by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Racism and anti-immigrant hysteria have been increasing in Italy in recent years. Hate crimes have been on the rise with reports of gangs of right-wing youth attacking Gypsies in Rome, Genoa, Turin, Milan and other cities, and with the Carabinieri and other police units standing idly by and watching if not actually aiding and abetting the perpetrators of those attacks and crimes.
Seventy years ago this month, nearly to the day, Italy's Fascist regime pf the day published a "Manifesto of Race", which paved the way for its notorious racial laws persecuting Jews and members of other supposedly "inferior" minorities, which were directly based on the “Nuremberg Laws” of Hitler's Germany. Now, the country's right-wing government has again stepped up special measures against an entire ethnic group.
In their election campaign earlier this year, Berlusconi and his allies had already made clear their intention of deporting tens of thousands of Roma back to Romania and former Yugoslavia. In mid-June a March decisions by Italy's highest appeal court was released stating that "it is acceptable to discriminate against Roma" because the court found that "they are thieves", in other words the courts ruled in one foul stroke that an entire Race could be discriminated against as they are all regarded as criminals, criminalizing an entire People. Following the release of the court ruling, Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, announced that a file is to be drawn up containing a DNA data base with digital fingerprints and photos of all Gypsies in Italy regardless of their citizenship. The target for the fingerprinting and such are here especially Gypsy children. Italy has now, so we understand, enacted a law that will require the taking of fingerprints and photos and other data of all Gypsies living in the country.
Unicef has protested that this is discriminatory and a violation of the UN's Declaration of the Rights of the Child but, on the other hand, works hand-in-glove with the Italian government as, as they say, it will be for the benefit of the children if they will be made to go to school and will get benefits. The Italian Red Cross, as we have reported already, also is deeply involved in this operation and all of it is very reminiscent of the 1930's. The Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana denounced the move as "an indecent and racist proposal" reminiscent of "when Jewish children were identified with a yellow star on their sleeves".
If the Church and his Holiness is so concerned maybe then He and his Church should issue a decree that would put any Catholic participating in this operation, whether police officer, soldier, or official, under the threat of excommunication. But we hear nothing of this sort being proposed even. Words and prayer do not help. They didn't in the Holocaust and they will not now either. Action is what is needed. When are priests going to be instructed to condemn this from their pulpits in their Sunday homilies? Shame we do not have the likes of the late Archbishop Romero in the leadership of the Holy See. The late Pope John II would not have been sitting idly by saying little.
Other churches are even quieter still than the Catholic Church as are the rest of Europe and the World.
The European Parliament voted July 10th to adopt a resolution calling on member states to "review and repeal laws and policies that discriminate against the Roma on the basis of race and ethnicity. The problem with this resolution though is that it is but a gimmick as it has no teeth whatsoever and is NOT binding in any way, shape or form, allowing the Berlusconi regime to give a two-finger salute to the European Parliament.
More and more it becomes evident that in this issue the European Union is either entirely powerless and a toothless paper tiger and Italy's fascists Il Duce II and his allies are thumbing their noses at the European lawmakers or, and this would appear to be more the case, what we are seeing here is, as I predicted several years ago, as I could see the writing on the wall, just the beginning of what the European Union is, in fact, planning for the Romani People of Europe.
© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008
