1.3 The emmigration of foreign workers to spain: a new and relevant  (Page 7/8)

The challenge of the 21 ^st century is the dialogue between Islam and Christianity, between East and West, exiling as much fanatical violent hatred to the crossed Christian, like anti-Islamic western fundamentalism, legitimized by pseudo-thinkers like Huntington (1997). According to what I wrote after the massacre of New York (2001) and before the terrorist attack of Madrid (2004):

The problem is not in that diverse civilizations exist, different religions, or diverse cultures, whose plurality is good for all humanity. The trouble is not in Islam, Judaism, nor in Christianity. It is in idolatrous perversion, and assassination of a legitimate religion (whichever that might be), but we perverted, rotted, and transformed it substantively into an idol, that turns the different ones into enemies that have to be exterminated. The profligate of Bin Laden is to assassin, using a religion in itself, which he perverts to ideologize and legitimize his fundamentalist violent fanaticism and his monstrous dreams of terror. That is not the religion of the immense majority of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, which has a pacifist front and teaches not to kill. That type of perverse interpretation of Islam does not identify the immense majority of its Arabic religious leaders, who have condemned the terrorism of September 11, 2001 (Buezas, 2001).

La Opinión Pública of Spain, political institutions, social actors, and the Spanish townspeople all have proclaimed a unanimous speech, forceful and firm, condemning the terrorist authors and unloading the blame on other foreigners, who might have that same nationality, religion, and culture. At a public level, Spanish society and its institutional actors of the same diverse ideologies and identities before a tragic and painful commotion have avoided the easy path of the search for scapegoats on which to unload their fury, hatred, and pain for they could be immigrants in general and the Moroccans particularly. However, that proclaimed public speech cannot simultaneously coexist with other moods and feelings even more ambivalent and ambiguous, inclined to the xenophobia against immigrants, and mainly the peak of the already existing distrust against the Moroccans and against Islam. To discover this is the objective of an investigation that we are undertaking.

The height of Islam phobia in Europe and Spain, in contemporary times, has not appeared after the terrorism of September 11, 2001, and of March 11, 2004. Singularly, after the presence of Maghribian in France and Turks in Germany, and after the fall of the wall of Berlin, Islam phobia— a common universal enemy, diffused and exterior— replaced, in the imaginary free and Christian west, the Coco of Communism, and in Spain, the liberalism and masonry, as well as the Communism.

  The Council of Europe, through the European Commission against Racism (ECRI), published in 1999 a document warning of the boost of Islam phobia in Europe. In Spain, the murder of a Moroccan in Madrid on June 21, 1997, by an ex-guard civilian and the xenophobe doings of El Ejido (February 2000), along with other multiple aggressions, are the tip of the iceberg of that imaginary prejudiced anti-Moor that is manifested in my scholastic surveys as the group of foreigners against whom children and adolescents show more distrust and rejection: 11% would throw them to the Moor-Arabs of Spain in 1986, and 27% in 1997 (Buezas, 2000). Our hypothesis is that after September 11, 2001, and March 11, 2004, that percentage has increased, surpassing even the gypsies, who have always been in my scholastic surveys, and in the studies of ASEP and of CIS, the most rejected group in Spain.