Speeches

Mr President, the first thing I want to do is address the Afghan women who have come to this Parliament to be heard: Thank you for your voice, thank you for your courage, thank you for your struggle, we are with you. Afghanistan has become the most dangerous country for women worldwide. Women cannot go out into the street if they are not accompanied by a man, their voices cannot be heard, they have to completely cover their bodies, they cannot look out the windows, they cannot work outside the home, they cannot play sports, and beauty salons have been closed, which were spaces where they socialized and were safe spaces where they could be, talk, with other women. The Taliban regime has imposed a apartheid gender that is erasing them from public space and killing them with violence and hunger: It is denying them the right to live, it is the most aggressive patriarchy in the whole world. But I want to say that this was not always the case, that Afghan women have always been an example, a reference of struggle, for all women throughout the world for the advances and feminist conquests that they achieved since the 1920s, also in the 1960s, with the conquest of equality in the Constitution or with the right to education as a fundamental pillar for the equality of our societies. And that is precisely why they suffered a lot of political violence, a lot of fundamentalist reaction. By the way, this political violence that the right also deploys against women who advance in feminism throughout the world; those right wings that use the situation of women in Afghanistan, but who, in reality, do not care about Afghan women, nor do they care about women and women's rights around the world. I want to say one thing. On the situation in Afghanistan we must dare to tell the whole story, including the damage that the interventions by the United States and NATO have done for their own geopolitical interests, against the USSR and also against the advance of popular processes: illegal wars, financing of terrorist groups that generated a failed state, which allowed the advance of the Taliban. Learn from history: War is never the solution, war destroys everything. And finally, I want to say how it is possible that, in the face of this situation, Member States of the European Union continue to deny international protection to Afghan women, to minorities, to families fleeing the Taliban regime. Act firmly, break any kind of complicity and protect women's lives: Afghans are not alone and the European institutions must prove it.

Madam President, Commissioner, the European Union will participate in the next G20 summit and will talk a lot about cooperation, development, equality... But, let's be honest, either there is a change of direction of the project of the elites worldwide or it is doomed to failure, because the world does not work. We are talking about the fact that the richest 1% receive and accumulate 63% of the world's wealth. The planet can't stand more extractivism and environmental destruction. And human rights defenders – women, indigenous people, etc. – who are defending the territory are being killed. What is the European Union doing? More concentration of wealth and power in few hands; militarisation of borders; bringing the far right into the command of the next European Commission; plunder of southern countries; austerity and war. And, above all, to be complicit in a genocide, thus breaking the consensuses that raised the European project after World War II and after fascism. If they give up defending equality, social justice, human rights and, above all, peace, there is no future for the European project and no future for the world. And no summit is going to cover up this fact.

Mr President, it is a profound hypocrisy for the right wing to bring a debate here today on anti-Semitism, because they are actually doing so in a campaign to support Israel, the genocidal state of Israel. Enough of trying to equate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Under this pretext, Europe and the United States continue to fund an ethnic cleansing that has already killed 41,000 people. Under that pretext they violate the fundamental rights of those who, here in Europe, defend human rights and under that pretext deploy against the Palestinian people the same strategy of hatred and dehumanization that Nazism applied against the Jewish people. They're calling an entire town a terrorist. In short, they are repeating history, that of humanity and also that of Palestine, that of humanity. Nakba of 1948, that of decades of occupation and that of Zionist terrorism. Today, the whole world can see Israeli soldiers bragging about raping and torturing Palestinians simply because they are Palestinians. It is, again, the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt spoke of when she wondered how such atrocities could be committed. Nothing justifies not radically opposing what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinian people. To the extreme right we already know that what defines them is always to stand on the side of the genocidal. To the rest I say: act, get the hell out of financing genocide and buying and selling weapons. Stand on the side of justice and truth. We will always do it with Palestine until it is free.