#Catalonia - ANTIFA called her Sílvia Orriols —@orriolsderipoll, a “shitty Jew, son of a bitch”.
Antisemitic abuse shouted at Catalan MP Sílvia Orriols on the eve of Catalonia’s National Day —under Palestinian flags, after a declared campaign to ban her from a public memorial
BARCELONA (Catalan National Day, 11/09/2026).— On the evening of 10 September 2026, at the Fossar de les Moreres — the square that marks the fallen defenders of Catalan Kingdom sovereignity in 1714 — a lawful floral offering by a party seated in the Catalan Parliament had to be ringed by riot police. Paint-filled eggs were thrown at the speaker. Stones and bottles followed her exit toward Pla de Palau. Three people were arrested. Officers were injured. That much is already in the Spanish and Catalan record.
What should now enter the international record is the insult that accompanied the Palestinian flags. Witnesses at the scene, including this correspondent, heard protesters shout at Sílvia Orriols — mayor of Ripoll, member of the Parliament of Catalonia, president of Aliança Catalana@ForeignOfficeAC — “jueva de merda, filla de puta”: “shitty Jew, son of a bitch.” Orriols is not Jewish. The slur did not need her to be. It needed a Jew to exist as a curse.
A memorial, a veto, a flag.
The Fossar is not a private chapel. For weeks, the antifa movement conglomerade: OJS, Arran, Endavant, Alerta Solidària, SEPC, Intersindical and COS advertised “antifascist unity” with one aim: keep Aliança Catalana out of the square. They failed to enter. Three to five hundred AC supporters held it first. Orriols arrived bandaged, was received as “presidenta,” spoke, and left under escort. Outside: Palestinian flags, “fascist rat,” praising terror organisations. Two infiltrators threw paint. The crowd that could not win the argument tried to win it with glass.
Her line that night was not an ethnic insult. It was a refusal: the loudspeaker the Catalan people gave her will not be snatched by “a handful of dropouts with Palestinian flags.” Hours earlier: the party does not go to Ithaca, Switzerland or Waterloo. It goes “straight to a free, prosperous, safe and Western Catalonia.” That last adjective is what the square could not forgive.
Not a slip of the tongue.
Catalonia’s far left has spent two years treating support for Israel as original sin. Orriols has been open about that support. Rahola, the other public Catalan voice that refused to recant, was doused in red paint by the same family. Both women filed complaints after threats that named “Zionists” who should “live in terror.”
When the same milieu then screams “Jew” at a woman who is not Jewish, the mechanism is older than the flag. “Zionist” is the licensed word. “Jew” is the ancestral one. Using it as a projectile against a Catalan mayor at a tomb of 1714 is not a critique of Netanyahu. It is the oldest European hatred, wearing a keffiyeh and calling itself antifascism. The people who shouted it spend their weeks calling everyone to their right a Nazi. They then reached for a word Nazis made industrial.
The silence that matters.
Salvador Illa, acting as president of the region (a former Health Minister of Pedro Sánchez during COVID crisis spoke the same evening of a Catalonia where “hatred has no place.” He did not name the party that needed umbrellas and a police corridor to leave a public square. He did not name the stones, the paint, or the word “Jew.” A government that studies hate-speech files against Orriols for talking about Maghrebi crime found no urgency in a crowd that used Jewishness as a weapon.
That asymmetry is now a diplomatic fact. Embassies in Madrid and Barcelona, the Israeli mission, Jewish organisations, and any capital that still claims a doctrine against antisemitism after 7 October can read the local press and file this as “another clash between independentists.” It was not. It was a test of whether a legal force that defends Western alignment, borders and Israel’s right to exist may commemorate its own dead without being hunted through the old city.
What should happen next.
The slur belongs in a hate-crime file, not in folklore. Audio and video exist. Witnesses exist. A democracy that prosecutes “hate” from a municipal lectern and looks away when it is screamed under a foreign flag is not applying the law. It is applying a caste.
Allies who still think in terms of the Mediterranean, jihadist pipelines and the American security umbrella should notice the signal. The networks that treat Israel as the enemy treat a Catalan party that refuses Islamist entryism as the enemy. When that liturgy is staged on National Day, in front of the police of a NATO country, it is no longer campus fashion. It is a governance problem.
Orriols will not leave the square. That is the only sentence the night settled. The grave of 1714 does not belong to those who brought Palestinian flags to spit “Jew” across it. It belongs to a people that lost a war and kept a language. Anyone who needs a Jew to insult that people has already told Europe who they are.
— Rubèn Novoa is parliamentary correspondent in Barcelona and author of
La Colònia. He was at the Fossar on 10 September 2026.
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