Italians indifferent as girls drown

Italian beachgoers near Naples didn't let the sight of two drowned Gypsy girls ruin their day in the sun. Photos in the Italian media on Monday showed people relaxing at the beach only a few feet away from the bodies of two young girls who had drowned in the sea a short time earlier.

It would be tempting to just dismiss this as a sad example of peoples indifference to the suffering of others if it wasn't for all of the other awful things Italy has been doing in regards to their Gypsy community lately. Earlier in the month the Italian government launched a controversial program to fingerprint and catalog all the members of Italy's Gypsy community (a move that earned Italy a stern, non-binding finger-wagging from EU officials). Italian politicians recently have taken to blaming the Gypsies for a rise in street crime and unemployment; police regularly raid Gypsy encampments outside Italy's major cities while Rome's new mayor made deporting Gypsies part of his election platform.

What makes this all more disturbing is that Rome's mayor belongs to a neo-fascist party, and neo-fascists make up part of the Italian coalition government.

Fascists scapegoating an ethnic group and the public's growing indifference towards them...Didn't this happen in Europe about 70 years ago?