As Hungary Picks on Roma,
Racism Rears its Ugly Head

Widespread outrage has erupted in Hungary after an influential politician called the Roma ‘animals.’ That a founding member of the ruling party could be so blatantly intolerant has reawaken fears that the European Union nation’s is slowly sliding into authoritarian rule.
Diverse segments of the population jumped into the Roma’s defense, including the country’s justice minister, and a group representing Jews, who know a thing or two about the switch to dictatorship by a seemingly stable democracy. But for the Roma, it’s all deja vu.
Historically, they’re used to serve as scapegoats every time things don’t go as planned for governments with autocratic inklings. And Hungary of the last 10 years seems to fit the bill, with ever stricter attempts at controlling the press and laws designed to curb individual liberties.
The article by Zsolt Bayer, founding member of the ruling Fidesz party, is so the more hurtful to the Roma, since they’ve been an integral part of Hungary’s ethnicity and culture for over six centuries. After an inconsequential New Year’s Eve bar brawl, allegedly with the involvement of some young Gypsies, Bayer went ballistic.
‘They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals,’ he wrote on the following Saturday’s edition of the Magyar Hirlap newspaper, a particularly nasty slur against what constitutes seven percent of the country’s 10 million people. Most of them, of course, living in impoverished communities outside big cities.
The World Jewish Congress called on Hungarians to ‘speak out against such manifestations of racism.’ Justice Minister Tibor Navracsics said that there’s no room for anyone ‘who labels a group of people as animals.’ And we’d add, leave the animals out of this too, for in 10,000 years-plus of registered history, there has been not a single case of animal racism reported.
In any event, like the Roma themselves, we’ve all been there before, as Continue reading →