Spanish town ordered to scrap religious festivals ban mainly impacting Muslims
'There can be no half-measures when it comes to intolerance,' Ángel Víctor Torres, the minister for territorial policy, wrote on social media on Monday. Rightwing opposition parties, he added, 'cannot decide who has freedom of worship and who does not'.
Last week, it emerged that the conservative-led council in Jumilla, a town of about 27,000 residents in the region of Murcia, had backed the ban. As its Muslim residents had for years used the facilities to come together to mark Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the motion was widely seen as targeting the town's estimated 1,500 Muslims.
The proposal was initially put forward by the far-right Vox party, which called for an outright ban on public celebrations such as Eid al-Adha.
Vox's hardline motion was watered down and subsequently backed by the People's party (PP), which removed the explicit reference to Eid al-Adha and instead stipulated that municipal sports facilities could no longer be used for 'cultural, social or religious activities foreign to the city council'. Vox had demanded the measure in exchange for backing the budget put forward by the town's PP mayor.
As the far right celebrated what it described as the 'first measure' to ban Islamic festivals in Spain's public spaces, the outcry was swift. The head of a prominent Muslim association in Spain described the ban as 'institutionalised Islamophobia', while the country's migration minister called it 'shameful'.
In Jumilla, the PP defended the motion, arguing that it did not single out any religion or belief and highlighted that 72 nationalities coexisted in the town without any issue. The local mayor, Seve González, told El País the council was aiming to 'promote cultural campaigns' that defended 'our identity' and protected the 'values and religious expressions of our country'.
In Madrid, the Socialist-led central government seized on the measure, portraying the PP as beholden to the far right, forcing the party to compromise with Vox while also drifting further to the right in order to compete for votes.
Spain's migration minister, Elma Saiz, said those who paid the price would be citizens who had spent decades peacefully living in Jumilla and had helped to sustain a local economy centred on vineyards and crops such as olives and almonds.
She told the broadcaster Antena 3: 'Foreigners make up 20% of those who contribute to social security in Jumilla. These towns would collapse without them.'
Saiz brushed off the claim that the ban was aimed at protecting Spanish identity, citing the country's history as a Muslim stronghold. 'To me, that seems utterly ignorant,' she said. 'It overlooks that we would not be the country we are today if we could not appreciate the contribution of Muslim culture to our language, our works of art, advances in architecture and civil engineering.'
Among the chorus of voices c ondemning the ban was the Catholic church, which described it as a form of discrimination that was incompatible with the right to religious freedom, while the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain told news agency Europa Press that the measure was a 'serious democratic setback'.
The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, said he was 'perplexed' by the stance of the Catholic church. Speaking to a far-right YouTube channel, he suggested the church's view could be linked to its reliance on public funding or to clergy abuse scandals that he claimed have 'absolutely muzzled' it.
On Monday, a central government representative said the council in Jumilla had a month to formally respond to Madrid's request. If it failed to respond, the central government would explore what other legal options are available, the spokesperson added.
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The measure came weeks after unrest gripped Torre-Pacheco, about 60 miles (100km) from Jumilla, with baton-wielding groups taking to the streets to 'hunt' people with foreign origins after an assault on an older person.
In the lead-up to the unrest, after the pensioner told local media he believed his attacker had been of north African origin, racist messaging on social media rocketed by 1,500%, according to tracking by the central government.
The events in Jumilla and Torre-Pacheco hinted at how the far right had started down a path that put all of Spain in danger, said Mounir Benjelloun Andaloussi Azhari, the president of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities.
'The goal of all this – let's not forget – is so that the far right can win votes,' he told the news site Eldiario.es. 'And if they need to criminalise an entire population to do so, if they have to generate hatred, if they have to lie and make coexistence impossible, if they have to say this is an 'invasion' they will do it.'
He had lived in Spain for 30 years, but said it was the first time he – along with many others – had felt persecuted: 'All for a handful of votes. At the expense of citizens' fear, at the expense of Spain's image around the world, and at the expense of betraying those who once proposed a stable model for Spain that guaranteed a series of rights that they now want to do away with.'
