For weeks, a 20-year-old Moroccan boy was turned into a freak show monster: the "atrocious murderer" who, according to headlines and hysterical voices, had doused a minor with gasoline and burned her alive in Las Palmas. The story had all the ingredients for the perfect media butchery: an illegal immigrant, a brutal crime, and an army of far-right accounts rubbing their hands to fuel the hate machine.
The problem is that it was a lie. There was no gasoline, no premeditated murder, and certainly no monster. What there was was an accident, smoke, confusion... and the racist machinery running at full throttle.
The question now is simple: are they going to apologize? Will we see those who inflated the media bonfire retract with the same volume with which they demonized? We already know the answer: no. For those who live on hate, retracting is as difficult as living without Twitter.
The boy spent 57 days in pre-trial detention while digital hordes clamored for his expulsion, for his lynching, for his head on a platter. Today, when justice dismantles the story, those same profiles are silent or invent a new excuse. Because accepting the truth would be tantamount to recognizing that their concern was not for the minor, but hunger for a scapegoat.
What happened here is textbook: the extreme right sought confirmatory bias. They didn't want to know what had really happened; they wanted reality to fit their prejudice. If a foreigner was near the fire, then he had to be the culprit. And if the investigation said otherwise, it was ignored. The important thing was the narrative, not the truth.
This episode is the uncomfortable mirror of what happens when xenophobia is disguised as popular justice. Hate campaigns are launched that destroy lives, foreigners are systematically criminalized, and it is demonstrated that, for some, being an immigrant is equivalent to being guilty until proven otherwise.
If they really cared about the minor, they would be accompanying her in her recovery. But no: what mattered to them was having a "Moor" to point at, because nothing spreads faster than a prejudice.
So yes, it would be nice to see those politicians, opinion-makers and tweeters apologize. But that is as likely as Abascal learning a verse from the Bible that does not contradict his speeches.
