The Damned

Jews think of themselves as the universal scapegoat, the racial minority within the world's population held in distrust and resentment. There's good reason for this acknowledgement, given the position of Jews throughout history. Where their religion - although heralding in the word's first-largest and prominent and second-largest and problematical religions - was held to be inferior. And where the culture inspired by Judaism, and the heritage related to its historic past in were treated with contempt.

The ethnic characteristics of Jews were identified and captured in a series of hateful caricatures, physical, spiritual and behavioural, making them social outcasts. That status allowed Jews to be exploited, slandered, herded into ghettos, held accountable for all the ills of the world through their sinister exploits and machinations to eventually control the world's finances, news organizations and social institutions.

Jews were disowned as citizens, their futures thwarted, laws and obligations imposed on them singly among all other groups of peoples; forced to be homeless, landless, held in general contempt as worthless sub-humans whose criminal minds could never be entrusted to equality of citizenship. That among Jews arose many whose superior intelligence and brilliant capability in all areas of human endeavour was a reality, made little difference.

The world was certain it distastefully harboured too many Jews and the elevation of fascist Germany to world-class status as a formidable warrior class intent on elevating itself to ultimate power led to its being permitted by a complicit world to eliminating a high proportion of existing Jewry. Post-war guilt drove a universal acceptance of Jewish rights and freedoms.

Soon enough eroded after the creation of the State of Israel which swiftly exhibited all of the unfortunate group and individual traits hitherto attributed to Jews. Zionism, the ultimate search for national survival for the world's Jews, resulted in a state that is universally damned for securing itself by denying the human rights of others. A resurgence of anti-Semitism has triumphed.

And another traditional outcast society has emerged to suffer the same insults and tribulations that have been visited on Jews. On a perhaps less ambitious scale, particularly with respect to wholesale extermination, but representing as a pale reflection in its relentless hounding and rejection of another ethnic minority whom the world appears to loathe.

Roma have been persecuted for centuries. Their caravans have been greeted throughout Europe as a blight on society. While living in dire poverty, rejected as normal and deserving people, they have been driven from one geography to another. Petty crimes have been committed of a people denied the capacity to earn a legitimate wage, for no one would hire them. They resorted to excelling in the art of cunning exploits, to survive.

The sad legacy of a people being forced from temporary and permanent places of refuge because they are not accepted into general society has its genesis in a special place that once seemed to have been reserved for Jews. Native, aboriginal populations living throughout the Americas have a fairly vivid understanding of the process by which ethnic populations are devalued and dehumanized.

Germany, the Czech Republic and France have all expelled their Roma populations. Those that remain are left to live desperate lives of poverty, plying trades that allow them to live as indigents, devoid of economic and social security. Children of Roma, born in the more economically and socially advantaged countries of Europe find themselves, after believing themselves to be German or Czech or French in nationality, adrift in alienation in their 'countries of origin'.

These outrages against human dignity and human rights take place in the very countries that advance those virtues, and accuse other, non-democratic countries of abusing human rights with their populations. The level of hypocritical sanctimony emanating from the European Union is nauseating and humanly untenable.

The plight of the globe's Roma should be of concern to every decent community. That it remains below the radar of public concern and that no powerful national, political, humanitarian groups have taken up the cause shames us all.