Madrid, Aug 21 (Prensa Latina) Just over 20 days into the migration crisis in the Spanish autonomous city of Ceuta, the situation seems far from being resolved and the idea that it is a laboratory against the left is gaining strength.

Regardless of whether the central government led by the socialist Pedro Sánchez did its homework, several aspects stand out and reinforce the theories known in Spain as “conspiracy theories”.

Sánchez has had clashes with US President Donald Trump, especially over the demand to increase military spending with NATO, but also over his alignment with the Palestinian cause and the promotion of a two-state solution with Israel.

Trump, as a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also does not seem to support Madrid’s measures against the Tel Aviv regime on some fronts.

At the same time, Sánchez’s government decided to regularize immigrants, more than half a million, who have been living and even working in Spain for some time, although without papers.

Far-right governments, particularly European ones, Trump, and other allies, vehemently opposed the Spanish initiative. Ironically, they didn’t hide a kind of morbid glee when more than 72,000 people crossed the border from Morocco into Ceuta between July 30 and 31.

While tensions continue between the Sánchez administration and the opposition, yesterday around 1,800 irregular migrants in Ceuta were transferred to reception facilities on a voluntary basis.

However, at nightfall, some 500 people returned to El Trampolín beach for fear of being sent back to Morocco.

Law enforcement officers, accompanied by immigration officials and the Red Cross, escorted the people, who were divided into two groups: one of sub-Saharan origin and the other of Maghrebi origin.

But the situation became tense again in El Trampolín, where hundreds of illegal migrants are once again gathering.

In a column in eldiario.es, former minister and Communist Party member Alberto Garzón pointed out that “there is no need to imagine a direct or explicit coordination between Washington, Rabat and the European far right.”

He stressed the importance of understanding that their interests can converge on the same outcome, producing destabilizing effects.

“What Vox (the Spanish far right) sees as an opportunity to weaken the government, the United States sees as an opportunity to torpedo any European project,” Garzón remarked.

The situation in Ceuta remains one of permanent political clash between the national Executive, the Ceuta authorities (and also those of Melilla, the adjacent city), and the conservatives of the Popular Party (PP) and Vox.

Underlying this context is the idea that Morocco was very annoyed by Pedro Sánchez’s trip to Algeria to normalize relations, given that Rabat considers Algiers a staunch enemy.

To make matters worse, the Ceuta issue led to the temporary suspension of Italy’s Schengen agreement with Spain, to which the Iberian country responded in kind. This was precisely a measure taken by a far-right government against a left-wing one.

Tehran, Aug 21 (Prensa Latina) Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stated today that the war with the United States must end at a time when Iran, he maintained, is maintaining its strength and prestige and considers its achievements preserved.

Pezeshkian made those statements during the general assembly of the Union of Islamic Doctors in Tehran, the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) reported.

The president pointed out that the continuation of the conflict is not inevitable and defended the search for a solution that would allow it to end without giving up what he described as the position of strength achieved by his country.

“The war must end at some point, and it is best that we end it today, while we possess strength and prestige, and at a time when the whole world recognizes our victory,” he declared.

Pezeshkian clarified that this position does not imply that Iran will give in to possible new attacks.

“We will not bow to tyranny. We will resist it to our last breath and respond with firmness,” he affirmed.

The Iranian president also referred to the memorandum of understanding reached with the United States through Pakistan’s mediation, calling it “honorable and valuable” for Tehran.

He explained that the Supreme National Security Council approved the document in a climate of unity and internal consensus.

“You will not find a single clause in this agreement that implies surrender; all obligations fall on the other party,” he said.

Pezeshkian insisted that the path of negotiation and the capacity for defense are not mutually exclusive options.

The United States and Israel launched attacks against Iran on February 28, after which Tehran retaliated against Israeli and American targets in the region, before a ceasefire was reached in April.

Washington and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding on June 18 regarding freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, the implementation of which remains stalled due to disagreements related to the security of that waterway.

Between July 8 and 24, the United States resumed its attacks against Iran, while Tehran responded by targeting US military installations and equipment in Arab countries, according to the Iranian version.

The cover sets the tone. A brown teenage boy looming menacingly over a girl in a headscarf. It has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a mosque window.

The paper contains several outlandish proposals, inching closer to a set of Nuremberg laws for Danish Muslims. The pretext for these vile and idiotic proposals is a series of media scare campaigns where a few high schools have reported problems with conservative Muslim students bullying students who are less strict in their religious beliefs. The only specific example mentioned in the proposal is the conservative organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir handing out flyers at a single Copenhagen high school. That this — a legal political organisation handing out flyers — is even allowed to happen shows that “dark foreign forces” are trying to “influence our young people and draw them away from the Danish community and the values our secondary education builds on”.

Now, this proposal has no chance of passing at the moment but it is a good example of what is considered acceptable political speech in the Nordic hermit kingdom. Støjberg isn’t treated like a crank; she’s treated like a serious politician with serious ideas. Although the proposal is not going to pass right now in its current form one ought not to dismiss it as obviously ridiculous. For decades, the far right has been the ideological laboratory of the Danish political mainstream; the lunacy Støjberg spouts today becomes tomorrow’s boring centrist consensus.

So how would high school look like if Støjberg and her merry band of fascists had their way?

