# Reflections # 6 weeks I am also a small migrant "I am ashamed to be Italian and Christian" by Alex Zanotelli AND 'frightening what is happening before our eyes in our country. The Roma camps in Ponticelli (Na) in flames, the new security package from the Minister Maroni, the mast pervasive racism and xenophobia, the hunt for different phobia of security, the birth of night patrols offer a chilling picture of Italy 2008. "I am ashamed to be Italian and Christian," was my reaction back in Italy from Korogocho, approval of the Bossi-Fini.
These six years have seen a significant worsening of racism and xenophobia in Italian society, ridden by the League (the real winner of elections in 2008) and now embodied in the Berlusconi government (I say this because I was just as hard with the Prodi government and the mayors from the left to Cofferati Dominici ...). Today
doubly ashamed of being Italian and a Christian. I am ashamed to belong to a society increasingly racist toward each other, different, people of color and especially the Muslim who has now become the enemy par excellence. I am ashamed to belong to a country whose government has launched a package-be illegal where security is the same as criminal.
I think that is not a crime to migrate, but that crime is a global financial-economic system (11% of the population world consumes 88% of resources) that forces people to flee their land for survival. The UN predicts that by 2050 we will have climate change a billion climate refugees.
The rich pollute, the poor pay.
Where will they go? We are criminalizing the poor? I am ashamed to belong to a country that desperately needs immigrants to work, but then rejects them, marginalizes them, humiliates them in a language from the League to shock. I am ashamed to belong to a country that hunts the Roma as if they were the dregs of society.
This is the road that brings us to the Holocaust (remember that many Roma were cremated in the Nazi concentration camps!). We have made the new Roma scapegoat.
I am ashamed to belong to a people who can not remember who was until recently a nation of immigrants ("if we were the Albanians'): it is over sixty million Italians living abroad today. Our immigrants have been treated badly a bit 'everywhere and had to fight for their rights. Because now the same way we treat immigrants in our midst? What we lost the memory so quickly? The well-being? How can we criminalize illegal immigrants in our midst?
How can we accept that thousands of people die trying to cross the Mediterranean to get in our "Paradise"? And 'the new slave trade that leaves a long trail of corpses from the heart of Africa to Europe. I am ashamed to belong to a country that call themselves Christian but a Christian has very little.
Christians are followers of Jesus of Nazareth that poor crucified outside the walls and who identified himself with the hungry, prisoners, foreigners. "What you did for one of these my brethren, you do unto me." How can we call ourselves Christians out of our mouths and words come out of hatred and contempt for immigrants and Roma? How can we boast of doing sponsorships while we refuse to do adoptions closely "?
How can you have Christian communities do not rebel against these trends racist and xenophobic? And when the shepherds take strong stance against this, because trends necrophilic? As a missionary, who has committed to a life of impoverished side of the earth, now that I work at Naples, I feel I must take the side of the marginalized, immigrants and Roma against any racist tendencies in society and our government. Remain silent now is to be responsible for the disasters of tomorrow.
I recall the words of Pastor Martin Niemoeller the Confessing Church in Hitler: "When the SS came to arrest trade unionists, I did not protest because I was not a trade unionist. When they came to arrest the Roma have not objected to When I was a Roma came to arrest the Jews have not complained because I was not a Jew ... When I finally came to arrest me there was no one to protest. "
We can not keep quiet, we need to talk, scream, scream. E 'at stake the future of our country, especially the future of humanity is at stake rather than life itself. Let's get the win for life!
Alex Zanotelli ...
