Sílvia Orriols defends banning the Quran: "What is being said is barbaric"

BarcelonaThe leader of the far-right Catalan independence movement, Sílvia Orriols, once again displayed her Islamophobia this Tuesday, a cornerstone of her political project, as she herself claims. In an interview with Catalunya Ràdio, the head of Aliança Catalana (AC) defended banning the Quran, the holy text of Muslims, arguing that "what it says is barbaric." She didn't stop there: "The Bible also contains phrases that are completely taken out of context, but the beauty of it is that we Christians know how to contextualize and update them; we don't interpret them literally," she said, in a direct attack on the capabilities of Muslims. "Their own religion says so; the Quran is not open to interpretation," she added, although this premise only applies to certain branches of Islam. The mayor of Ripoll also began the interview by confessing that she lives with "great hope." the US and Israeli attack on Iran"One of the most terrifying regimes in the world could fall," celebrated the woman who, on other occasions, has had no problem expressing her support for Donald Trump. In this regard, she denounced the opposition to the war of Spanish President Pedro Sánchez, whom she criticized for "playing at ambiguity and mediocrity" and for "not being able to stand up for human rights." The far-right leader was referring to the rights of the Iranian population, long repressed by the authorities in Tehran, but she omitted the massacres of the same population that are being caused by the bombs coming from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Orriols, who has stated that she prioritizes her position as mayor over that of deputy – she has admitted, in fact, that He does not usually attend committee meetings to which she is assigned—, she has not ruled out running again as a candidate for Aliança Catalana in the next Catalan elections if the project "needs" her. She has called for these elections to be held soon: she believes that the budgets presented by the Catalan government "perpetuate the misappropriation of public funds" and has argued that, given the lack of support for their approval, calling elections would be "the most legitimate" course of action for President Salvador Illa. She has complained of "influencing" the discourse of the entire parliamentary spectrum with her presence in the chamber, especially in the case of Junts, and has not ruled out post-election agreements Both at the national and local levels, if they serve to implement the policies advocated by his party. Policies that fall within the same principles as the Spanish and European far right, both in relation to feminism—he has considered the current mainstream movement too radical to "fight men," and has equated it with machismo—and in matters of Islamophobia and xenophobia.

After referring to Islam as a "political and religious ideology," as a "totalitarian regime," and as a "theocracy in itself," he has proposed closing all mosques that "proclaim a literal vision of Islam" and that are a "hotbed of radicalization." Beyond the fact that this statement contradicts himself—he has implicitly admitted that the Quran is indeed open to interpretation—he has asserted that his proposal would entail closing a third of the mosques currently in Catalonia, without clarifying where he obtained this figure or what criteria he used to arrive at it.

"They're forcing us to live with savages"

At the same time, however, she asserted that official data on insecurity and the supposed "immigration deficit" in Catalonia "are not reliable" and reiterated the link between immigration and crime, a pillar of the hate speech that AC shares with the far-right Vox party. Orriols denied the relationship between crime and poverty, linking it, without evidence, to a "cultural" issue and the "different moral frameworks" of people coming from certain countries. "They are forcing us to live with savages," she went so far as to say.

The mayor, who demanded a firm hand in deportations, also suggested that her counterpart in Badalona, ​​the Popular Party's Xavier García Albiol, was too lenient with the hundreds of people occupying the abandoned former high school B9. which left them destitute with no alternative"I wouldn't have waited until there were 400 people [...] I would act firmly," he said, concluding with a message contrary to solidarity with the most disadvantaged: "Catalonia is not an NGO."