Lies and hypocrisy from an Islamist at the 'Café de ideas'

In that country you can appear on public television and tell lies and nothing will happen. Najia Lotfi was invited as a Muslim woman to the Ideas Cafe Gemma Nierga and set herself up as a representative of all those who belong to this religious denomination, hiding a relevant fact: that she is not only a believer, but a member of an Islamist party. That is, a political party whose ultimate goal is the establishment of an Islamic state based on Sharia law. It's not that she's a sympathizer or that we can attribute any affinity to her with the Justice and Development Party (PJD), but rather that she was a member of parliament. With a strange gift of ubiquity, she was one during Ada Colau's first term, and while in the Moroccan parliament she was part of the ranks that want the lives of all Moroccans to be based on the Quran, in Barcelona she was inventing a supposedly ethical bank and receiving subsidies from the city council, and I didn't care.

To understand who Najia Lotfi is, you need to know what the PJD (People's Party of Morocco) is, the party for which she was a member of parliament: an Islamist group that opposes any proposal for equality for women, always presenting itself as a danger that goes against the family values of Moroccan society and religion. Therefore, when Lotfi says that women are not forced into anything within Islam, she is lying. She doesn't explain what happened in Morocco last year, when human rights, left-wing, and feminist organizations proposed a modification to the Family Code to advance fundamental rights: something her party was against. It is against equal inheritance (in Morocco, women inherit half of what their brothers inherit), equal guardianship of children, and the recognition of domestic work performed by women. And, most blatantly, it opposed definitively ending child marriage. That is to say, with the pure and simple legalized pederasty that has existed in Islam since the birth of the religion, and it is not an invention of ill-intentioned Islamophobes that makes us so obsessed with coexistence and interreligious harmony. In the 2004 amendment to the Family Code, in fact, underage marriage was prohibited, but with the possibility that it could be permitted in those contexts where the judge deemed it appropriate. In practice, there are still many places where girls are married completely legally. It will also be because they want to, as Lotfi said; girls will want to be victims of institutionalized pederasty. Abdelilah Benkirane, the secretary general of the PJD, believes that a girl can marry from puberty. That is, if a girl has her period at nine or ten years old, she can already be "given."

But the most shameful, the greatest indecency, laden with a nauseating violence against women, was Najia Lotfi's assertion that Afghan women wear the burqa because they want to. Just the day after the highly ethical fundamentalist uttered these words on public television, I was sitting at a roundtable with a young woman who fled the Taliban regime nine months ago and who told us, her voice cracking, what this misogynistic dictatorship had meant to us and how her lives had changed from one day to the next. We are not idiots, Ms. Lotfi, and we are informed about what is happening in Afghanistan, Iran, Morocco, Raval, Vic, Salt, or Reus, and we know that you not only do not defend our rights but are the women's wing of a far-right Islamist movement that presents itself here as a global Islamic victim state based on its totalitarian vision of religion. No, it's not our culture, it's their radical, misogynistic theocratic politics based on our perpetual subjugation.