Teachers in Catalonia to get tips for spotting terrorists

By Alyssa McMurtry

MADRID

Teachers in Spain’s Catalonia region will now be given tips on how to spot potential terrorists in the classroom, the Catalan government has announced.

According to the new protocols to be launched in schools, teachers in classrooms will be asked to note behavioral changes of students, local media reports said.

Teachers will be advised to look for changes, such as students deciding to wear religious clothing like the Hijab or if they become more introverted or refuse to participate in school activities due to “religious motives”. Other signs that teachers should be on the look-out for, according to Catalan police, is consumption of Daesh propaganda or any talk about leaving school to travel abroad.

The protocol will be available soon in schools throughout the region, Neus Munte, spokeswoman of the Catalan government, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

“The education community is a space where Islamic radicalization and other conduct should be detected,” Munte said.

The news came as a shock to leaders of Catalonian teachers’ unions, who told leading Spanish daily El Mundo that they were unaware of the new protocols until made public by the media Tuesday.

“We don’t want political schools and we don’t want there to be a witch hunt,” Nicolas Fernandez Guisado, president of a union called Anpe, told El Mundo.

“The school is a place for learning, for coexistence, and education of values and absolutely, it all has to come from inclusive education,” Guisado said.

Manuel Pulido, education department secretary at the CCOO union, said these new protocols could raise many problems and complications.

Pulido said schools were being asked to solve all problems, including traffic accidents, violence against women and now terrorism. “This could be way beyond our functions,” he told El Mundo.

The Catalan government says the measures are based on a similar program created a decade ago to combat the phenomenon of Latin gangs in Catalonia. It also appears to be similar to the controversial Prevent program launched in the U.K.

Authorities say they want to do all they can to reduce the possibility of a terrorist attack. They want to avoid cases like that of Bilal Hadif, one of the terrorists responsible for the Paris attacks in November. According to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, the principal of the school Anneessens-Funck that Hadif attended, tried to alert Belgian authorities about his radicalization, but it was to no avail.

On the other hand, general profiling has been known to lead to negative consequences for students. Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old schoolboy from Texas was arrested, handcuffed and suspended after bringing a homemade clock to school in 2015 in the U.S. His teacher said the clock “looked like a bomb” but his parents argued that if the boy wasn’t Muslim, he would have been praised for his ingenuity and not been subjected to the ordeal.

In Catalonia, Muslims students total around 5 percent, or approximately 75,800, according to a 2015 study by the Union of Islamic Communities in Spain (Ucide) and the Andalusi Observatory.

Local Spanish media reports that the Catalan government started work on this new initiative in schools after the Paris attack in November last year.

Spain´s terrorism alert level has been at level four out of five since June last year, after a Spanish hotel was attacked in Tunisia. This “high level” entails increased surveillance, vigilance and police presence around suspected terrorists.

Spain has become a hotspot in Europe for homegrown terrorism, according to a report released in November by Spain’s El Cano Institute.

Almost half of the 120 people arrested on charges related to Daesh or Al Qaeda linked terrorism between 2013 and late 2015 were Spanish nationals, according to the report. The report also suggested that Catalonia was the most active region for this type of terrorism in Peninsular Spain.