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So before we continue with normal politics, tomorrow we can talk about the Ciudadanos mess, for example, or Vox's attitude towards Constitution Day, let’s not shy away from talking for a minute about the racism we saw yesterday during the match against Morocco in the World Cup. Some people want to pretend it didn't exist and others that it wasn't such a big deal, that it was just words.
For those who didn't see it, Spanish Twitter was full of the phrase “fucking Moors” during the game yesterday, even more so when Spain lost. This is not an issue unrelated to the political environment, which is already full of racist conspiracy tribal narratives from the radical right, because that creates public, shared expectations, and then they all rush to confirm their xenophobic biases.
Let’s highlight three examples. State of Alarm TV wrote that "the most serious" incidents were recorded in Parla in Madrid, "where several Moroccans have burned down a building", a hoax that its own editor denied hours later on Twiter, after speaking with the police, but who even as he published the correction managed to blame the error "on a day in which many Moroccans were rioting in Spain".
Another fake story was that the socialist mayor of Murcia had lit up a public building with the colors of the Moroccan flag, and the Popular Party on the City Council rushed to denounce the event, announcing they would demand urgent explanations. The local water company whose building it is quickly refuted the hoax, explaining that it was just their normal Christmas lights, as could easily be verified. Even the editor of La Verdad, the most widely read newspaper in a region that has been governed for 27 years by the conservative Popular Party, thought that was too much this morning: a "reckless act of irresponsibility".
And while we are in Murcia, there was a “story”, based on an anoymous blog post and a few unsubstantiated tweets, about the murder in the city of Cartagena of a man wearing a Spanish flag by some Moroccans. A murder. That was “totally false”, the National Police confirmed to me this morning, and they added there had been no notable incidents at all at the national level as a result of yesterday's game.
Of course there were some isolated incidents in some cities, as there always are when there are big parties or football matches: a bin on fire, some fights, some clashes with some police officers. But looking at the media that are not radical right propaganda accounts, the reports were of peaceful celebration and joy, as I myself could see while following some young people celebrating the Moroccan victory here in Murcia for a couple of hours (see the video).
We saw on Monday that there are some 870,000 people holding Moroccan nationality officially resident in Spain but that once you get into the different definitions of nationality and birth and origin and children for X number of generations, it all gets messy and there is no easy way to categorise it all. Fortunately, we are all citizens with rights before the law, not hierarchical tribal groups.
870,000 people with no noteworthy incidents.
Look at what the internal memo from the National Police said the day before yesterday: "the only objective measure we have is the number of Moroccans who are officially registered in each of your regions". They could only send reinforcements to where there are generally more Moroccan residents.
Vox, in the words of its European spokesman, Buxadé, collectivized them all before the facts occurred: "we do not want to see the images we have seen, of Moroccan communities in Brussels, committing acts of vandalism”, he said.
Under the rule of law, individual behavior is governed according to criminal law after the facts, not by prior collectivization. That is the political narrative, the ideological framework, the manipulation that Vox and the radical right accounts promote in order to generate emotions and anger and fear in people to make them want to vote for Vox so that they can one day take power in government.
Xenophobia is not a cultural idiosyncrasy or a passing fad. It is no coincidence that yesterday the words “fucking” and “Moors” suddenly came together in the mouths of so many thousands of people, with a clear meaning of collectivised tribal hatred. It's racism. In 2022, 74 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is just not acceptable. As we saw in October, Vox, MAGA and the other members of the new global radical right alliance are promoting a reactionary worldview that is not compatible with those historical advances for everyone.
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Racism, the match against Morocco and Vox