Hindus, Jews Ask Pope to Abandon Double Standards on Roma Apartheid

Hindus and Jews claim that Pope Benedict holds double standards on the issues of Roma (Gypsy) apartheid in Europe.

Hindu statesman Rajan Zed; and Rabbi Jonathan B. Freirich, prominent Jewish leader in Nevada and California in USA; in a statement in Nevada today, said that despite their repeated requests, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI had not come out openly to support the 15-million European Roma who faced apartheid conditions. But in a message for "19th World Day of the Sick, 2011", posted on Holy See's website on January 15, Pope says (as per Zenit.org translation): "...know how to recognize and serve him also in those brothers who are poor, sick, suffering and in difficulty, who have need of your help".

The Pope also points out in this message: "A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through 'com-passion' is a cruel and inhuman society". And he quotes in this message: "As I have loved you, so must you love one another" (John 13:34).

Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, and Rabbi Freirich argued that it was a travesty to silently watch Roma suffer day after day for the last about 1200 years, and do nothing about it. Roma apartheid occurred right under the Pope's nose in Europe. Hindus and Jews had been regularly appealing to the Pope to openly support the Roma cause and come up with a White Paper on their plight, and yet the Pope continued to ignore these reasonable requests for justice in Europe for the Roma.

Rajan Zed and Rabbi Jonathan Freirich further said that the alarming condition of the Roma people was a social blight for Europe and the rest of the world as they reportedly regularly faced social exclusion, racism, substandard education, hostility, joblessness, rampant illness, inadequate housing, lower life expectancy, unrest, living on desperate margins, language barriers, stereotypes, mistrust, rights violations, discrimination, marginalization, appalling living conditions, prejudice, human rights abuse, and racist slogans on Internet.

The Pope needed to make a public statement against persecution of the Roma, Zed and Freirich added.

Rajan Zed and Rabbi Freirich pointed out that religions shared a conviction to help the helpless, defenseless and downtrodden. The Pope should recognize, acknowledge and affirm the Roma as children of God who deserved to be treated like all other people-as equals. Roma apartheid was shocking, reprehensible, hazardous and immoral. As the most powerful religious leader in the world, the Pope's must lead in upholding the moral obligation to make efforts to stop the frequent human rights violations suffered by Roma.

Hindu Rajan Zed and Jewish Jonathan Freirich offered help to the Pope, if asked, to support the Roma cause.

Sify News

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

BNP's Griffin: Islam is a cancer

As the BNP struggles for right-wing support in the European Parliament, leader Nick Griffin tells Cathy Newman he believes there is "no place in Europe for Islam"

The BNP leader Nick Griffin has described Islam as a “cancer” that should be removed from Europe by "chemotherapy".

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Mr Griffin, who has just been elected to the European Parliament, said there was "no place in Europe for Islam". He added: "Western values, freedom of speech, democracy and rights for women are incompatible with Islam, which is a cancer eating away at our freedoms and our democracy and rights for our women and something needs to be done about it".

The BNP leader said he agreed with a candidate for the Flemish far right party, Vlaams Belang, who had declared: "We urgently need global chemotherapy against Islam to save civilisation."

The remarks will fuel controversy over the BNP’s success at the European elections last month. The party’s two winning candidates - Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons - take up their seats in the European Parliament next week.

Mr Griffin has been holding talks with other far right parties in Europe such as Vlaams Belang and Jobbik, from Hungary. The BNP had hoped to team up formally with a range of European rightwingers, giving them access to up to €1m of public money to spend on staff and offices. However, those talks have ended in failure.

The BNP will still work together informally with Jobbik, with both parties saying they share common ground on issues such as law and order. Jobbik has formed its own militia, the Hungarian Guard, which wears Nazi-style uniform and marches across the country to tackle what it calls “gypsy crime” by Roma travellers.

Mr Griffin told Channel 4 News that he believed Britain had “got a problem with Romanian gypsy crime”. Jobbik’s use of the term has led to accusations that it is seeking to criminalise an entire ethnic group. The BNP leader said: “There are two sorts of gypsies in Britain. There are the old fully-established anglicised Romanies who have been here for generations and who when they go to an area, when they leave it, it is spotlessly clean and you can not see they have been there. We have got no issue with that.

"And on the other hand there are the travellers - mainly from Ireland - and the Roma gypsy beggars and pickpockets in London. And while the liberal elite may say it is politically incorrect to say so, I would say that they have a very high level of criminality."

