Ritual washing in Santa Coloma, recast as fouling the water children drink.
Muslim people wash before prayer, and on September 11 RadioGenoa posted on X about that washing in Santa Coloma, in Spain. The same day it wrote of migrants in Ceuta that "invaders rummage through the trash like rats". The Santa Coloma post read: "In Santa Coloma, Spain, they wash backsides where children put mouths to drink. We can't live like this." It doesn't say who they are; the practice identifies them. It presents the washing as the fouling of a place where children drink, and the people doing it as something the town can't go on with. The post was seen 1,190,873 times.
The sentence takes a religious practice and describes it as dirt in the water. Ritual washing becomes backsides in the fountain, and the children with their mouths at the spout are placed downstream of it, so the people who wash are cast as a contamination of the town's water and the town's children. That is a way of describing a religious group as unclean, aimed at the practice that marks them.
We can't live like this settles it. The complaint has moved from a fountain to living alongside the people who use it, which turns the whole group's presence into the problem. A fair-minded reader should notice that the post reached over a million people with a sentence that identifies its subjects only by what they do to pray.
The receipts
Every quote, checked against its source.
RadioGenoa (X)
"In Santa Coloma, Spain, they wash backsides where children put mouths to drink. We can't live like this."
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