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Sydney restaurant faces human rights complaint after temporarily denying entry to people wearing keffiyehs
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Afterwards, Amir and his friend Hasan, who were both wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, went searching for food and stumbled across Jimmy's Falafel on George Street. Sign up: AU Breaking News email Amir said while they were asking a restaurant employee if a table was vacant, a security guard approached the pair and said their scarves could not be worn inside the venue and had to be removed if they wanted to dine in. The security guard said the directive came from the restaurant manager, Amir said. 'We were quite shocked that this is happening to us, right in the centre of Sydney,' he said. Amir, who said he saw other people also being turned away due to wearing keffiyehs, said the pair calmly left the venue. Keffiyehs, traditional scarves worn across the Middle East, are often worn by people expressing support for Palestine. A Merivale spokesperson said in a written statement that Jimmy's Falafel was patronised by many who participated in the Harbour Bridge protest march on 3 August, including 'many, many people wearing keffiyehs and hijabs'. The statement said that a management decision was made at about 3.55pm 'that people carrying large flags and placards should not carry or display them within the Jimmy's Falafel venue', after instances of members of the public 'yelling obscenities and violent rhetoric' at Merivale venues on George Street, including comments such as 'death to the IDF', 'death to all Zionist pigs' and 'f***ing Zionist pigs and scum'. 'Jimmy's staff understood that decision as providing that persons wearing political garb and/or carrying flags and placards should be kindly asked to remove those items (place them in their bags) before entering,' the spokesperson said. 'This meant that for the period 3.55pm to 4.15pm, people wearing political items of clothing were politely asked to remove those items and place them in their bags before entering.' Merivale CCTV footage, viewed by Guardian Australia, shows that during that 20-minute window, some patrons wearing keffiyehs left the venue or were turned away, while others removed them before entering or ordering takeaway. The footage shows other diners wearing keffiyehs inside the venue during that period, as well as at other points during the day. On the footage, which did not include audio, just before the start of the 20-minute period, protesters appear to yell into the venue. 'To be clear, at no time was anyone refused entry or discriminated against due to their political or religious affiliations. As you can imagine, it was a day of thousands of people attending the city. It was a challenging time for venue staff, and we of course have an obligation to their safety and comfort. 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I felt humiliated,' he said. Hasan, who is Lebanese, said the keffiyeh resonates with Palestinians and is a symbol of 'hope and freedom'. 'We just wanted to become one with the Palestinian people and show solidarity with them,' he said. Amir said he now fears wearing a keffiyeh in public or expressing his opinion about the conflict in the Middle East. 'I feel quite shocked, traumatised and humiliated,' he said. Qamar Albashir said he was wearing a Moroccan scarf when his group of six people approached Jimmy's Falafel . He said the security guard told the group, which included three people wearing keffiyehs, they could not enter the venue wearing the scarves and would have to remove them to go inside. 'We were kind of dumbfounded. When [they] said we couldn't go in we ask why not, and the security guard said it was a private establishment. We were lost for words.' 'It felt really horrible. We felt further anguished because our kids were there with us.' A fourth man, who requested anonymity, said he was also denied entry to Jimmy's Falafel on the afternoon of the march while wearing a Jordanian keffiyeh. 'We were told by the security guard that we wouldn't be allowed in because we were wearing scarves,' he said. 'We were in shock at first.' The man said he was accompanied by his wife, who was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, and his friend, who was not wearing a scarf. He said the group observed two other groups, where some members were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, who were denied entry on the same basis. The man said his friend ordered takeaway food from the venue from the street for the group.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Constable or Lowry: which artist best represents Britain?
Paintbrushes at dawn. An art critic and a novelist have started an excitable row about which Spanish painting is the country's most significant. The critic Miguel Ángel Cajigal holds that Picasso's Guernica, a powerful (and internationally famous) antiwar canvas, is the obvious contender, and said as much on the radio. The novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who professed himself 'in shock' at this, countered with Francisco Goya's Fight with Cudgels, a picture of two men viciously slugging it out in the mud, painted in the 1820s. 'Picasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,' he wrote, in what is at the very least a damning indictment of the bad-tempered state of Spanish politics. That you can perfectly well argue for either of these paintings is something that neither man seems willing to accept. But what does it mean, 'significant'? Should such a painting 'define' a nation? Should it speak to its psyche, in the way that Pérez-Reverte apparently believes Goya's brutal scene does? Should it be globally famous, like Guernica — or should it simply stop us in our tracks? • The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for August 2025 And what, then, would ours be? France has Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, of course. I'm writing this in Scotland — would its be Henry Raeburn's Skating Minister, or does it have to have a stag in it? For Britain as a whole — whose national dish could reasonably be argued to be chicken tikka masala, a hybrid of cuisines born out of the colonial project — our 'most significant' artwork is a pretty complex question. Is it Constable's The Hay Wain (1821), evoking a preindustrial view of Britain where a pretty country pub is always just around the corner? Or is that nostalgia, making it unsuitable even if it is something we're sorely given to as a nation? • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews If it's impact you're looking for, you could do worse than Mark Wallinger's Turner prizewinning work State Britain (2007), which recreated Brian Haw's 40-metre antiwar protest camp that sat on Parliament Square in Westminster for nearly 10 years. With exhortations for peace and offerings from the public, including children's toys, combined with images of extreme human suffering, it created an environment that allowed viewers to consider the horrors of war — to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Guernica, in a different way, does the same thing. And Wallinger's work speaks to so much of what we think and know about ourselves. It reminds us of the huge numbers of Britons who turned out to protest against the war in Iraq, and of our affection for the plucky underdog, what the artist called Haw's 'single-minded tenacity'. As an imperfect answer to an unanswerable question, State Britain gets my vote. Nancy Durrant Compared with France, Italy and Spain, Britain has produced few great painters. We're generally better at writing. But there is something novelistic about the painter William Hogarth, whose pictures tell stories and have something very ungrand and deflationary and British about them. They're also genuinely comic. My favourite is Tête à Tête from Hogarth's series Marriage à la Mode. The marriage is already a disaster — the couple are bored, chaotic, unfaithful and overspending. The despairing butler leaves the room with a sheaf of bills. It's full of novel-worthy detail (the dog pulling the woman's cap out of the husband's pocket, the broken-nosed statue on the mantelpiece signifying infidelity). Compare this to the pompous and simpering aristos having their portraits painted in autocratic France at the same time. No country but Britain could have produced a painter as funny, as democratic and as splendidly cynical as Hogarth. James Marriott Here's old industrial Britain: little undistinguished figures, a couple of children, a trader's cart, smoke rising into the grey sky after another working day. Lowry's Going to the Match is more famous and purposeful, but this evening workforce speaks of modest duty. So does Lowry himself: more dutiful than happy, but fond of his home region; anonymous in a raincoat, too diffident to accept a knighthood. Made a coronation artist in 1953, he, as usual, just lovingly depicted the crowds, Queen Elizabeth's golden coach half-hidden in the throng. Libby Purves No painting captures Britain's mixture of pride and melancholy quite like Turner's Fighting Temeraire. The Trafalgar warship is hauled away for scrap, sail giving way to steam. Politicians love it: it's been on the £20 note, quoted in Brexit speeches and wheeled out in essays on decline. I live near Turner's recently restored house in Twickenham: it's open to the public and you can wander around, retracing his steps, trying to fathom his grumpy genius. He saw beauty that others missed, beauty that's all around. And it's British beauty — the picture of constant renewal. Fraser Nelson Though painted in a very different style, John Singer Sargent's vast 1919 canvas Gassed is comparable to Picasso's Guernica in its shock impact, tragic power and its depiction of 20th-century warfare's horrific consequences. It also stands alongside Wilfred Owen's bitterly ironic poem Dulce et decorum est as one of the first works of art or literature to capture the ghastly reality of chemical weapons — in this case, a mustard-gas attack that has blinded or poisoned the line of bandaged Tommies staggering along to, probably, a very short and bleak future. Once seen, it's a painting that haunts you all your life. Richard Morrison The National Gallery's Wilton Diptych is not only this country's most important artwork but its most magical. That we have it at all, one of a handful of English panel paintings to have survived from the Middle Ages, seems akin to necromancy. Thanks to the Reformation in the 16th century, and the activities of Oliver Cromwell a century after that, the earliest chapters of our art history have largely been taken from us. Painted by an unknown artist for Richard II towards the end of the 1300s, this folding pair of panels depicts his coronation before a trio of saints and a host of angels, the latter looking like bewinged girl guides. The Wilton Diptych gives a ravishing — and, to be frank, heartbreaking — insight into our collective loss. Anna Murphy I have chosen Whistlejacket by George Stubbs because a) it is lovely and b) it speaks to my childhood obsession with horses and the fact that for hours I would try — and fail miserably — to draw them (I could just about do the head and neck but never the body and legs, which always resembled those of a panto horse). Horses were, to me (still are, along with dogs), nature's most beautiful animal creation, and Whistlejacket, rearing magnificently, hoofs pawing the air, and with real, conscious character in his face and eyes, is a pin-up. Stubbs, aka 'Liverpool's Leonardo' because of his anatomical attention to detail, dissecting equine corpses the better to understand their bodies, painted the stallion not in a field or even with another animal but alone, isolated, against a plain yellowish backdrop, almost as though he is in a studio, which is pleasing. It creates a sense that he is as aesthetically worthy of a portrait in his own right as any king, queen or castle. Quite right. Carol Midgley You would think from the paintings commonly labelled Britain's