"Novye Izvestia" against Romanian gypsies

On October 1, 2007, several Russian newspapers at once published notes about an incident in Rome: a robbery of Russian-speaking tourists.

Most publications informed readers about the incident and stated the fact that recently the problem of crime in Italy has become aggravated (see, for example, notes on this topic in Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda , they are quite restrained).

Against their background, the news posted on the website of the Novye Izvestia newspaper "Romanian gypsies robbed Russian tourists in Italy" looks dissonant. The author of the note did not confine himself to describing the details of the incident, but said that “a flood of Romanian gypsies” and other “illegal immigrants” poured into Italy , who commit a lot of crimes, and stated that “foreign criminals who feel like masters in Italy are not afraid of anything and every day they become more impudent: they rob passers-by, tourists, raid the villas and apartments of Italians .

The Italians are desperate and demand action, but the authorities and law enforcement agencies are powerless: their timid actions caused "stormy condemnation from many political leaders of the ruling center-left coalition, who said that this is contrary to democracy and infringes on the rights of immigrants" .

We note that, firstly, the accusations of the Romanian gypsies in the described case are generally the assumptions of the Roman police ( “most likely, this is the work of the Romanian gypsies ,” they said), and the problem of crime in the Vatican has existed for a long time and is in no way connected with crime migrants from Eastern Europe. And secondly, the ethnicization and vulgarization of really serious problems of crime, racketeering, etc. makes their unemotional discussion almost impossible.

Unfortunately, this is not the first case of anti-Gypsy hate speech in Novye Izvestia.

Sources

• Romanian gypsies robbed Russian tourists in Italy // Novye Izvestia. 2007. September 30.
• Zibrov V. Romanian gypsies robbed Russians in Rome // TVNZ. 2007. October 1st.
• Kurnosov V. Vatican-style robbery // Newspaper. 2007. October 1st.