One of Jobbik’s MEPs, Krisztina Morvai, has been accused of anti-Semitism after text she wrote on an online forum. Questioned by Channel 4 News about the remarks, she did not deny writing them, but said she did not want to make any comment. She then terminated the interview.

Although Jobbik still sees the BNP as an ally, Vlaams Belang distanced itself both from Mr Griffin and the call by one of its candidates for "global chemotherapy" against Islam. One of its MEPs said he did not agree with comparing "people to diseases".

Channel 4

Belfast Romanians rehoused after race attacks

Up to 20 families moved to temporary accommodation after repeated attacks on their houses

Romanian families forced to flee their homes in Belfast because of racist attacks have been temporarily rehoused, but many said they wanted to leave Northern Ireland.

More than 100 Romanians had to seek shelter in a church hall last night after suffering repeated intimidation, including bottles being thrown through their windows.

The families, who are members of the Roma ethnic group, were given shelter at the O-Zone sports complex in the city today, and Stormont's social development minister, Margaret Ritchie, said they were to be offered emergency lodgings tonight. It is understood that they were later moved to student accommodation in the Queen's University area, which has been made available for a week.

Gordon Brown condemned the attacks, saying: "I hope the authorities are able to take all the action necessary to protect them." Belfast's lord mayor, Naomi Long, said the attacks had brought shame on the city.

A Romanian mother of two sheltering at the O-Zone said the families were terrified. The woman, who gave her first name, Maria, said everyone was adamant they wanted to return to Romania. She said attacks had been intensifying over the past two weeks, with youths threatening her and her children. Other people spoke of men armed with guns telling them to leave the country or face being shot.

"We are OK, we are safe here now," she said. "But we want to go home because right now we are not safe here [in Northern Ireland]. We want to go back home to Romania, everybody right now does. I want to go home because I have here two kids and I want my kids to be safe."

Belfast's small community of Romanians grew noticeably grew about eight months ago. The streets from which the Romanians fled are on the border between the city's multi-racial university district and the loyalist working class Village/Donegall Road area. On Monday night, a number of young men from the Village area threw bottles and stones at an anti-racist protest on the Lisburn Road called to show solidarity with the Romanians. The mob chanted Combat 18 slogans, although security sources in Northern Ireland said there was no evidence the neo-Nazi terror group had organised cells in the Greater Belfast area.

The two main loyalist paramilitary groups, the UVF and UDA, have condemned the attacks and said none of their members were involved.

The deputy first minister, Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness, said the attacks had been carried out by "racist criminals within our society who are unrepresentative of the vast majority of the people of Belfast".

Anna Lo, an assembly member for the Alliance party in south Belfast, said the families were "very frightened" and many would prefer to return to their homeland rather than remain in Belfast.

"They are really very frightened," she said. "The women, when they were talking to me yesterday, they were really upset, tears in their eyes and said, 'You know we love it here, we'd like to live here, but we're too scared.'"

Some within the Village/Donegall Road community have tried to make a stand against the aggressors. A poster on a boarded-up window at 14 Belgravia Avenue, a three-storey house occupied until Monday by several Romanian families, read: "Village says No to racist attacks." A similar poster nearby was torn down by a woman on her way to work, who declined to comment.

Guardian

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

Members of Jobbik, a far-right Hungarian party which has
been using Auschwitz slogans in its attempt to pick up votes.

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.

Guardian

Facebook removes Italian neo-Nazi pages

Facebook said yesterday it had removed several pages from its site used by Italian neo-Nazis to incite violence after European politicians accused the internet social networking site of allowing a platform for racists.

Seven different group pages had been created on the site with titles advocating violence against gypsies.

"The existence of these groups is repulsive," said Martin Schulz, Socialist leader in the European Parliament, which lodged a complaint with the California-based company.

Facebook said it had removed the pages because they violated its terms of use.

"Facebook supports the free flow of information, and groups provide a forum for discussing important issues. However, Facebook will remove any groups which are violent or threatening," it said in a statement.

Italy's Roma, or gypsy, communities have been subjected to several attacks in recent months, while Italy's media has focused attention on violent crimes committed by gypsies. The government has dismantled illegal shantytowns where many Roma live.

