“Normal” and “Abnormal” people: Greek paper mocks death of illegal nurse

Greek urban free press magazine Athens Voice mocked the Armenian woman who worked as illegal nurse at a public hospital and died when she tried to escape security control on Saturday morning.

In a post on the section “Athens Voice comments on current news” published also on its Facebook page the Athens Voice wrote:

“Migrant from Armenia, exclusive nurse at Nikaia hospital, jumped from the window and died in order to avoid deportation. Sadly, she missed the chance to accompany Tsipras at the reception of the President.”

The free press was referring to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras who once attending the reception hosted by the President of the Republic in the company of a migrant woman form Africa.

The xenophobic post that was supposed to be ironic to Tsipras and humoristic? triggered an outrage on Greek social media.

In a few hours and probably seeing its FB followers disappearing by hundreds, the AV deleted the post and wrote something that should be an apology. Apology?

“Despite our intentions, the comment was misinterpreted. Not only those who misinterpreted it exactly because they understood its target [Tsipras, that is]. But [it was misinterpreted] also by normal people and our friends. So it was misplaced and that is why it was withdrawn and we hope that at least we have now explained its real meaning. We apologize, we need to be much more careful about the sensitive issues, the public speech does not all have the same codes,” the AV wrote among others, in fact after a long review of the highlights of the Migration issue.

In the sense of AV, those who criticize absence of sensitivity to the death of a human being and slam the instrumentalization of this death for political purposes are “abnormal”, while “normal” are the claques of a xenophobic and reactionary rhetoric not seldom often expressed by the  Athens Voice?

Several government ministers also raised their voices and criticized the AV of “social cannibalism.”

Later on Sunday evening the paper responded with another article speaking of “coordinated attack by ministers and government trolls” in fact defending its original post saying it was “criticism against the government for handling the migration issue.

Apparently, in times where words are cheap, human dignity has lost its value.