(JTA) — A deputy mayor of Madrid hosted an event in the Spanish capital honoring Palestinian terrorists from Hamas and other groups who are imprisoned in Israel.
The International Day of Palestinian Prisoners was held Monday at the main municipal space of the Retiro district, in the southeastern part of the city, and drew harsh condemnations from representatives of the city’s Jewish community, the Libertad daily reported Tuesday.
A poster advertising the event listed Deputy Mayor Mauricio Valiente of the Izquerda Unida far-left party first among four speakers, introducing him by his municipal title and as an expert on human rights.
Another speaker, introduced as a “television journalist and Palestinian former political prisoner,” was Musab Muhammad Nimr Bashir, a 36-year-old Gaza native who had admitted to using his position in 2007 with Doctors Without Borders for planning to assassinate an Israeli official together with other terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Another speaker, Ana Sanchez De Mera, was introduced as an activist for “the boycott on Israel.”
In a statement, the Jewish Community of Madrid wrote that it “views with alarm and consternation” the use of public resources in support of “prisoners, many of whom are imprisoned and convicted in a viable and consolidated democracy of bloody acts of terrorism.”
The statement also addressed the involvement of promoters of the boycott against Israel in the event, noting that several Spanish courts, including supreme ones, recently declared it discriminatory.
“The support of the municipality of all the people of Madrid and the use of its space in support of people and organizations who promote the boycott,” the community wrote in its statement, is tantamount to “supporting hatred and the destruction of the only Jewish country in the world and its inhabitants.”
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