Czech Senator: Roma community lives off welfare through its children

Czech Senator Jaroslav Doubrava, who was a communist for many years before running for the Senate on behalf of the Severočeši.cz association (“NorthBohemians.cz”), recently gave an interview to news server parlametnilisty.cz in which he makes no secret of the enmity he feels for Romani people. “The Romani issue will be one of our main electoral topics, not because we suffer from xenophobia, but because it is starting to become quite a burning issue for us in the north in particular, and something has to be done about it. We need to attain a situation wherein the laws apply to everyone and are enforceable. I don’t want what I have experienced to keep happening. I ran into one of my acquaintances who is a police officer while he was rushing off somewhere and I asked where he was going. He said: ‘There’s some problem among the Gypsies and I don’t want to be labeled a racist, so I am getting as far away from it as I can’,” Doubrava said.

Doubrava also claims that while some [non-Romani] people do report incidents of theft, they are allegedly afraid to give statements to police because they fear the allegedly Romani perpetrators will take revenge against them or their families. Even though he espouses a left-wing ideology, he agrees with Czech Labor and Social Affairs Minister Jaromír Drábek that there should be stricter criteria for the disbursal of welfare, as in his view Romani people are abusing the welfare system.

“I disagree with most of what our government is doing, but this is one of the few things that I do agree with. My fingers are crossed for Drábek, I hope he pushes that through and I will help him advocate for such measures if I have the opportunity. Everything is revolving around the Roma once more. This is a community that considers work to be the most terrible way to make a living. They have 10, 12, 15 children and live off of benefits and welfare,” Doubrava said.

The senator is for supporting families, but not through the mechanism of paying a benefit per child. He would prefer to see people’s taxes reduced by a certain percentage per child, or the amount of their contribution to social security reduced per child. In his view, this would help people who create “something of value” and it would stop making it worthwhile for “moochers” to “produce children like on an assembly line” and not go to work. Those who don’t work and don’t pay tax will not qualify for the per-child tax deduction. You can read the entire article (in Czech only) at http://www.parlamentnilisty.cz/zpravy/204671.aspx