PETITION ‘Jimmy Carr: The Genocide of Roma is Not a Laughing Matter’

By Searchlight Team

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The ‘Positives’ of Genocide?

In Netflix comedy special “His Dark Material”, Jimmy Carr ‘jokes’ that the Romani and Sinti genocide is ignored when people discuss the Holocaust because people don’t want to “focus on the positives”. This is nothing short of a celebration of genocide.

Porajmos

Hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, Roma, and Traveller people were killed in the Holocaust. Roma people call it ‘Porajmos’, meaning ‘the devouring’.

Historians estimate that as much as 25-50%[1] of the entire Romani and Sinti population of Europe were victims of genocide at the hands of the Nazis, a crime of almost unimaginable proportions. To this day, affected communities in the UK and across Europe still struggle to navigate this immense collective trauma and come to terms with the scale of grief and loss.

We appreciate that comedy is subjective but in our view when punchlines are indistinguishable from the genuinely-held views of fascists and Neo-Nazis, a line has very clearly been crossed. Ethnic Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers experience sustained and widespread discrimination in contemporary society – with recent polling[2] indicating as many as 50% people hold negative opinions of them, and material like this normalises further discrimination, and even violence, against already marginalised communities.

It’s Not Educational.