Irish Times

Romanian actress battles racism in Italy

Emigrant heads 'charm offensive' to counter anti-Romanian feeling

As Italy struggles to contain a rising tide of xenophobia and racism, the largest and most despised minority in the country has acquired a glamorous standard-bearer. Like 1.2 million other residents of Italy, Ramona Badescu is an immigrant from Romania. The willowy actress and singer from Bucharest moved to Italy after the fall of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and is the closest thing Italy possesses to a Romanian household name.

Now Rome's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, has made her his counsellor for the Romanian community's integration. "I hope to become a bridge between the Romanians and the mayor," she said. "Romanians here have many problems connected to work: more Romanians die at work sites than any other nationality." Her first policy idea is to set up a free phone service in both languages to help Romanian migrants find information, residence permits and other practical information.

But some Italians have greeted the appointment with derision. "What does this bird know about what the Romanians in Italy get up to?" was one web comment. "She's one of the privileged, she knows nothing about reality..."

"It's scandalous to give this job to a 'lady' who has no qualifications for the job..." wrote another ."Another nobody who has failed in showbiz and throws herself into politics," sneered a third. "It makes me sick!"

Ms Badescu, who has a degree in commerce and economics, insists she is the right person for the job. "I'm an emigrant and emigration is never a happy act. It's full of problems: you leave your family behind. You are hoping and dreaming of a better life, but when you arrive it's very different from what you imagined."

Italy's attitude to immigrants was turned upside down last year after an admiral's wife was murdered. A Romanian gypsy was quickly blamed and, amid a media witch-hunt, politicians demanded the mass expulsion without trial of undesirable foreigners. Romanians were the scapegoat of choice: Walter Veltroni, Mr Alemanno's left-wing predecessor, said Italy had become "unlivable" since January 2007, when Romania entered the European Union.

With a growing number of crimes blamed on Romanians, Italians began to fear and suspect these hidden strangers in their midst. Clinching the prejudice was the belief that romeni (Romanians) and rom (Roma, gypsies) were one and the same. It has become an urban legend that all Roma are Romanians and vice-versa.

"The Romanians and the Roma are two completely different peoples," Ms Badescu points out. "The crime reports have created this prejudice against an entire people. Now there are Romanians in Italy who are scared to speak their own language."

Independent

The picture that shames Italy

Holidaymakers sunbathe, indifferent to the bodies
of two Roma girls that lie on this beach near Naples

It's another balmy weekend on the beach in Naples. By the rocks, a couple soak up the southern Italian sun. A few metres away, their feet poking from under beach towels that cover their faces and bodies, lie two drowned Roma children.

The girls, Cristina, aged 16, and Violetta, 14, were buried last night as the fallout from the circumstances of their death reverberated throughout Italy.

It is an image that has crystallised the mounting disquiet in the country over the treatment of Roma, coming after camps have been burnt and the government has embarked on a bid to fingerprint every member of the minority. Two young Roma sisters had drowned at Torregaveta beach after taking a dip in treacherous waters. Their corpses were recovered from the sea – then left on the beach for hours while holidaymakers continued to sunbathe and picnic around them.

They had come to the beach on the outskirts of Naples on Saturday with another sister, Diana, nine, and a 16-year-old cousin, Manuela, to make a little money selling coloured magnets and other trinkets to sunbathers. But it was fiercely hot all day and, about 2pm, the girls surrendered to the temptation of a cooling dip – even though they apparently did not know how to swim.

"The sea was rough on Saturday," said Enzo Esposito, the national treasurer of Opera Nomadi, Italy's biggest Roma organisation. "Christina and Violetta went farther out than the other two, and a big wave came out of nowhere and dashed them on to the rocks. For a few moments, they disappeared; Manuela, who was in shallow water with Diana, came to the shore, helped out by people on the beach, and ran to try and get help."

Other reports said that lifeguards from nearby private beaches also tried to help, without success. "When Manuela and Diana came back," Esposito went on, "the bodies of her cousins had reappeared, and they were already dead."

It was the sort of tragedy that could happen on any beach. But what happened next has stunned Italy. The bodies of the two girls were laid on the sand; their sister and cousin were taken away by the police to identify and contact the parents. Some pious soul donated a couple of towels to preserve the most basic decencies. Then beach life resumed. The indifference was taken as shocking proof that many Italians no longer have human feelings for the Roma, even though the communities have lived side by side for generations.

"This was the other terrible thing," says Mr Esposito, "besides the fact of the girls drowning: the normality. The way people continued to sunbathe, for three hours, just metres away from the bodies. They could have gone to a different beach. It's not possible that you can watch two young people die then carry on as if nothing happened. It showed a terrible lack of sensitivity and respect."

