throughout Italy over rising crime levels and urban degradation, much of it blamed on Roma gypsies and the estimated half a million Romanians who have emigrated to Italy since Romania joined the European Union.

According to the Roma rights group, Opera Nomadi, there are 2,500 Roma in Naples, 1,000 from Romania and 1,500 from the Balkans. A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) drew parallels with Roma people forced to flee from the Balkans, saying: “We never thought we’d see such images in Italy.”

In Rome, where Gianni Alemanno, the new right-wing mayor, has vowed to dismantle “nomad camps” to reduce street crime, police raided a Roma camp, loading the inhabitants on to buses and taking them to detention centres. Mr Alemanno has promised to deport 20,000 illegal immigrants.

Today the Berlusconi Cabinet will approve an emergency “security package” drawn up by Robert Maroni, the new Interior Minister and deputy leader of the anti immigrant Northern League. It includes the dismantling of Roma camps, the appointment of “special commissioners” to deal with “the Roma problem” in Rome and Milan, the tightening of border controls and the speeded-up deportation of immigrants who cannot show they have a job or an “adequate” income. Mr Maroni also wants to make illegal immigration a criminal offence.

Mr Berlusconi vowed during last month’s election campaign to curb illegal immigrants, describing them as an “army of evil”. Mr Berlusconi has also pledged to hold a Cabinet meeting in Naples next Wednesday to resolve the continuing rubbish crisis amid fears of an epidemic as warmer weather arrives.

Yesterday Flora Martinelli, the mother who caught the Roma teenager trying to steal her baby at Ponticelli, said she was “very sorry for what has happened. I didn’t think it would come to this”.

But she said, “We have absolutely had it with the Roma, they have to go.” At one of the few remaining nomad camps, terrified Roma people were reluctant to speak. “We are not all criminals” insisted one thirty-year-old man. But at the market opposite the burnt-out Via Malibran camp, local people were unrepentant. “The gypsies don’t work, they don’t wash, and they steal,” said one youth. “This is our version of ethnic cleansing.”

Cristian David, the Romanian Interior Minister, arrived in Rome yesterday for talks on the crisis. Calin Popeascu Tariceanu, the Romanian Prime Minister, said Italy should have followed the example of France and Germany in refusing to allow nomad encampments to spring up. He said a distinction must be drawn between “honest Romanians” with jobs and criminals who “have tainted the image of all Romanians working abroad”.

Giulio Riccio, head of social policy at the Naples council, condemned the “criminal aggression” at the Roma camps, adding “I am ashamed to be Italian”. Rosa Iervolino Russo, the Mayor of Naples, said she deplored “all violent and racist actions”.

Franco Frattini, the Foreign Minister and former EU Commissioner, denied the new Italian government was “xenophobic” but said the Schengen agreement on free movement across EU frontiers needed to be “updated”. It is estimated that there are at last 700,000 illegal immigrants in Italy.

Pietro Fusella, manager of a hotel in Via Chiaia, in Naples’ historic centre, said both the rubbish cisis and the attacks on Roma camps were unjustly damaging the city’s image. “Both problems are in the suburbs, not the centre” he said. He had put up a webcam on the hotel website to show that the street outside was “clean and safe”.

Last year the centre-left government of Romano Prodi expelled over 200 Romanians with criminal records after a Romanian was accused of murdering an Italian woman at a Rome railway station. However, the centre-right swept to power in elections last month, arguing that much tougher measures were needed.

[WertyNtont]

Italy fingerprint plan criticised



Mr Maroni said Roma children would be fingerprinted to avoid "begging"

Italy's interior minister has sparked criticism with a proposal that would see police fingerprinting all members of the Roma community living in camps.

Roberto Maroni, of the anti-immigrant Northern League, said the move would guarantee that those with the right to stay could live in decent conditions.

Those without that right, including children, would be sent home, he said.

The UN Children's Fund (Unicef) has criticised the proposal, as have opposition MPs.

Mr Maroni said the fingerprinting of Roma - or Gypsy - people would include "children too, to avoid phenomena like begging".

Since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was returned to power in elections two months ago, his government has focused on law and order, says the BBC's Christian Fraser in Rome.

The blame for the rising crime has fallen on the Roma gypsy community and, in recent weeks, camps have been raided by police while others have been attacked and burnt by vigilante mobs, our correspondent adds.

Stunned and concerned

Opposition MPs said it was wrong to treat children as criminals.


Rosy Bindi, who held the post of family minister in the centre-left government that was ousted in January, said the initiative was "unacceptable".

It would lead to an "ethnic register" that would "treat Roma children as if they were hardened criminals", she said.

The head of Unicef Italy, Vincenzo Spadafora, said his organisation was "stunned and deeply concerned" by the proposal.

