Avoid celebrations of Islamic acts in the public spaces of the municipality. That was Vox's goal with the motion presented last week in the plenary of July of the Murcian City Council of Jumilla. And although the motion as such was not approved, but an amendment of the PP in which express reference is not made to this religious community, in the text that came forward, the modification of the Sports Facilities Regulation is established “so that the use of these facilities is exclusively for the sports field or acts and activities organized by the City Council of Jumilla, and in no case for cultural, social or religious activities outside the City Council”. “What he did was bleach the motion,” considers the former mayor and socialist spokesman in Jumilla, Juana Guardiola.
In the same amendment – approved with the ten votes of the councilors of the PP and the abstention of VOX – are promoted “the activities, campaigns and cultural proposals that defend our identity and protect traditional religious values and manifestations in our country.” Although from the PP in Jumilla they have defended that express reference is not made to any religious community, the decision has been hard criticized by the opposition in the City Council, where the PSOE has nine councilors and IU with one, and Podemos has presented, for its part, a letter in the Prosecutor's Office to denounce “this new nonsense of the Popular and Vox Party”. “It is another step in the Xenophobic and racist drift not so much of Vox, which has accustomed us, but of the Popular Party, which in the Region of Murcia buys all its policies,” said the Secretary of Communication of Podemos on Wednesday in the Region of Murcia, Víctor Egío. “The Popular Party of López Miras, today, does not differ in anything from that racist ultra -right,” said Egío.
The motion was proposed by the only councilor of Vox at the City of Jumilla, Juan Agustín Navarro, but came forward after the amendment of the PP, which governs this Murcian municipality of 27,000 inhabitants. The motion of Vox proposed to prohibit the celebration of Ramadan or the Lamb Festival in public spaces and has made Jumilla the first session into converting this threat of the ultra -right into a real veto into a municipality with a population – according to data from the ine- of about 1,500 people of Muslim religion.
“Pure and hard discrimination”
“What has happened in Jumilla seems unacceptable to me,” said Sabah Yacoubi on Wednesday, president of the Association of Moroccan Immigrant Workers of Murcia (ATIM), for whom “Prohibiting Islamic religious festivals in public spaces is not a simple administrative decision, it is pure and hard discrimination that violates the Constitution and the agreements that the State signed with the Islamic Commission in 1992.”
For Yacoubi, “talking about activities outside the identity of the people is false and dangerous. Since when is it questioned that Holy Week processions use the streets? Who decides what the identity of the people is?” He said while recalling that in Jumilla they live more than 1,500 Muslims that pay taxes and are part of the community. “They have the same right as anyone to use public spaces for their celebrations.”
The Moroccan activist has pointed out that Islam is part of Spain, “denying it is to deny almost eight centuries of history; the Andalusian legacy is in our culture, language, architecture and traditions and pretending to erase it is revisionism that only seeks to sow hate.”
For Yacoubi, “the most worrying thing is that these types of decisions are not isolated facts, what we see in Jumilla follows a guideline that we have already seen in other places in the Region of Murcia, such as in Torre Pacheco, where Islamophobic speeches and policies are also rehearsed under the umbrella of an alleged defense of ours.” In his opinion, “it is a political experiment of exclusion, an institutional racism laboratory, and what is today allowed in Jumilla can be the prelude to what is tried to apply tomorrow in other towns and cities of Spain if it does not stop on time.”
Along the same lines, Monir Binjilon, president of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities (FEERI), has indicated that “the Muslims of the Murcia region feel very disappointed.” “We do not understand how politicians in this country want to collapse all the struggle for the defense of religious freedoms and fundamental rights collected in the Constitution.” For Binjilon, a “serious” crime is being committed, which consists of hindering religious freedom. “We can only describe it as racism, and Islamophobia,” he said.
“We would have given us the same if they were going to ban all the religious symbols and acts of all confessions,” but the focus is in Islam, “and in our community.” The president of the Feeri has recognized that during the recent altercations in Torre Pachecho against the Moroccan migrant population “we have felt fear, and it has been thanks to some ideologies that want to break society and that they talk about Spanish identity, but they really have an identity crisis and do not want to find out that Islam forms a very important part of the legacy of this country.”
“They continue to feed hate”
The decision has been strongly criticized by opposition councilors, who have described this veto as “xenophobic”. A sentence to which the Secretary General of the Murcian Socialists, Francisco Lucas Ayala, who has pointed out that “nothing has been learned from what happened in Torre Pacheco has been added; they continue to feed hate and cause a social fracture of unpredictable consent; the PP violates constitutional values and puts the coexistence at risk only by clinging to power”.
In the brief presented by Podemos before the Prosecutor's Office, the disturbances of Torre Pacheco are also alluded to. “This action – they apply – cannot be analyzed in isolation, but in the context of a growing institutional strategy of exclusion driven by extreme right political forces in the Region of Murcia.” And the letter continues: “Just a few days before, the municipality of Torre Pacheco was the scene of serious disturbances motivated by hate speeches against the Maghreb community, facts that have been subject to a complaint before this same prosecutor's office.”
United Left-Verdes of the Region of Murcia has also announced that the measure approved in the Plenary Session of the City of Jumilla will bring to court. The leftist organization has considered that this resolution is a frontal attack on fundamental rights included in the Spanish Constitution, and especially article 16, which guarantees religious and worship freedom. According to IU-Verdes, it is an act of institutional discrimination “disguised as administrative regulation”, which has no legal support and that constitutes a flagrant case of Islamophobic racism promoted from local power.
The IU-Verdes Regional Coordinator, Penelope Luna, said that “it is an act of Islamophobic and hate racism, disguised as administrative regulations” and has accused the PP “of being an accomplice of fascism, negotiating the dignity of this land in exchange for continuing to rule at any price. The Region of Murcia cannot become the field of testing of reactionary authoritarianism”.
