Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. From that moment when the American people lost their innocence and the rest of us knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that from that day on the world was going to change.
The stupor. The conviction of a before and after and that many, many certainties fell with those towers and that what happened from now on, without exceptions, was going to affect us.
It was not the first Islamist attack, but it was the one began to weave in Western society such a primal, persistent and easily invoked sentiment as is fear.
Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, Daesh, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, we are already familiar names. In the same way that Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, Libya or the Maghreb are part of our particular geography, as were other scenes of war and violence decades ago.
The attacks in Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels and many others that occurred on European soil have confronted us with the fact that we have built a society in which we are not safe. But, above all, to know the origin and circumstances of its authors, neither born nor arrived from distant countries, but from our own neighborhoods.
We know that the umbrella of multiculturalism, far from protecting us, has left us out in the open, falsely immune thanks to that blind complacency and that moral superiority that we invest in (because we are better, that is why our empathy is greater and our understanding is infinite ).
And it does not matter that that feeling of superiority, that paternalism of such a colonialist spirit, is contradicted by a theory that makes us all equal and that does not judge anyone, whatever the customs and whether or not they collide with our rights. The most basic.
Because, in the end, it’s not about respect, it’s about fear.
The latest, the decision of the Duque de Gaeta-Pobla de Farnals fault not to burn a crescent to not to offend to Muslims after the protest of a group of Pakistanis from a nearby neighborhood.
It was out of respect, say those of the falla. I think not, that it was out of fear. For the one that I do not remember having ever felt in the Fallas world until now. Because if something is substantive in failures, it is irreverence, jest, merciless mockery against everything and everyone (people, symbols, authorities, celebrities, ordinary people, vices and virtues). Without consequences.
That is his spirit, that has always been his spirit. And both the Valencians and the thousands of people who join the party every year, have understood it that way.
But there are those who do not. And because fear can be smelled and the weakness of a society too, it was not enough that the Fallas commission apologized in Arabic and Spanish, wrote an official statement, of course pardoned the figure of the crescent and hired a crane to remove it with the supervision of the Pakistanis who had demanded their withdrawal.
No, when the time came, it was not enough. It was also necessary to remove the figure of the papier-mâché mosque and, since they were there, the same night of the crema, a group of Pakistanis made them remove everything they considered offensive, such as vaguely Arabic style arches that adorned the fault, because, already put, the architecture is also sacred.
Once again, the Fallas commission insisted that they were moved by respect. Let me tell you that those who urged you know no.
As they know in the neighborhoods of European cities where they have imposed their law, which is not that of the rest of their fellow citizens and not that of those who fled their countries so as not to have to live with people like them.
They know that it is fear and they also know that they have an unexpected ally on a left capable of abjuring all its principles (starting with feminism) in order to please them.
A left that excuses them if they attack in Barcelona, if they kill in Kabul or if they hang a homosexual from a crane in Tehran.
A left for which the burqa or the nicab are little less than regional costumes and in no case symbols of feminine submission.
A left that nests in its ranks (in Barcelona en Comú, for example) politicians who advocate imposing the sharia.
Twenty years of 9/11. Don’t call it respect, I don’t believe you. Call it complicity. Call it fear.
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Reference-www.elespanol.com