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Tens of thousands of demonstrators march following mayor’s call to challenge the government over its failure to accept country’s quota of migrants
Demonstrators march taking part in a protest along the street in downtown Barcelona, Spain on Saturday, Feb. 18, 2017.
Demonstrators marching in Barcelona on Saturday to demand more refugees are welcomed to Spain.
Saturday 18 February 2017 13.35 EST Last modified on Saturday 18 February 2017 14.52 EST
Tens of thousands of people marched through Barcelona on Saturday urging the Spanish government to immediately meet its pledge to take in thousands of refugees.
Ada Colau, the mayor of Spain’s second city, had called on Barcelona residents to “fill the streets” and march under the slogan volem acollir (“We want to welcome them” in Catalan). Local police said approximately 160,000 people had heeded her call.
Many of those flooding the major Via Laietana thoroughfare carried signs reading “Enough excuses, welcome them now”.
Thousands of pro-refugee marchers in Barcelona.
Spain has only taken in 1,100 refugees, despite a pledge in 2015 to take more than 10 times that. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP
The protest comes after Spain pledged to take in about 16,000 asylum seekers from other EU countries under a quota system agreed in 2015, as the continent struggled with its biggest migration crisis since the second world war.
Like other EU members, Spain has fallen far short of this target, with only 1,100 resettled in the country so far.
Jacint Comelles, a 62-year-old potter who joined the protest with friends and family, said not enough was being done to help people who have fled conflict hoping to start a new life in Europe. “We demand this minimum amount of dignity – that at least this number of refugees (16,000) can come,” he said. “In Catalonia, everything is ready to welcome them.”
The protest, organised by a group calling itself Casa Nostra Casa Vostra (Our home is your home), finished at the Mediterranean coast – a symbolic location given the more than 5,000 migrants who lost their lives trying to cross the sea last year.
Senior Barcelona lawmaker Mercè Conesa said on Wednesday that it was “shameful” that Spain had not taken in more refugees, and urged the European commission to begin “severely sanctioning” countries that did not meet their pledges on the issue.
Barcelona, capital of the wealthy northeastern region of Catalonia, put forward a plan in August 2015 for resettling refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea.
^ A lot of the general public are easily swayed by what they see and hear from the media. The media in many countries, particularly in the west, tend to be liberal now.
I think what a lot of Westerners were very slow to realize that this refugee crisis is completely different than any other similar event in history. Unlike almost any other refugee crisis, the people who are seeking refuge are really not that different than the people they are running from. It's just that most of them happen to be on the losing side. Other than that, they're not much different (for the most part) - most of them are still Muslims, and of those, many are still radicalized Muslims.
It's as though in the early 70s, the US admitted tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, and of those, thousands of them were Viet Cong. OK, I know that's a clumsy analogy, but analogies only go so far in this instance, because this is a unique event. Gimme a little bit of latitude on the analogy, because analogies are usually used to illustrate a point - sometimes the point is still a really good point, even if the analogy used to start you down that road only gets you so far. The reader has to do a little bit of the work, too, and decided whether the point actually had merit.
And I believe this one does. America, and the West in general, are so stuck in this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mindset that we don't comprehend how alien that is to so many other cultures. In the 90s, I had some good friends who were Somali refugees. They were good people who really appreciated what the United States had done for them and their families, but they were just thunderstruck by how incredibly naive Americans were regarding Somali and Muslim culture. As one of them explained it to me, "you did good things for us, and we are grateful. but what you do not understand is that this does not mean we instantly become loyal only unto you and turn our backs completely against other Somalis. our clans, our families, our religion always come first. we may disagree with other Muslims about many things, but they still come before you."
What he and others went on to say was that the way things worked in, for example, Somalia was that family came first, then clan, then other Somalis in general, then Muslims, and then - finally - Westerners. One said, "You may be my most bitter enemy, but if you are in my clan and someone from another clan attacks you, I must defend you. You may be my closest ally, defending me and my family against other clans, but if you attack my brother I must kill you. You may defend me and my family, my brother and his family, my father and his family, but... if you a Westerner, and you attack another Somali clan, I must kill you." That's when I first realized that we can never win.
Obviously this is an oversimplification, and a generalization to boot. But by and large, it's a pretty accurate representation of the problem we're up against. Once we bring the refugees over here, many of them start to remember that they have a hell of a lot more in common with the people we're saving them from than they do with us. It's not, "well, they saved me, so I'm going to be just like an American." It's more like, "well, they saved me and I'm grateful, but i am still a Muslim and they are still infidels."
People need to wake the hell up. Europeans are already starting to get it, but in many ways it's too late for them. Thankfully, America has much tighter vetting procedures than many of the Europeans countries do, so I'm optimistic that things aren't going to go down the same path that they did in Europe. But we need to be very, very conscious about where we go from here in terms of Syrian refugees. This is one genie we do NOT want to let out of the bottle.
Spain should let Syria have all of the protestors.
For 800 years good Spanish men died to rid their nation of Muslim pigs, and now they are welcoming them back.
Well, when their women are raped and forced into hijabs, and their men outright murdered, they will basically be getting only what they asked for.
Catalonia's Elite is having big issues with Madrid's elite, Catalonia is controled fiercely by Masons, Madrid is not, Catalonia wants to manage its own agenda the first thing to destroy the sense of uniti with Spain is breaking in language and in religión, that is what Catalonia's Elite is attempting to go.
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