The attitudes of ordinary Italians towards the Roma, never warm, have been chilling for years, aggravated by sensational news coverage of crimes allegedly committed by Gypsies, and a widespread confusion of Roma with ordinary, non-Roma Romanians, who continue to arrive. The Berlusconi government has launched a high-profile campaign against the community, spearheaded by the programme announced by the Interior Minister, Roberto Marroni, to fingerprint the entire Roma population. The move has been condemned inside Italy and beyond as a return to the racial registers introduced by the Fascist regime in the 1930s. The fingerprinting of Roma in Naples began on 19 June.

The most senior Catholic in Naples, Cardinal Crescenzo Sepe, was quick to point out the coarsening of human sentiment which the behaviour on the beach represented. But the Mayor of Monte di Procida, the town on the outskirts of the city where Torregaveta beach is located, defended his citizens' behaviour.

When the Roma girls got into difficulties, he said: "There was a race among the bathers and the coastguard and the carabinieri to try and help them." He rejected the claim that the indifference of the bathers was due to the fact that the girls were Roma.

The two cousins were given a Christian Orthodox funeral service in the Roma camp in Naples, attended by 300 Roma and city and regional representatives.

In a speech yesterday, Mr Maroni proposed, "for humanitarian reasons", granting Italian citizenship to all Roma children in Italy abandoned by their parents.

The Italians and the Roma

Roma have been living in Italy for seven centuries and the country is home to about 150,000, who live mainly in squalid conditions in one of around 700 encampments on the outskirts of major cities such as Rome, Milan and Naples. They amount to less than 0.3 per cent of the population, one of the lowest proportions in Europe. But their poverty and resistance to integration have made them far more conspicuous than other communities. And the influx of thousands more migrants from Romania in the past year has confirmed the view of many Italians that the Gypsies and their eyesore camps are the source of all their problems. The ethnic group is often blamed for petty theft and burglaries. According to a recent newspaper survey, more than two thirds of Italians want Gypsies expelled, whether they hold Italian passports or not.

Independent

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

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.

Guardian

Plight of the Roma: echoes of Mussolini

The compulsory fingerprinting of Italy's Gypsy population is the latest example of the country's increasingly repressive attitude towards minorities – and an ominous reminder of the policies of the former Fascist dictator.

Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue.

The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies.

It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, for Italy to guarantee "to those who have the right to remain here, the possibility of living in decent conditions." For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni's supporters must have sounded obvious: "to avoid phenomena," as he put it, "such as begging". The new measures, he said, were indispensable "in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy".

For anybody not swept up in the wave of anti-Roma fury, the campaign has a strong whiff of Mussolini and Hitler about it.

The task of counting and identifying the residents of Italy, citizens or otherwise, who happen to belong the most despised minority in Europe is, in fact, already under way.

Giovanna Boursier, an Italian journalist, found one small camp where the count had already taken place on the furthest southern outskirts of Milan. "There is not even a bar where one could ask the way," she wrote in Il Manifesto, "but once you scramble up a hill you see the roofs of the huts. There are about 10 of them, along with the caravans, dotted around the outskirts, under flyovers and high-tension wires. Around 40 Roma lived here."

They told her that the police arrived at dawn, woke everybody up, surrounded the camp and flooded it with lights and then went from home to home, demanding identity documents and photographing them. All the residents were Italian citizens. It made no difference. "This wasn't a census," protested a Roma called Giorgio. "This was an ethnic register."

Fingerprinting was the detail they omitted – lacking, at that point, the power to do it. But Mr Maroni has now set about remedying that.

Italy's "security emergency" is a strange and distracting phenomenon which has been brewing up slowly for the past decade as economic growth slowed to a stop. It intensified dramatically with the admission of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU in January of last year, and now bulks so large that it was the biggest factor in Mr Berlusconi's election victory and continues to dominate the media. It led to the decision last week to allow police numbers in the big cities to be augmented by up to 3,000 troops.

The issue is strange and distracting because it does not seem to exist, either statistically or as a fact of personal experience. Crime is not a big deal in Italian cities. There is no epidemic of burglary, mugging, bag-snatching, rape. Italy remains a country where it is pretty safe to walk the streets. Yet the government is behaving as if this were Colombia. And Colombia with a very special difference: that the supposedly soaring rate of crime is the work of one particular ethnic group, known as "nomadi rom."

