The party recently published a series of tweets targeting Muslims in Spain, particularly those living in Catalonia.
Rabat – International social networking service Twitter has suspended the official account of Spain’s Vox Party for inciting hatred against Muslims.
El Pais reported that the right-wing political party violated Twitter’s hate speech rules.
The Spanish party posted a tweet recently, claiming Muslims make up 0.2% of the population but they are “responsible for 93% of police complaints” in Catalonia.
“Most are from the Maghreb,” the party claimed.
The tweet was not the first of its kind. In January, the party shaed a series of anti-Islam posts, targeting Muslims in Barcelona.
“Separatism is the enemy of Catalan identity: They promoted mass immigration from Islamic countries because no one spoke Spanish in them. The reality is that our province is losing its identity because of those policies #stopislamization,” the group said.
The party had additionally retweeted posts targeting Muslisms authored by individual VOX members.
Member of VOX Pascual Salvador wrote a tweet in January saying “Catalonia implants the Islamic religions in Catalan classrooms and is the region with the most arrests this year for Islamist terrorism.”
In response, Twitter banned the party from using its account. The party can login but cannot tweet or retweet.
Twitter stated that inciting fear against a specific group of people based on their origin or nationality “has no place” on its service.
Human rights NGOs have expressed concerns regarding Islamophobia in Spain. The concerns mounted after VOX won 52 seats in the Spanish Congress of Deputies in November 2019.
VOX has long shared aggressive advertising that features overtly hostile remarks towards peope from the Maghreb and Muslims in general.
In 2020, members from VOX in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta denied Muslims their rights to celebrate Eid Al Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice.
Juan Vivas, the leader of the autonomous government in Ceuta justified the move by claiming there were not sufficient numbers of livestock imported to Ceuta.
The decision to cancel Eid Al Adha was announced by Vivas and a coalition from Vox and the People’s Party (PP).
Vivas said: “The export of livestock to Ceuta has been limited, the slaughterhouse will be closed, no tents will be erected and it is forbidden for anyone to come to the feedlot to remove animals,” Vivas warned the Muslim community ahead of Eid Al Adha.
A European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights report shows that 546 incidents of Islamophobia were reported in 2017 alone.
Data shows that the incidents include acts against women, men and children, as well as islamophic acts directed against mosques, and towards people of Spain’s immigrant community.
The report also highlighted the growing Islamophobia bias of political leaders from parties across the political spectrum, revealing the pervasive problem of Islamophobia within the borders of Morocco’s northern neighbor.