favourites, from the likes of JMW Turner and John Constable, that the most important things about us are our sea and countryside. But surely the defining thing about this country was the Industrial Revolution. It not only changed our economics, landscape and demographics, it changed the dynamics of the world. And this is why, for me, the Wolverhampton-born artist Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) is so important. Self-taught, he painted the blast furnaces, coalmines, factories and collieries of the Black Country with the eye of a French impressionist. A landscape that an American consul to Birmingham once described as 'black by day and red by night', and that is said to have been the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Turner captured our light, Constable conveyed the beauty of our land, but a painting such as In the Black Country depicts nothing less than the fire in Britain's soul. Sathnam Sanghera
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Cancel culture? I'm not to blame, says Sturgeon in wake of Fringe venue Forbes ban
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The Scottish Daily Mail revealed how bosses apologised to performers after the Deputy First Minister appeared at a Fringe event last week. Some artists set up a 'safe room', claiming to be 'terrified' by the 5ft 2in MSP. The venue said booking Ms Forbes, who has criticised gender reforms and backs single-sex spaces for biological women, was an 'oversight' they would prevent 'happening again'. It led to calls for a recent award of £608,000 of public funding to be withdrawn. After appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival yesterday, Ms Sturgeon, who now admits she should have 'paused' her gender reforms, was asked about the ban. She said: 'I don't agree with cancel culture and I don't agree with that.' The Book Festival has been criticised for failing to include gender critical writers, including the authors of the best-selling essay collection The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht. While the National Library of Scotland has been accused of 'cowardice' for pulling the book from a major exhibition after staff complained about it promoting 'hate speech'. Asked if she bore responsibility for the 'censorious atmosphere', Ms Sturgeon said: 'No, I don't.' Pressed on whether she would say sorry to people who felt vilified for their gender-critical views, she said: 'No, I won't apologise. People on both sides of this debate are vilified. I've been vilified and received some awful abuse - nothing like the abuse trans people are getting right now. 'I tried to stand up for rights of one of most stigmatised minorities in the country. I don't believe that is in conflict with the rights of women which I have stood up for and will continue to stand up for.' She added: 'As a frontline politician for three decades, I am not without responsibility for the state of public discourse. I've got to take my share of collective responsibility. 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'Vile abuse on either side of this debate is completely unacceptable, but it's impossible to deny that Nicola Sturgeon's obsession with gender ideology and intolerance towards women's groups poured fuel on the fire.' The ex FM also revealed she received a rape threat and vile comments about her miscarriage after the release of her memoir. She said: 'These are people who call themselves feminists, standing up for women's rights, saying things about me, such as when I described my miscarriage experience the other day, 'I haven't laughed as much in years', accusing me of making it up, people saying they hope I'm raped in a toilet. These are the kind of things that go in both directions.' Earlier, on stage with broadcaster Kirsty Wark to discuss her memoir Frankly, Ms Sturgeon was cheered by fans for taking a swipe at Joanna Cherry, KC. The former SNP MP, who was ostracised by party colleagues for opposing gender reforms, said this week Ms Sturgeon was 'Stalinist' in how she ran the SNP. Ms Sturgeon said: 'There are certain people in this world who spend a lot more time thinking about me than I spend thinking about them.' She also admitted her flagship pledge to close the attainment gap in schools could take twice as long to deliver as she promised. She vowed in 2016 to end the gulf in exam results between rich and poor areas in a decade. But she suggested yesterday it could be another 10 years before SNP policies had an effect - as she hadn't realised tackling poverty was needed to address the poverty-related problem. She said: 'Unless you're changing the conditions kids are growing up in, then you're not going to have the impact, and that's what I learned along the way. 'Some of the things that I am proudest of are the Scottish Child Payment, the doubling of early years education, the baby box. These are things that are lifting children out of poverty, and I believe in time will make a difference.' Ms Wark replied incredulously: 'In time? That was ten years ago. That gap has not been closed. 'In time' is leaving a whole generation of children without that.' Ms Sturgeon: 'It will take longer than I appreciated or allowed myself to appreciate at the time, and that was my mistake. But it will work through the system. 'I absolutely believe that things like Scottish Child Payment, if we're looking back 10 years from now, the benefits of that in school attainment, in the attainment gap, will be seen.' Scottish Tory education spokesman Miles Briggs said: 'Nicola Sturgeon claimed that education was her top priority, but her record was disastrous - and now she says it will be another decade before progress is made on the flagship promise she made 10 years ago. 'It would be laughable if it wasn't so serious for the young people she has let down.' Asked why there was so little in her memoir about Scotland's drugs deaths crisis on her watch and if she owed the public an explanation, Ms Sturgeon said: 'It's for the public to read my book and make up their minds about that and other issues.'