"We'd like to suggest to him (Mr Maroni) that to respect all children's right to equality he should record all Italian children in the same way," said Mr Spadafora.

"Roma children are no different from other children. Moreover children cannot and should not be treated as adults."

Meanwhile, Amos Luzzatto, the former president of Italy's Union of Jewish Communities, said the measure was a form of "ethnic surveying".

"You start like this then you move on to the exclusion from schools, separated classes and widespread discrimination," he said.

Recalling how Jews, Roma and other minorities were targeted during Italy's years of fascism, he accused the country of having "lost its memory".

[RuttyUttepe]

Italy PM in Libya to meet Gaddafi
By Christian Fraser
BBC News, Rome



Mr Berlusconi says he wants Libyan migrant holding centres set up

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has arrived in Libya for talks with Col Muammar Gaddafi.

The two leaders will discuss how to stop illegal immigrants using Libya as a launching point for Italian shores.

Mr Berlusconi said he would ask for the creation of Libyan holding centres for illegal immigrants and increased vigilance of Libya's coast.

On Wednesday, a boat thought to be from Libya reached the Sicilian island of Lampedusa with 275 illegal migrants.

Every year thousands of immigrants from the African continent head towards Libya, from where they attempt to sail across the Mediterranean for Europe.

Stranded migrants

There are possibly around a million people at the moment trying to make that journey.

Most have travelled from sub-Saharan states such as Ghana and Sierra Leone, attracted by Libya's reputation as a centre for people smugglers.

A wooden boat carries some 35 would-be immigrants from Lampedusa on 26 June 2008



Italy has pressed Libya for years to step up patrol of its shores

Mr Berlusconi is meeting Mr Gaddafi in the northern province of Surt, to discuss one solution, an accord signed in December.

The agreement would allow Italian naval vessels to patrol the Libyan coast with Libyan sailors aboard - but it is yet to be implemented.

This is perhaps because Libyan authorities are worried that if these efforts prove too successful, they will end up with thousands of stranded migrants.

The compromise could be a renewed focus on Libya's southern borders, where the migrants cross the Sahara desert without too many problems.

Italy is offering to fund a radar or satellite system which would help the Libyan authorities respond.

There are other issues up for discussion - notably oil.

Italy, the former colonial power, is Libya's biggest trading partner and 25% of oil imports come from their north African neighbour.

The Italian prime minister might express his concerns at the rising price of crude oil.

It jumped again on Friday in response to threats from Libya's most senior oil official that his country might cut production if it continues to be pressured by the US.

[enactolaelant]

The fact is that Roma (gypsies) supplement their nomadic lifestyle by stealing.

They are, and have been nomads in Europe forever - how the hell can they keep a steady job and income while being a nomad?

Selling frying pans will not support a whole band of them.

How PC can you get to justify a lifestyle of petty crime?

Puleeeeze.

[Abnorttrano]

You are just being racist.

21st Century humans are not supposed to be racist.

That was all supposed to have been abolished after the horrors of the Continental wars in the 19th Century to end all wars. Metternich himself said so and told me to remind you.

I guess the powers in WWI and WWII didnt get that memo.

Human nature never changes. It never will either.

[ZenDers]

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL30454060.html

France drops "integration contract" from EU plan
Mon 30 Jun 2008, 17:16 GMT

By David Brunnstrom

BRUSSELS, June 30 (Reuters) - Incoming EU president France has dropped a proposal encouraging "integration contracts" for migrants as part of a Europe-wide migration pact after it met resistance from other capitals, diplomats said on Monday.

A draft of France's European Pact on Immigration and Asylum in January encouraged such contracts with provisions requiring those wanting to settle long-term in the EU to learn the national language and values of their host country.

However a new June 16 draft seen by Reuters drops reference to such contracts and merely invites EU states to promote integration of migrants "in a manner ... they deem appropriate".

It adds that migration policy should be based on a "balance" between migrants' rights to education, work, security and social and public services, and duties such as learning the language.

"Quite a lot of member states felt that binding contracts would not be the right thing," said one EU diplomat of the plan, due to be discussed by EU ministers in France next week.

French Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux, speaking to visiting European journalists in Paris, declined to say if the idea had been dropped following opposition, notably from Spain.

However, he said the text was being redrafted, adding: "This is a minor point which won't prevent a major agreement."

Each country would be free to draw up such contacts with immigrants if it wished, Hortefeux said.

"It's very much watered down," one diplomat said. "There was a lot of criticism and very few wanted to go down that road."

France, which has made harmonising EU immigration policy a priority of its six-month EU presidency starting on Tuesday, wants leaders of the 27 EU states to adopt the pact in October.

Hortefeux said an advance was a commitment by EU countries not to carry out mass regularisation of illegal migrants in future, although there was a debate with Spain on the wording.

