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
Historians estimate that as much as 25-50% 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.
Ethnic Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers experience sustained and widespread discrimination in contemporary society – with recent polling 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.
We acknowledge that Jimmy Carr highlighted the widespread ignorance that exists with regard to non-Jewish victims of the holocaust, but it was nevertheless incredibly crass for him to claim his ‘joke’ therefore had an “educational quality”. If this was the case he would have used his considerable platform to raise awareness of Roma Holocaust Memorial Day to his 6.7m followers. To our knowledge, that has never happened.
There is no legitimate basis for this 'joke', and no positive to its inclusion which outweighs the profoundly negative impact it produces
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