During this month of March and until the beginning of April, the Huesca City Councillead by Lorena Orduna (PP), will support a school campaign to encourage Ramadan, with the collaboration of an Islamic entity, the Association of Arab and African women and immigrants.
This is the preparation of a brochure with public money, in which specific activities are promoted to be carried out in Huesca schools. The objective, as can be seen in the brochure to which OKDIARIO has had access, is to publicize this holiday, encouraging Islam in schools so that students can carry out different activities.
The pretext on which both the association and the City Council are based is to “promote” “religious coexistence” and make visible the “minority religions».
To this end, the City Council and this association propose that schoolchildren carry out crowns with motifs of these days with the phrase 'Ramadan Mubarak’that means 'Blessed Ramadan; Check the calendar for the month of Ramadan and mark the days as you go. And also place welcome garlands in schools with said motto, as well as asking families to participate in charlas.
This dissemination campaign has also been carried out through the Municipal Diversity Service. For its part, the association, as we have been able to verify, since 2012, no content updatedand maintains on their Facebook profile a drawing of a veiled woman in which they urge other women to also wear the same profile image, as a sign of “support” for “the Palestinian sisters.”
In fact, the City Council's Equality service also discloses more activities and children's workshops intended to promote Islam to on April 1 and 2, organized by the same association, the Association of Arab and African Women and Immigrants, with the name “Sense and Sensibility of Ramadan”, between March 10 and April 9.
Huesca and Ramadan
As the brochure in question itself indicates, this year Ramadan coincides with “different festivals of religious tradition.” Therefore, while the Consistory promotes the Islamic culture of Ramadan, for its part, Christians have also been immersed in Lent for weeks since Ash Wednesday.
And that is where the double conflict that the Vox municipal group denounces in the Huesca City Council would be: in the marginalization of other religions, by the Government team, while Islam is exclusively promoted “with public money” from the institutions.
The conflict, therefore, is not, according to Vox, in promoting the culture of Islam in schools, but rather in only promote said religion and exclude the rest, and mainly the majority confession in Spain, which is Catholicism, argues Vox.
On the one hand, the City Council led by Orduna fails, according to Vox (its priority partner in the Huesca Government), to comply with the protocol regulations itself, in which it “clearly establishes that the City Council will not program confessional character“, in reference to Chapter 1, in its article 13. However, the pamphlet prepared by the Government team, they argue, “is clearly confessional, since it includes religious precepts.”
And on the other hand, “there is evidence of inequity in the visibility of religious diversity,” denounces Vox spokesperson, José Luis Rubió. As the party expressed in a statement this Monday, “if the objective is to show coexistence and religious diversity, the same treatment must be given to all.”
And they add that “it is necessary to show the characteristics of all religions present in the cityas well as their traditions to ensure an inclusive and respectful approach.
❌ The council that launches this campaign in favor of Ramadan will not put the same effort into publicizing, for example, Catholic Holy Week.
— VOX Huesca (@VoxHuesca) March 11, 2024
As far as is known, the Huesca City Council had not launched a similar activity for the dissemination and understanding of Lent of the Christian religion, for example. An attitude that Abascal's people warn about in his statement: “The lack of recognition and visibility of the majority traditions and feelingss. “Equality and respect must be two-way.”
We must not forget that, after all, Ramadan is a fast celebrated in Islam, in the same way that fasting is also celebrated in Catholicism, with the Easter Vigil, and therefore, according to those from Vox , the fact of valuing a period of fasting “lacks justification and reflects a religious bias “which goes against the principles of equality and diversity.”
From the City Council, however, they downplay its importance and express their support for Holy Week, as well as arguing that the PP is working to declare it. Festival of National Tourist Interest.