Speeches

Madam President, the Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities includes people with mental health problems. No one would say it by listening to you. I heard that the incidence was five million people in Europe. Eighty-seven million people before the pandemic had mental health problems in the European Union. There is a lot of talk about disability and all the disabled are put in the same bag. It's absurd. Mental health disorders require a strategy of their own, determined and profound. Inclusion, Mrs Lahbib, requires access to a job. Are you aware of how devilishly difficult it is for someone with a mental disorder to do a job, even when most of the time their behavior doesn't reflect that? Do you have any idea of the weight, the stigma, when sporadically the behavior does reflect it? Have you considered the particularities of those good professionals who, however, have to take a medication all their lives that affects their skills? Do you know that most health systems in Europe do not meet the minimum, do not understand that the mentally ill need pharmacological support ...

Madam President, there is no war of aggression in which a justification or an excuse – or many – of historical appearance is not used. The powers that attack usually do so on the basis of I do not know what offenses and grievances of a historical type that are usually simplifications or open lies regarding facts that the general public does not know, because history, historiography, is a specialty. It takes advantage of this massive ignorance to hurl crude lies. But within the lies there is not only the open and flagrant lie, there is also the concealment of a part of the story, there are also the specific facts that are selected and the way in which they are interpreted. Therefore, it is true that the Russian case is a gross manipulation of an aggressor power against a country that has wanted to be free and belong to the free world. Also – and if we did not say this, we would not be telling the truth – there is a bastard use by history in democratic countries. And I want to give as an example my own, Spain, where a Law of Democratic Memory steals half of what happened in the Civil War and where the Catalan separatists have not stopped taking advantage, with Russian support, of the historical lie.

Mr. President, I'm hearing here a kind of threat about shutting down the networks. Look, if you shut down TikTok, I personally will find it fantastic, because it's a company whose parent company is in Beijing and therefore it's a data-filled network of billions of people that's actually controlled by a fierce communist regime. But that's not the case with other social networks. I'm hearing things that sound very undemocratic. How are they going to stop certain posts on a network like X, for example, where community notes allow you to correct falsehoods that other users may post? You believe little in complexity. The way of organizing complex systems, when blatant lies appear, is precisely self-organization, something in which the dirigistas believe little.

Madam President, the Iranian theocratic regime has more than 400 documented and proven terrorist actions outside its borders, and a significant number of them have taken place on European soil. I would like to refer, in particular, to the attack on my 15-year-old Vice-President of this Parliament, as has already been mentioned here, and I repeat, my compatriot Alejo Vidal ‑Quadras, who miraculously saved his life after being shot in the face, in the full face. The attacker was a Franco-Tunisian hitman, arrested as he was preparing to assassinate an Iranian dissident in exile. These repeated attacks on Iranian dissidents or European politicians supporting the resistance against Iran's Islamic dictatorship demonstrate that the policy of appeasement and dialogue has been a resounding failure. How many deaths does it take for them to realize that Iran is Europe's enemy? The voice must be raised in this Parliament, especially when the Ayatollah regime has financed certain political parties in Europe.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to say that the guidelines presented continue to have an ideological tufillo from which it seems that the European Union is unable to liberate, or to liberate, any of its proposals. My country, Spain, suffers from one of the highest unemployment rates and the highest youth unemployment in the Union. That ideological tufillo is a luxury that we cannot afford; what is needed are structural proposals for the creation of quality jobs, for which an appropriate environment is needed. Some of these proposals are: reduction of taxes for companies – especially for SMEs – and self-employed quotas, a real model of family conciliation – especially for women who want to be mothers and workers – the promotion of the indefinite hiring of nationals against illegal immigrants who pull wages downwards, the withdrawal of subsidies to unions that are already mere puppets of political power without effective representativeness ... In short, in the face of tainted proposals of ideology, we propose the application of alternative common sense policies.

Madam President, it is urgent, yes, to protect journalists who risk their lives covering Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine: the deaths and attacks suffered by journalists at the front are inadmissible and this Parliament must demand more protection for those who risk their lives to inform us. Nor can I fail to mention the case of the spy Pavel Alekséyevich Rubtsov, alias Pablo González: for years, the left in this Parliament dedicated itself to defending him by accusing Poland of holding an innocent journalist; Today we know the truth: Pavel has been recognized and decorated by Putin, confirming that he worked for the Kremlin. Now, those who raised their voices against the PiS government in Poland are keeping a suspicious silence. Pavel, aka Pablo Gonzalez, worked on La Sexta, a television network in Spain known for its unconditional support for Pedro Sanchez and its whitewashing of the separatist coup of October 1, 2017, a coup in which Russia was also involved: None of this is a coincidence. Our PiS friends have been demonized in this House, but your government has fought the most against Russian aggression: They deserve our respect, not our criticism. Let us learn to distinguish our true allies in the defense of freedom and democracy.