The migration plan is the latest French ambition for its EU presidency which has been diluted. Paris has had to tone down ambitions for an EU-style Mediterranean Union.

Immigration is a sensitive issue in the EU, where the Commission estimates there are up to 8 million illegal migrants.

Spain, which gave some 570,000 illegal migrants the right to stay and work legally in 2005, is keen to avoid any suggestion that its past policy was wrong. France and Italy also carried out large-scale regularisations in recent years.

"I don't think there's much opposition elsewhere, but I think Spain would want to drop the reference altogether," a diplomat said.


FRENCH PRIORITY

Since the 1960s, France has given hundreds of thousands of work permits to illegal immigrants, though the numbers have been on a downward trend.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken against broad amnesties, arguing the EU's open internal borders meant such moves affect the bloc as a whole.

Diplomats said some states with more liberal views on migrant workers wanted the French text broadened to encourage migration to fill whatever skills shortages exist, rather than just by the "highly qualified" workers currently referred to.

The European Commission argues more migration is needed to make up for the EU's ageing population but EU states have been reluctant to agree joint policies on economic migration.

Under the French proposals, EU leaders would pledge to strengthen the fight against illegal migration and expel more illegal migrants, as well as confirm previous EU commitments such as a common asylum policy by 2010 and biometric visas.

EU states have already beefed up cooperation against illegal migration, creating a border agency and agreeing this year that illegal migrants could be locked up for up to 18 months.

They have also agreed biometric visas for foreigners, adding to the biometric fingerprinting of asylum seekers.

More than 200,000 illegal migrants were arrested in the EU in the first half of 2007, fewer than 90,000 were expelled.

[hernkingAnank]

Countries in the EU, in todays world, are starting to realize how bad it will be in the future.

Apart from tourism and culture (exportable in any case) what can the EU offer that America or Japan/Asia/Oceania or RF or India cant offer?

Space to live? Technology? Rocketships? IT? What exactly?

I still get the feeling when I talk to a lot of Europeans that they think they will fall of the edge of the world if they leave the boundaries of Europe.

Much like the English, there is too much emphasis on past "glories". Not enough emphasis on getting hard work done....must be the weather from September to May over there.

[zlopikanikanz]

Not bad for a region that has the largest economy in the world and whose currency is worth more than the dollar.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2001rank.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...91971920080314

[ringsarcle]

Most likely he's bitter he cant live here.

[HomePageOEMfreeSOFTWARE]

Most likely he's bitter he cant live here.

Recon you're right there Alonzo, (with emphasis on the word bitter, such an unpleasant attribute).

The fact is that due to Europe's high standards of living, many residents of the third world want to get in on the act (and really, who can blame them?). As already mentioned it is a very sensitive issue. Talk to any European and the majority will voice strong concerns about the numbers of migrants entering our borders. Racist or not its a fact, and with the rising influence of radical Islam amongst the growing moslem community in Europe, something the US should also worry about.

I was surprised when speaking to white people in LA during my recent visit the resentment and concern regarding central american / Mexican migrants moving to the US. And not just LA, but also Vancouver, where several people i talked to were concerned about the growing asian population there. This is a worldwide issue, not just a European one.

As for the 'Roma' community, my first memory of coming into contact with them was watching a friend picked up by a group of them and thrown into a ditch full of brambles and nettles when i was about 8 - his arms face and legs were cut to ribbons. There was a gypsy camp near where i lived and the trouble they caused would take me hours to describe, but when they left the local council had to send a whole troop of people to clean up the mess they left behind.

GT - In what way does India / Asia have more to offer than Europe (apart from a booming sex industry which i understand caters for all penchants) - its simply laughable to make such a crass statement (is your Anglophobia now becoming a hatred of Europe in general?). Having visited both India and other parts of Asia, i thank god i was born in Europe. The mass poverty and low standard of living was for me shocking, plus the overcrowded dirty cities surrounded by shanties with no hope of escape for its occupants. A few gleaming towers in the city centres and a few ultra rich residents while virtually everyone else live in poverty - thats Asia for you, and if thats what rocks your boat GT, well thats just fine. Personally (apart from a safari holiday booked for this November) i've decided to remain in Europe for future holidays with the occasional trip to the US / Canada in the future. Really, how many cities in the world can compare with the beauty / history / culture of Rome, Paris, Salzburg or Barcelona? (and i've left London off my list so you don't start another rant).

[JaK_MarkoV_Pi]

The LAST thing Americans should do is point to European attitudes toward immigration.

