Moroccan-Origin Lawmaker Counters Far-Right Attacks in Ceuta Assembly

"You are Jihad, you are Sharia, you are a social failure and a failure of the Spanish education system," Vox spokesman Carlos Verdejo told Fatima Hamed, spokeswoman for the Movement for Dignity and Citizenship (MDyC) party, during a session at the Ceuta Assembly. "My Jihad is to fight to find solutions, so that no one is criminalized... With this word, you wanted to say something else, but you didn’t have the courage to do it," Fatima reacted, after the same Vox deputy had asked to "expel" her to Morocco after she tweeted against Santiago Abascal.

"I understand some loss of control, but behaving like alpha males is something incomprehensible and pathetic," Fatima lamented in an interview with El Diario, recalling the latest scenes of verbal violence from these Vox deputies, which had led Vivas to suspend the parliamentary session at the end of June.

To read: Ceuta Assembly Suspended After Vox Deputy Accuses Rivals of Being "Pro-Moroccan"

The MDyC spokeswoman also commented on the remarks of the Vox spokesman deputy who recently claimed that there are "pro-Moroccan" deputies (PP and PSOE) in the Ceuta Assembly. "It didn’t take a migrant invasion for the far right to say there are traitors in Ceuta. This is their discourse. For them, a "Moroccanization" is underway. They have a distorted vision of our history, which for them begins with the arrival of the Portuguese. At that time, there was already a Muslim, Visigothic, Phoenician and even prehistoric Ceuta, but Vox has remained in the Portuguese conquest, which annihilated the existing Muslim, Jewish, Venetian, Catalan... population. I don’t see any pro-Moroccan ideas among the inhabitants of Ceuta: we are Spanish, religion is not a fact that influences nationality," Fatima explained.

To read: Far-Right Vox Party Confronted as ’Racist’ During Bilbao Street Event

"Radicalization is not good in any society, even less so in a society like Ceuta. Vox attributes radicalism to others, believing that this will give them more votes, but extremisms are not followed by societies, people are concerned about their daily lives," added the MDyC deputy who denounces Vox’s "fascist vision". "If you respect what I impose on you, you are the ’good little Moor’, but if you revolt against exploitation, xenophobia or Islamophobia, you are a ’pro-Moroccan’. It’s either you’re with me, or you’re against me."

For Fatima Hamed, coexistence in Ceuta can be improved. "We must continue to deepen mutual knowledge, because it will be easier to live together," she specifies.