If he is a jihadist, the government remains silent

On Saturday last week, National Police agents had to shoot three times a young Spanish man of Moroccan parents, as he lunged at them with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The same attacker had been injured earlier … Three people, all residents of the Vallecas district of Madrid. At first, the case seemed like an ordinary crime incident, but the call made by the attacker’s brother to the police changed the perception of the events. Although the armed youth appeared to have taken drugs and the attack may have been due to drug use, agents who went to the scene discovered a jihadist attack. In addition to praying to God, the officers heard what appeared to be prayers in Arabic. The next thing was the young man was attacked and shot by the police. The National Court is investigating the events as an Islamist attack, where forensic experts will determine the role of drugs consumed by the detainee. In any case, the classification of the event as jihadist terrorism is what justified the intervention of a Central Investigative Court.

Despite the clear danger committed by the National Police officers and the unusual use of firearms against the assailant, the Ministry of Interior maintained – and continues to maintain – absolute silence regarding the incident. This does not mean that he silenced the potential terrorist nature of the aggression; He didn’t even mention police intervention. On the same day as the incident in Vallecas, the press office of the Ministry of the Interior reported the dismantling of a violent group linked to a youth gang. In the following days, official silence continued regarding the attack, which could have killed several people. This is not the first time that the Ministry of Interior has silenced cases that were considered jihadist terrorist acts from the first moment. He did so, for example, in September 2021, when a car crashed into a cafeteria balcony in the Murcian town of Torre-Pacheco, driven by a jihadist who committed suicide after a collision that killed two people and injured several people.

This Home Office media resistance to all references to jihadist terrorism, which often contradicts its chatter about sexual violence or hate crimes, is a disrespectful way of dealing with public opinion which it considers immature and which it insists on protecting through obfuscation. Spain is sophisticated enough to assume that, as a Western democratic society, it is on the radar of the jihadist threat. The idea that an unspoken reality does not exist is characteristic of cowardly politicians or those with some complexities behind them. The government – so inclusive and so open – lives in the illusion that under its mandate there will be no Islamist terrorism in Spain. Its strategists must believe that the Spanish citizen must be convinced that jihadism was something from the truth and not from a government that is too sensitive to the Islamic world and which is praised by the Houthis and Hamas.

Neither the executive nor the left knew that everything is known in an open and informed society, and they realized that what happened in Torre Pacheco was a double terrorist murder, and that the attack that occurred in Vallecas bears all the evidence that it was a double terrorist murder. Even if this is not the case, the Ministry of Interior’s duty is to communicate officially, inform society, and bear responsibility for peace of mind.