Roma Couple Ordered Jailed by Greek Authorities
By NIKI KITSANTONIS and DAN BILEFSKY
ATHENS — A Roma couple was ordered jailed on Monday over the alleged abduction of a child who was found during a police raid on an encampment in central Greece last week. The case has fueled speculation about human trafficking and illegal adoption rackets, and heightened scrutiny of Roma populations across Europe.
The couple, identified by the police as Christos Salis, 39, and Eleftheria Dimopoulou, 40, insisted during five hours of testimony that they adopted the child from a Bulgarian woman.
The crucial detail being left out at this point is that they offered multiple stories about the child before, apparently, now settling on the Bulgarian one.
On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out completely the idea that the little girl is part gypsy. Gypsy-acting individuals come in a wide variety of phenotypes. I was once ripped off in a classic gypsy scam by two Caucasians, one of whom looked Armenian or Lebanese, while the other looked liked a 400 pound version of Danny Devito. (The woman with them was gypsy-looking, but under the streetlights it was easy for me to assume she was just a run of the mill Mexican.) They occasionally switched from American-accented English (kind of like how the characters talk on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) to some unknown language to coach each other during the scam. Interestingly, whatever this language was, they spoke it with regular American English accents. Perhaps it was some kind of Thieves' Cant. Were they gypsies? Irish travelers? Somebody else who had picked up the gypsy culture? Beats me.
It's not unknown in history for a group to take on elements of the culture of a group that they aren't related to by blood. For example, the great Russian novelists like Tolstoy were fascinated by how Christian Cossacks, typically Slavic serfs who had run off to Russia's southern steppe frontier, took on much of the horse-based culture of their Muslim enemies like the Kazakhs and the Chechens. (That's what Borat is ultimately about: Kazakh=Cossack in Sacha Baron-Cohen's mind.) The Irish travelers might be similar to the Cossacks in picking up traits from the gypsies. Who knows, maybe some American carnies, say, study the gypsy style for clues on easy money? Or maybe it all independent but convergent cultural evolution?
Ms. Dimopoulou had a second identification card giving her name as Selini Sali with a different date and place of birth. They will stand trial on charges of abducting a minor and forging official documents. ...
The case comes amid an increasingly acrimonious debate in Europe over how to integrate the Roma, a nomadic people who came to the Continent centuries ago from India, and who are also widely known as Gypsies.
In France, President François Hollande intervened over the weekend after a 15-year-old Roma girl was removed from a school bus and expelled to Kosovo, along with her parents and five siblings who had been living illegally in France for five years. After the case led to protests by student groups across the country, Mr. Hollande said the girl, Leonarda Dibrani, could return to France to finish her studies, but that her family would not be able to join her.
The case of the little girl comes as an unwelcome wrench in the gears of an international elite multiculti campaign by the NYT based around the 15-year-old gypsy girl being arrested and deported with her family back to Kosovo by French authorities. (That was an ideal case for promoting the Narrative about white bigotry: this was a 15-year-old gypsy girl who was even still in school.)
This kind of unwelcome news story drives the global Establishment nuts: they've got this human interest story all lined up to push their dominance, and then suddenly the Daily Mail and economically struggling papers like the L.A. Times discover a much better human interest story that undermines the Narrative.
Gypsies kidnapping little blonde girls is exactly what would interest Los Angeles' immense number of Latinos. In my experience, Mexicans are fascinated by the concept of malevolent gypsy fortune tellers putting curses on people. (For example, I'd never heard of Sam Raimi's 2009 horror film Drag Me to Hell when it came out, but L.A. Mexicans love it.) In the good old days, the high-toned LAT could ignore the tabloid tastes of Mexicans as long as the Mexicans kept paying for used car adds in the LAT's giant classified section, but post-Craig's List, the Grey Girl has to pander to the new lowbrow demographics that the LAT so long editorialized in favor of.
At a time of grinding austerity and persistent unemployment across Europe, minorities and migrants are facing a growing political and economic backlash. The Roma, blighted by poverty and living in squalid housing on the outskirts of some European cities, have been singled out for attention.
An alternative interpretation of the sequence of cause and effect is that the Roma have been, predictably, doing things that attract attention. The main change is that the expansion of the EU allows gypsies to travel from their bases in Eastern Europe into richer, more naive Western Europe. When I say it was predictable, I mean I predicted this trend in a 2004 VDARE article "A Gypsy Is Haunting Europe ..."
An estimated 11 million Roma are scattered across Europe.
In Greece, officers’ suspicions were raised when they spotted the girl, who has light blond hair, pale skin and green eyes and bore no resemblance to the other camp residents. Subsequent DNA tests proved that she was not related to the Roma couple who were harboring her, the police said. ...
The Roma couple had given conflicting explanations to the police about how they acquired the girl – including that they had found her outside a supermarket when she was infant. Ultimately, they said they had adopted her after she was abandoned by her birth mother, a Bulgarian national.
Panagiotis Tziovaras, the head of the Larissa police department, said Monday that it was possible the Roma couple was involved in human trafficking, state records showed them to have a total of 14 children registered in different parts of Greece. But he stressed that it was too early to draw any firm conclusions.
“It could be an abduction, an illegal abduction, she could be a trafficking victim,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’re looking at all these options.”
We can't yet conclude that the child was kidnapped from her mother. In the chaos of gypsy culture, she might have been born to, say, a fair-skinned gypsy prostitute and traded along as a valuable commodity for use in begging and organized thievery. Gypsies use children all the time in their scams, and a child who doesn't look gypsy is less suspicion-arousing than all the children who do look like stereotypical gypsies. Also, if you intend to maim a child for better begging, as in Slumdog Millionaire, you might wish to stockpile other people's children.
Child-stealing is an old stereotype about gypsies (e.g., the four-year-old Adam Smith was abducted). Because it's a stereotype, it's fervently believed by the Great and the Good that it absolutely can't be true. That would mean that average people sometimes correctly notice patterns, and we can't have people noticing things for themselves.
My guess is that gypsy child-stealing really was a pattern, but it has largely disappeared because it elicited such ferocious reactions from the victims' communities. Europeans will put up with a lot of gypsy bad behavior, but not with child-stealing.
Documents found in the couple’s possession suggested that Ms. Dimopoulou had given birth to six of the 14 children within a 10-month period, the police official said, adding that Ms. Dimopoulou also had two police identity cards with different details and that Mr. Salis had been arrested for armed robbery in the past.
... He said Maria’s case had “opened a Pandora’s box about what’s happening with the Roma and the exploitation of children in Greece but also in Europe.” He said there were no statistics to indicate how many children were victims of such rackets “because the authorities have not tackled the issue for fear of being accused of racism.”
Representatives of the Roma community in Farsala appeared on several Greek television channels on Monday, asserting that Maria had been well-cared-for at the camp. The head of the Farsala Roma community, Babis Dimitriou, said that the real parents of the child were a Bulgarian Roma couple who had been at the camp last week during the police raid but had left. He expressed fears that the case would fuel discrimination against Roma in Greece and beyond.
After all, we can't have gypsies learning that there are boundaries of bad behavior that they can't cross.
It will be interesting to see whether the global elite media gin up some other human interest case involving oppressed gypsies victimized by bigoted whites to distract from this one, or will drop the whole subject and imply that only lowbrows are at all interested in gypsies.