Students would have to prove themselves sufficiently ideologically pure before even starting school. Støjberg intends to do this through a creepy proposal to force minors to touch adults physically. To be allowed to start school, students will have to shake the hands of both the principal and a school leadership representative “of the opposite sex as the principal”. This, we are told, will “test if students have adopted the Danish values of liberty, including gender equality”, nothing says “gender equality” like forcing teenagers to touch strangers in a ritualized power display. The suffragettes, one imagines, would have wept with joy.

Støjberg defends the moronic handshake requirement by likening it to a similarly harebrained requirement to shake the mayor’s hand if you want to become a citizen, a requirement that Støjberg herself got pushed through some years ago. “When I introduced the handshake ceremony for citizenship, there was an uproar. I was told that it was both symbolic politics and discriminatory,” the fascist leader says. “But it has been implemented today, and it turns out to work really well.” She does not elaborate on what “working really well” means, what she has established is only that the policy exists, which she offers as its own justification.

The forced physical contact is not the only requirement to start school though. Parents will be required to attend a mandatory meeting about “Danish culture, equality and education”.

But wait, there are more hoops to jump through. Students will be required to sign a declaration to follow “Danish values” - apparently self-evident to the pure of heart, though never actually defined for the rest of us - including an explicit affirmation that “the Constitution is above the Qur’an”, a bizarre humiliation ritual that reveals the fascists’ expansive ignorance on the contents of both the Danish constitution and the Qur’an.

But ideology is not enough. Even if you shake every hand, even if your parents sit through the re-education seminar, even if you swear on whatever vague values the average Danish red-faced Facebook uncle is pretending to have, you can still get rejected for racial impurity. A proposed “ethnic admission cap” would allow schools to reject students with “non-western background” if the school already has more than 25% non-Aryan students. Danish students shouldn’t have to suffer just because they live near brown people. “It shouldn’t be Danish students who for generations have had a tradition to for instance attend a specific high school who have to be transported away,” the proposal wheezes.

Once inside, the fun doesn’t stop. Anyone practicing “negative social control and culture of dominance” gets expelled. In addition, dress codes will also be introduced “where necessary”. Proposed banned items of clothing are headscarves, caps and puffer jackets. The fascists want to “remove the attitude” of the presumably Muslim “young boys who run around in packs in the hallways, showing dominance behaviour”. During her own election campaign earlier this year, Støjberg posted several videos where she was wearing a puffer jacket herself, but she has helpfully clarified that hers was a “mom pillow,” a wholesome garment worn by many women and entirely distinct from the terrifying “dominance puffer jacket” worn by non-Aryan teenagers.

Looking the part is not enough; students will also have to be sufficiently well-fed. Under Støjberg’s proposals, fasting would be banned for high schoolers. She openly admits that she wants to ban religiously motivated fasting but that the ban would cover all types of fasting.

Under the proposal students would get suspended, or expelled in repeat or “aggravated” cases, for speaking any other language than Danish in school, including during recess. What makes a case aggravated is not specified but one can imagine t depends on the language being spoken. How this squares with the far right’s performative devotion to free speech goes unexplained. Nor is it explained how foreign-language classes would function under a ban on speaking foreign languages. The fate of the many English loanwords in constant use by every Danish teenager also remains an open question.

All of this is transparently designed to expel as many non-white students as possible. This creates a funding problem, since schools are paid per student. Støjberg has a fix: schools keep the funding for any student expelled under the “negative social control and culture of dominance” clause. Cruelty, it turns out, should never be impeded by finances.

Støjberg begrudingly acknowledges that Danish administrative law requires you to at least pretend to consult the people you are making decisions for. But due process is for cucks and communists so the fascists want to fast-track the administrative process and reduce hearing times to seven days in order to fast-track expulsions. After expulsion, schools and municipalities would be under no obligation to help students enroll elsewhere. The best way to combat regressive social norms, apparently, is to ensure the affected kids remains unemployable, angry and uneducated.

Students are not the only ones getting punished under these proposals. High school managers sometimes, in their weakness, commit the sin of making Muslim students feel welcome. This must be stopped. To prevent such disgusting outbreaks of human kindness from happening, the fascists want to make it illegal for schools to make “special Islamic accommodations”, for instance by adjusting dinner times at parties to allow Muslim students observing the Ramadan to take part. Offending schools will be fined or punished “in another way” until they stop being so disgustingly inclusive.

Non-denominational prayer or reflection spaces, known as “Islamic Prayer Rooms” in the far-right lexicon, are a particular bugbear of Danish fascists and have been so for ages. You might assume these would be covered by the general ban on accommodations, but Støjberg wants them banned specifically. Just to be sure. Offending schools will be fined.

To guarantee sufficient racist paranoia among staff, new teachers will receive mandatory training in spotting “negative social control and culture of dominance.” And to ensure no school slips through the net, the government will conduct systematic inspections. Schools that fail to meet the Islamophobia quota will be fined.

The Danish far right has long been successful in racialising the political discourse on crime. It has now set its sights on doing the same for bullying, transforming a universal social problem into a racial pathology, a contagion carried exclusively by brown bodies. Støjberg is not shouting into the void. She is speaking to an audience that has been carefully cultivated over decades, an electorate that has been taught to see its Muslim neighbours as an existential threat to be managed, marginalised, and ultimately removed.

The proposal will not pass today. But the ideas will linger, floating in the political ether like spores, waiting for the moment when the center decides that the time has come to move another notch to the right. And move it will. It always does.