From the Liveblog of
Monday, November 20, 2023
Spanish politician who defended October 7 massacre tapped to become youth minister
Cnaan Liphshiz is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez appoints to the position of a cabinet minister a far-left lawmaker who on October 7 justified Hamas’s murder of some 1,200 Israelis and called Israel’s attack on Hamas a “genocide.”
Fighting Online Antisemitism, a nonprofit based in Israel, calls on Sánchez to drop Sira Rego as minister of children and youth “due to her support for terrorism.”
Rego publishes dozens of posts every day on X, where she condemns Israel’s actions and highlights Palestinian suffering.
On October 7, she posted: “#Palestine has the right to resist after decades of occupation, apartheid and exile. Faced with those who today defend returning to collective punishment by bombing the Gaza Strip, it is urgent to defend international law. The only solution is the end of the occupation.”
The post is timestamped 2:23 p.m. CET, when detailed accounts had already emerged from the wholesale slaughter and torture that Hamas terrorists had begun perpetrating about eight hours earlier in Israeli towns and villages close to Gaza. It predates any major retaliatory action by Israel against Hamas.
Later statements by Rego describe Israel’s attacks on Hamas, whose regime in Gaza Israel has vowed to topple, as a “genocide.” Hamas-controlled authorities, whose statistics on Palestinian casualties do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists and cannot be independently verified, say some 13,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip.
Spain’s new cabinet is shaping up to include 22 ministers. It is the result of over four months of coalition negotiations, which resulted in an alliance between Sánchez’s Socialist Party, the Sumar far-left party and two separatist Catalan factions, whose inclusion in the government is causing deep division among Spanish citizens.