They've even built WALLS at the border to keep out Mexicans.... with tentitive plans for expansion. Could you IMAGINE if Europe stooped to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...Mexico_barrier

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Bush_sig...-Mexico_border

And then there are those "Minutemen" border patrols:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/fe...eman_4-06.html

http://media.npr.org/news/images/200...uteman_200.jpg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/...vqawP/340x.jpg

http://www.tshirtheat.com/border_pat...shirt_heat.htm



---

[pavlik]

Recon you're right there Alonzo, (with emphasis on the word bitter, such an unpleasant attribute).

The fact is that due to Europe's high standards of living, many residents of the third world want to get in on the act (and really, who can blame them?). As already mentioned it is a very sensitive issue. Talk to any European and the majority will voice strong concerns about the numbers of migrants entering our borders. Racist or not its a fact, and with the rising influence of radical Islam amongst the growing moslem community in Europe, something the US should also worry about.

I was surprised when speaking to white people in LA during my recent visit the resentment and concern regarding central american / Mexican migrants moving to the US. And not just LA, but also Vancouver, where several people i talked to were concerned about the growing asian population there. This is a worldwide issue, not just a European one.

As for the 'Roma' community, my first memory of coming into contact with them was watching a friend picked up by a group of them and thrown into a ditch full of brambles and nettles when i was about 8 - his arms face and legs were cut to ribbons. There was a gypsy camp near where i lived and the trouble they caused would take me hours to describe, but when they left the local council had to send a whole troop of people to clean up the mess they left behind.

GT - In what way does India / Asia have more to offer than Europe (apart from a booming sex industry which i understand caters for all penchants) - its simply laughable to make such a crass statement (is your Anglophobia now becoming a hatred of Europe in general?). Having visited both India and other parts of Asia, i thank god i was born in Europe. The mass poverty and low standard of living was for me shocking, plus the overcrowded dirty cities surrounded by shanties with no hope of escape for its occupants. A few gleaming towers in the city centres and a few ultra rich residents while virtually everyone else live in poverty - thats Asia for you, and if thats what rocks your boat GT, well thats just fine. Personally (apart from a safari holiday booked for this November) i've decided to remain in Europe for future holidays with the occasional trip to the US / Canada in the future. Really, how many cities in the world can compare with the beauty / history / culture of Rome, Paris, Salzburg or Barcelona? (and i've left London off my list so you don't start another rant).

Its the very thing that I am painfully aware of. Europe and especially England just cant seem to rid itself of resting on its "glorious" past. In London, people either want it to be Beatlemania 1964, Finest Hour 41, or Capital of the World 1888.

I thought only the Germans carried on like this now, jealous as they are of the Japanese exceeding their historical technological predominance.

If you dont know whats going on in Asia, no one here can help you.

May I kindly suggest that you quit the personal attacks and just open your eyes?

[Gasfghj]

I'm not sure where you get this notion that Europeans are trapped in the 'glorious' past. Why would any of us wish to be reliving 1941 - rationing, the blitz, the threat of invasion - hardly a time to want to relive. And why on earth would the Germans be jealous of Japan??? Where do you get these ideas from??? Certainly Europeans are proud of their past - and why not (aren't you proud of your countries history?). If you think the Germans and English are self obsessed you should meet the French.....(much as i love them).

I have travelled extensively through Asia over the past 10 years so have seen it with my own eyes - i also follow the news closely and am well aware of currant affairs in that part of the world, so why do you make the assumption that my 'eyes are shut'?

The fact is Americans are just as concerned about immigration as us Europeans, certainly most of the Americans i have met both here and in the US. Have a look at Fabrizio's post, if you are interested that is.

[EzequielTMann]

Yep, jealous of Japan:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle3213374.ece

[Trientoriciom]

Europe is pretty much as glorious as it has ever been for the last century.

[MaugleeRobins]

^ The last 20 centuries i would say.

I can't think of anywhere i'd rather live (but north america comes a close second).

[gennick]

Glorious?

You mean glorious as the Chinese CP uses it?

eg If every party representative has a sub machine gun - It Would Be Glorious!

[QRhnNSg9]

GT, chill.

Any points you may have about your dislikes of Europes makup lose any validity when you pile on so much bile.

Noone here ever reads anything you post about England or any other country without first putting on their "Oh, its Gregory" glasses and preparing themselves for the inevitable onslaught od defamations and derogatory comments laced in something resembling cultured elocution and sardonic wit but ending up being no more than ones own bitter feelings tainting any objectional observation.

The EU may have problems with immigration, both with peoples attitudes towards it AND from the immigrants themselves not respecting the country they are moving to, but as others have said, this is not something that they hold in solitude, HUMANS, in general, behave this way and we all have our shortcomings one way or another.


Anywho. Bottom line, can the vitriol.

[feqlmwtuqx]

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.

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.

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.

What will happen when Europe's populations are in decline? Probably nothing - because Europe has already become the worlds greatest retirement village.

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.