In Germany, a similar group known as Querdenken used Facebook to encourage violence against vaccine supporters until it was kicked off the site. In Italy, an anti-vaccine group known as V_V (after the movie “V for Vendetta”) has used Telegram to threaten nurses, doctors and others involved in efforts to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent years a number of informally organized far-right groups have used social media in similar ways. The company did not respond to messages seeking comment about La Reconquista. Twitter has drastically reduced its staff focused on ferreting out misinformation, hate speech and extremist content since it was bought by Elon Musk. It’s where the movement lives,” Esteve Del Valle said. “The social networks are tools to organize, to mobilize. In that sense, the internet isn’t just a place where Reconquista supporters find each other and share information, but a method of shaping public opinion and politics. By ignoring the details of the historic Reconquista or Franco’s dictatorship, La Reconquista seeks to legitimize its own anti-immigrant views as traditional Spanish values, according to Marc Esteve Del Valle, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who has studied Reconquista’s use of the internet. He was reburied in a nearby cemetery.įar-right groups in several countries have sought to reshape public understanding of events like the holocaust, slavery and, more recently, the Jan. In 2019 Franco’s body was exhumed from a tomb at a grandiose memorial complex built by the fascists. Spain has responded to the effort to rehabilitate Franco’s legacy by passing a law last year that made it a crime to glorify the dictator. “ Reconquista style, but we won’t only remove the moors but also those who opened their doors to them,” wrote another. “If loving Spain is very facha, well, I am very facha,” reads the Twitter bio of one supporter of La Reconquista, using a Spanish term for fascism. President Donald Trump as their profile picture. They often refer to Muslims as Moors, an outdated historical term for Muslims from North Africa. Supporters of La Reconquista often display Spanish flags in their profiles and some openly praise Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator whose rule ended more than 40 years ago. “Today is the anniversary of the reconquest of Granada, an indelible memory of the day the recovery of the entire national territory was completed after eight centuries of Islamic invasion,” he wrote. The party’s leader, Santiago Abascal, has made several references to the Reconquista, as he did last year in a Tweet. The party’s Twitter account was briefly suspended in 2020 for accusing its critics of promoting pedophilia, and again in 2021 for inciting hatred against Muslims. Vox, whose members express strongly anti-immigrant views, now holds 52 seats, or the third largest number, in Spain‘s 350-member lower legislative chamber. The far-right party Vox helped popularize Reconquista online, using the term repeatedly in Tweets ahead of the 2019 election. But often those behind the content simply created a new account days after they were suspended. Many of the violent threats against Muslims that spread on Twitter following the attack violated the platform’s rules, and in some cases the platform did act to remove the content or suspend the author. The man, an unauthorized immigrant, is now jailed in the psychiatric ward of a Spanish prison awaiting the results of a judicial probe authorities believe he acted alone. It’s a term embraced by some on the far-right, who see their opposition to Islam and immigrants as a divinely ordained sequel of sorts to that bloody, centuries long conflict.Īnti-Muslim rhetoric from accounts linked to Reconquista soared after a Moroccan man attacked two Catholic churches in the southern city of Algeciras in January, killing a church officer and injuring a priest. Reconquista takes its name from the successful effort by Christian leaders to reconquer vast parts of the Iberian peninsula from its Islamic rulers and expel Muslims during the Middle Ages. One concern, Finkelstein said, is that the rhetoric could lead to offline violence.
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