Gypsies or Roma are visible in Italian cities as in the rest of Europe, and their number has increased. In Rome your subway journey may be made slightly less enjoyable by their accordions and violins and the appeals of their begging. Your eyes may be offended by the sight of them fishing in the waste bins, or hauling stuff home for recycling. Rome is so badly policed that small, utterly miserable squatter camps have sprung up in many places. They are a disgrace – unhygienic, unaesthetic – and have no place in a civilised modern country. But as the source of a "security emergency"?

Giovanni Maria Bellu, a La Repubblica journalist and an expert on Italy's minorities, said the problem was one of misunderstanding. "Most Italians make no distinction between Italian Roma and those who arrived from Yugoslavia during that country's break-up," he said. "And many Italians think that 'Rom' is an abbreviation of 'Romanian' – and since the arrival of Romania in the EU there has been a large influx of Romanians. People conflate these separate things. There have been crimes committed by Romanians – and people confuse these with the Rom, and the Rom end up being blamed for everything.

"Security was the over-riding theme of the general election, which is why this conflated Roma-Romanian theme became so big, and a part of the left is very timid about confronting the problem. The security emergency itself is a myth: there has been no increase in the number of rapes, for example – in fact, the number has declined. But when a single case occurs it is splashed on the front page of certain papers for a double reason: it increases the climate of fear; and it damages the centre-left, which is perceived as being weak on security."

Italy's Roma paranoia spilled on to the world's front pages on 13 May, when a woman in a suburb of Naples called Ponticelli alleged that a Roma girl had tried to steal her baby. The community erupted in fury, and thugs belonging to the Camorra crime syndicates threw petrol bombs into the local gypsy squatter camp, driving out the inhabitants and burning the place to the ground. Suddenly there was no avoiding the fact: the Italian hatred for the Roma had taken a dramatic new turn.

But the origin was an ancient fear, rooted not in fact but legend. Mr Bellu said: "There is nothing in police records to support the idea that Roma have stolen babies. It's just a legend. But one that still has people in its grip."

Marco Nieli, the president of Opera Nomadi, the most important organisation representing Italy's Roma, said: "The first Roma arrived in Italy in 1400 and have been here ever since, and are Italians in every respect. The real problem is one of crass ignorance: if someone says that Roma steal babies, the political parties reflect and amplify this nonsense. This way all the problems are swept under the carpet."

Thomas Hammerberg, European commissioner for human rights, visited a big Roma camp in Rome earlier this month. "I visited Casalino 900 camp, where 650 or so Roma live," he said. "There was no electricity, no water. It was a very bad slum."

And the fear of the "ethnic register" was already rampant, he said, "due to what happened to them in the past in Germany and elsewhere. They also raised the question, why us? Why not others? Many of those in the camp I visited had been in Italy for 40 years; they came over from Yugoslavia, some of them still have problems with identity papers, squeezed between the old and the new country. If you've been in a country for 40 years, are you still a foreigner? This talk about fingerprints was another reminder that their status has never been settled.

"The basic problem of Roma is widespread in Europe: housing, health, education, employment, political representation... But for a long time in Italy the Roma have been a symbol of something that is unwanted.

"The Nazis and the Fascists used the same methods of singling them out in the 1930s. It's not surprising that they are frightened."

A pocket dictator and the Manifesto of Race

Racism is often seen as intrinsic to fascism, but the inventor of the ideology, Benito Mussolini, was brought around to the Hitler obsession with race late in his career and after a great deal of arm-twisting.

Jews had lived in Italy for centuries without persecution. The community in Rome, though confined to the historic ghetto area for many centuries, has the longest uninterrupted history of any Jewish community in the world. In Mussolini's Italy, upper middle- class Jews continued to live and prosper without persecution – until 1938.

In that year Mussolini introduced his Manifesto of Race, closely modelled on the Nazi Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship, the right of Jewish children to go to school and of adults to work in the government or the professions.

Traditional Italian tolerance and/or indifference towards Jews meant that many were sheltered during those years, but after the fall of Rome, when Mussolini moved to the town of Salo on Lake Garda and was set up by the Nazis as the pocket dictator of the Republic of Salo, deportations of Jews to the death camps began in earnest.

And what of Italy's Roma during the grim final years of Mussolini's rule? Some 1.6 million Roma died in Germany and elsewhere during the Holocaust, a proportionately greater genocide than that suffered by the Jews.

