Spain: Gypsies Never Did Anything Wrong Ever But Everyone’s Racist Against Them

“Gypsies out”

Gypsies are known throughout history as being very honest and trustworthy folks.

Going back to the time of Alexander the Great, everyone was like “these gypsies sure are upstanding gentlemen.”

Of course nowadays, because of rising racism due to memes on the internet, everyone has started hating the skin for no reason.

The Guardian:

Almost 10 months on, Ricardo García Carmona still shudders at the way he spoke to his mother when she appeared on his doorstep with an urgent warning a little after 9am on Sunday 17 July last year. “She said: ‘Let’s go! We need to get out!’”

A few hours earlier, his mother told him, a young doorman called Álvaro Soto had been stabbed to death after an argument at the pub where he worked in the small Andalucían town of Peal de Becerro. The alleged killers, like García Carmona’s family, were members of Peal’s Gypsy community, and his mother could not shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

“I started laughing at her and told her she was mad,” says the 34-year-old security guard. “Then I started to yell at her. ‘Where are we going to go?’ I told her it would be worse if we went because they’d think we were part of the same family as the guy who’d done it – ‘If we run away, the people in town will say we were involved.’”

By then, his mother was on her knees, begging her son to listen. “They’re going to come and they’re going to burn us out,” she said.

A little later, a crowd of people surged down the steps from the church and headed for García Carmona’s house. They chanted “Gypsies out!” and began kicking his car. A nearby civil guard officer told him that things “had got a bit out of hand” and warned him and his family to stay indoors.

“Do you get it now?” his mother asked. “They haven’t even buried [Soto] yet, and when they do the whole town will come to burn the Gypsies out. Let’s go.”

This time, García Carmona heeded her advice and the family packed up and fled to a hotel in the nearby town of Úbeda. He was in his room there the following night when friends in Peal began sending him photos of the anti-Gypsy violence that had followed a peaceful demonstration calling for justice for Soto.

In his absence, his home was ransacked, its white goods dragged out on to the street and the word “Murderer” sprayed on one wall. Other Gypsy property in Peal suffered similar fates: houses were looted and damaged; one was burned; cars were tipped over and walls disfigured with graffiti that read “Gypsies out”, “killer Gypsies” and “death to Gypsies”.

“I looked at those pictures in the hotel,” says García Carmona. “I’m not going to lie. I cried like a baby. I didn’t know what to do. I asked myself what I’d done to deserve this. Was all this just because I was a Gypsy?”

…

While the security guard was always aware of a latent racism in his home town, he could never have imagined having to live through last year’s events – which carry echoes of the anti-Gypsy violence of the 1980s.

In July 1986, Gypsy families living in the Andalucían town of Martos – which, like Peal de Becerro, sits in Jaén province – were forced to flee after their homes were torched. Two years earlier, five Gypsies, including three children, were badly burned after a mob doused their house in another Jaén town, Torredonjimeno, with petrol in retaliation for an earlier assault.

We need a new agency at the UN to protect these gypsies from defamation.

I wonder why there is no Gypsy Anti-Defamation League???