The most persecuted in Europe

Evacuation of a roma camp in Italy Art. 27 of the Italian Constitution, already unheeded in the part saying that penalties should rehabilitate detainees and cannot consist in treatments contrary to human dignity, is largely ignored in our country also in the first paragraph that says "Criminal responsibility is personal". Indeed, the concept applies only if the suspect of a crime is a "normal" Italian, while does not apply if it's an immigrant, let alone if it's a Romani.

What is happening these days in Teramo is a very dramatic event, unfortunately showing us that Italy has become a deeply racist country, particularly against Roma. A man was killed in a brawl and alleged perpetrators are three young Roma, Italian citizens like us. Now there is no doubt that if the three are guilty they must be prosecuted and convicted, two of them have already been arrested, but their ethnicity does not have the slightest to do with the offense. Nevertheless, newspapers and tv have been at pains to inform the public about their ethnicity and the public has organized a punitive expedition against the neighborhood where many Roma live, destroying properties and terrorizing the community, and today local gypsies rightly protest against this manifestation of deep racism.
The person who commits a crime do not commit it in the name of his ethnicity or his social group, commits it for himself, and in fact will be personally prosecuted and punished. The fact that the media say that an alleged offender is Roma, Romanian, African, or whatever is a sign of a serious racist attitude. The same thing happened for years in northern Italy and also on the national media with regard to the southerners. An irresponsible attitude that fueled racism in the North and in fact founded the political fortunes of the Northern League.
Yet the opposite does not happen, media don't give as much space to the news when the 'Ndrangheta kills young Roma, nor when the Italians rape or kill immigrants. The alleged abduction of a girl in Ponticelli, Naples, by a supposed young Roma woman, who unleashed an arsonist assault against the nearer gypsy camp, was a fabrication of the local Camorra, but the media believed it without questions.
In decades of investigation and suspicion, no roma was ever convicted of the abduction of children, while many Roma children have been taken from their mothers by the Italian state, almost always wrongly. The roma kidnapping of children is a black legend that many people believe, based on nothing. Gypsies didn't kidnap children even in medieval times, sometimes they just adopted orphans and vagrants. This widespread racism against Roma is accepted by many and is comparable to the most odious anti-Semitism: the Roma, in fact, like Jews, were persecuted and exterminated by the Nazis, they too were victims of the Holocaust and a huge number of them, from half a million to 1 million and a half, died in death camps.
The Roma, like the Jews, lived in Europe for centuries and are European citizens as we are. It's true that there is a social problem, that does not regard all gypsies, many of which are integrated into the society of the country they live in, because a lot of jobs that the Roma have done for centuries, from circus to craft, to trade metals, are almost impossible or very limited in the modern world. For this reason, states should try to integrate into the social fabric this part of the population, a task certainly not impossible given that basically it is a relatively small number of people. Instead the Italian state and local authorities do nothing but drive out the nomads constantly, destroying their camps, and the only ones who help them are a few private voluntary organizations. Consequently, the "nomads" (which is an incorrect term because many are settled) turn out to be such simply because they have no other option. Avoid situations of degradation would rather be the first step to reduce crime.
In several occasions the UN and the European Union have criticized Italy for the widespread racism against Roma, both politically and socially, but the situation is getting worse. And many decades after the Holocaust, now that the Jews in Europe are much less than before and virtually indistinguishable from the general population, the gypsies are probably the most persecuted ethnic group in Europe, and certainly the most persecuted here in Italy.