Mr President, Commissioner, I was surprised by what the report says and what the report hides about Spain, a place where the basic rules of the rule of law have been violated for several years. The highest governing body of judges in Spain, the General Council of the Judiciary, has been renewed through a shameful tutelage of the European Commission, in which once again the PP and the PSOE have distributed the armchairs. The amnesty law, approved through negotiations between the government and the worst of the Spanish Parliament -separatists, philoterrorists and communists- has broken the equality between citizens. In Spain an autocracy is being built. Where is the independence of the judiciary? Where is the rule of law? Where is Europe to save us from ourselves, as prophesied again and again by the submissive and controlled opposition of the People's Party? It seems that it is much easier to scapegoat Hungary and forget about others.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, once again we see that, for the plans of soft totalitarianism that these self-directed powers have prepared in great decision-makers of what does not correspond to them, there is nothing better than the verbiage to cover up those intentions, right? Addressing contemporary global challenges through renewed multilateral cooperation, blah, blah, blah. This doesn't mean anything. Do you know what it does mean? Look, global governance, which is not about governance, but about global government, about world government, is the old utopia that, like all utopias, carries a dystopia. Only through violence – violence against the will of the people, violence against the principle of representation of citizens, violence against the only sovereign subject, which is the nation-state – and only by pushing further and further away the legitimate subject in the international order, which is the state, can one come to identify supposedly governmental international organisations, supposedly representative of the interests of nations, with something that nobody has asked of them and that they do, say, according to a series of strange private actors – big platforms, big interests more or less anonymous – who have decided how all the citizens of the planet have to live. They've decided we have to sacrifice ourselves. Not to sacrifice ourselves, but to eliminate industries in the same way that agriculture is being eliminated. The automobile industry will have to be wiped out. Yeah, well, I see time's running out. I do not want to leave without stressing that all this is nothing more than a totalitarian plan.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I am surprised because I am just a MEP, a simple Spanish MEP who comes here to express a political position, and I hear how all the interventions that precede me tell what the European Parliament has to do, what the European Union has to do. Well, let me imitate you. I will say that the first thing the European Union would have to do is stop funding the Palestinian National Authority as long as this Authority continues to use these funds to pay for the project. Pay for slay, i.e. to reward murders. Not only to reward and encourage murders, but also more is paid, more is financed, to those whom they call martyrs – and here we must call, for a minimum of decency, terrorists. More is paid to those prisoners who have more years of punishment, that is, the more you have killed, the more we will pay your family. And those who fall into the terrorist act are assured the annuity for their relatives. So the European Union must stop financing terrorism. I wish Hamas was a peaceful movement, but it turns out to be a terrorist organization, and those are the terms by which we define it here. I wish they did not use children as human shields, but it turns out that, when there are bombings, they, Hamas terrorists, hide anywhere, where they can, and there are many such places because they have hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that they have built with the money sent to them as international aid and that they are supposed to go to get their children educated, to be calm, to have infrastructure ... while what they do to their children is indoctrinate them in hatred at school and tell them that it would be a pride and an honor for the family to die as martyrs. I wish things weren't the way they are. But on October 7, Hamas launched an attack of unprecedented brutality. The images that have been seen about it have no comparison to anything our generations have seen before. And the voice of the West has been: Yes, Israel has the right to defense, but... Because, when it comes to the Jews, there is always a but.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, comparing Israel to the Nazi state is an example of specific anti-Semitism offered by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is an intergovernmental organisation to which most of the countries of the European Union belong. Today Israel has been compared here to the Nazi regime. This summer dozens of campuses in Europe and America have become loudspeakers of anti-Semitic slogans, with no response from the Commission. Now they are tearing their clothes talking about hate crimes and violent speech. Unfortunately, we in Europe are well aware of the consequences of anti-Semitism. The left wake He hates Europe's cultural and spiritual roots and will do his best to erase them, but they will face us, defending religious freedom, pointing out their hypocrisy and upholding the truth. By entering the dark grotto of anti-Semitism, the world knew absolute evil and absolute evil was in Europe. Don't let anyone forget.