The history of their treatment under Mussolini is a subject that contemporary Italian historians have been loath to look into, according to Marco Nieli, president of the Italian Roma organisation Opera Nomadi.

"It's a fact that there were concentration camps for Roma in Italy during the Fascist period, and it's also a fact that thousands of Roma died in them of hunger, cold and over work," he claimed. "Studies are now under way to discover the extent of the suffering that took place."

Independent

School sets example after race-hate incidents rise

Dalena, a Slovakian girl with an ear-to-ear grin, sat reciting numbers yesterday in heavily-accented English with a British classmate at the special needs unit in Chatham's Luton Junior School. After successfully counting to 20 together, the two nine-year-olds smiled at each other and then walked holding hands back to their classroom to join an excited gaggle heading off on a visit to the school's allotment backing on to a row of tatty terraced houses.

In any other school, such a scene would have been unremarkable. But at Luton Junior, it served as a symbolic rebuff to the ugly events – and subsequent hysteria – that have forced the stationing of police at the gates to the school and made the north Kent community it serves the latest focus of the debate about race relations in Britain.

Tony Goulden, a local Labour councillor and the chairman of governors at the school, said: "If you believed what you read, this school has spent the last week in the grip of some kind of race riot. That could not be further from the truth. This is a school where the children learn to count in each other's languages, learn to say hello in each other's languages. This school is the cure, not the problem."

The "problem" is Britain's response to one of its latest waves of immigration – the 70,000 Slovakians who have come to the UK to work since 2004.

Dalena is one of 32 Slovakian children, some from a Roma gypsy background, who have arrived at the Luton Junior School in recent months after their parents arrived to meet local demand for agricultural labour. Together, the Slovakian children make up just 8 per cent of the school's roll of about 400 pupils. But Slovakian integration in Chatham has not gone smoothly of late.

For the past fortnight, the neighbourhood of Luton, a faded and deprived corner of the Medway town, has been racked by tensions over a series of claimed racially-aggravated assaults and verbal clashes between the established population and a recent influx of Slovakian migrant workers and their families. In the past six months, police have recorded 13 racist incidents.

Matters came to a head 13 days ago when Jake Stedman, a 10-year-old pupil at Luton Junior, was found by his mother outside the family home with two black eyes and a bleeding head after allegedly being chased into an alleyway by a Slovakian mother and beaten, reportedly with a metal bar. The incident came a day after the boy had confronted another Slovakian woman outside a convenience store, thrown a blackberry at her and punched her on the arm, allegedly shouting "go back to your own country".

The clash made national headlines this week. The Daily Mail proclaimed: "Boy, 10, 'battered by woman in race row at his school'". The Times stated: "Schoolboy, 10, 'is beaten by migrant'." Further oil was poured on the fire with reports that police were considering criminal charges against the boy.

The reality is somewhat different. Kent Police said yesterday a 10-year-old boy had been given an official reprimand after admitting common assault and that a 36-year-old Slovakian woman arrested in connection with the attack on Jake has been released on police bail. It is understood there is no evidence that a metal bar was used and all incidents took place some distance from the school.

Nonetheless, the result has been an uncomfortable week in the spotlight for Luton Junior and its 410 pupils in an area where social deprivation has created strains. The British National Party regularly gains 15 per cent of the vote and unemployment runs above the national average. About 10 per cent of the population are immigrants, many from Eastern Europe.

In the fevered atmosphere of recent days, a small number of parents verbally abused members of staff after rumours – unfounded – circulated that an allegation of bullying against a Slovakian pupil had been ignored. Other parents showed their support by showering the school with gifts of flowers and cards.

But mutual suspicion and incomprehension still hung around the school gates yesterday. Clare, a 32-year-old parent, said: "It's the fault of the Slovakians. They don't make any effort to mix, they hang around in big groups. I understand they have a different culture but people around here don't want them to have a free ride. They are taking jobs, using our schools but not giving back."

Most Slovakian parents are reluctant to talk, preferring to pick up their children and rush away. But Dagmar, a mother of two children, who arrived in Chatham in 2005, said: "It is very hard not to conclude there is some racism behind this. We do the same work that everyone else does – picking crops, working in pack houses. But Slovakians have darker skin than other Eastern Europeans. I don't hear of Poles being abused in the street. But often I hear of it from my Slovakian friends."

But inside the classrooms of Luton Junior, such turmoil is ignored. At playtime, Slovakian children can be seen teaching clapping games to their English classmates.

Independent