Milwaukee Bucks no. 15 NBA draft pick Giannis Antetokounmpo
In an appearance on Greek television yesterday, Golden Dawn leader MP Nikos Mihaloliakos compared Milwaukee Bucks Greek 18 year old no. 15 NBA draft pick Giannis Antetokounmpo to a chimpanzee. When asked to comment on Antetokounmpo becoming an exemplar for Greeks abroad, he remarked: “in the zoo if you give a chimpanzee a banana and a flag he’ll be ‘Greek’ too”. Continue reading
This is my op-ed that appears in the print edition of the April/May 2013 issue of Free Inquiry magazine.
Nowhere is the European crisis that followed the Wall Street crash of 2008—and especially the subsequent effort to combat it—felt more sharply than in Greece. The country is suffering an economic depression after five years of rapidly declining output with no end in sight as it fails to meet the demands of the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who are since a 2010 bailout its largest creditors. Greece is also one of the largest entry points for immigrants into the EU—many of them asylum seekers—with the result that an estimated 10 percent of the population are not citizens and are widely portrayed in the local media as dangerous criminals.