Dogwash

A tediously predictable article and comment thread on CiF from some or other professional campaigner-for-hire fulminating against Sarko's plans to clamp down on trouble-making East European gypsies. The article is the usual human-rights bleat on behalf of persecuted innocents demanding their rights to be given stuff other people have to work for, and the comment thread descends almost immediately into the expected "Gypsies are thieving parasites" versus "Gypsies are innocent victims" shouting match between the usual suspects.

More interestingly, I notice that the Gypsies-as-Holocaust-Victim ploy, although not itself new, seems to be gaining a firm toehold, as exemplified by these extracts from reader comments:

Expletive (03/08/10 12:49):

People seem to forget that Hitler almost wiped the Roma people out, as a percentage of their population, these people were hit far harder than the Jews. But instead of offering them help at the end of the war (like the creation of modern Israel) the Roma have only ever been offered more prejudice


MiddleEnglandLefty (03/08/10 12:57):

Let's put them in death camps, all of them. Obviously the criminal activities described in this film define all Roma everwhere.

If this takes hold, the next time I complain about East European Gypsy women thrusting their sickly drugged sprogs at me in the expectation of a hand-out I shall presumably be accused of wanting to build gas chambers on Hyde Park. Oh, well.

Mind you, a homeland for the Romany, eh? The creation of the modern state of Israel wasn't actually a direct and conscious act of reparation for the Shoah as 'Expletive' implies, rather a Zionist coup acquiesced in by tired Europeans who had other things to worry about, but the idea of a homeland for the Romany diaspora is an interesting one. Somewhere in the Punjab, presumably. Chandigarh? Amritsar?