Braden Phillips

Special for USA TODAY

BARCELONA — A TV program asked Mustapha Aoulad Sellam to be a guest the day after the deadly Aug. 17 van attack by Muslim terrorists. As he passed through security, the guard looked at Aoulad Sellam's ID and asked if he is Muslim.

“I said yes, and he got up to greet me, holding out his hand and saying, ‘These are going to be hard days for you. You have my support,’ ” said Aoulad Sellam, president of the Spanish group Stop Islamophobic Phenomena. “I was taken aback, then shook his hand warmly.”

The experience made Aoulad Sellam optimistic. Spain's Islamic community so far has avoided the vicious backlash and violence toward Muslims and immigrants that followed other terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels and London.

“Yes, you have graffiti, insults,” he said about comments made on social media. “But I would say things are much better here than in other countries where similar violence has taken place.”

Barcelona has shown tolerance since the van attacks here and in the coastal city of Cambrils that killed 15 people and wounded more than 100. Vandals have sprayed hate graffiti on mosques in other cities in Spain, but not Barcelona. A pig’s head was thrown in front of a mosque in Fuenlabrada, outside Madrid, two days after the attack. But similar incidents have not occurred in Catalonia’s cosmopolitan capital.

Saturday, a massive march is scheduled so Catalans can show their rejection of terrorist violence. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont and other leaders said they would be among the estimated 100,000 people to march down Paseo de Gracia, the city’s main boulevard, to Plaza Cataluña, near where the attack took place.

The tolerant attitude may stem from an aversion to the far-right military dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain for 36 years until 1975, said Sònia Parella, a sociologist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona who studies immigration.

“The far-right has a connotation very closely tied to the dictatorship,” Parella said.

She pointed out that the far-right, anti-immigrant activism that swept across Europe and culminated in Britain’s vote last year to leave the European Union has failed to find a toehold in Spain.

“Despite the economic crisis here, which is a breeding ground for anti-immigration movements, no party has adopted it as a position,” she said.

Although politicians have not exploited feelings of Islamophobia or anti-immigration, such comments are still on the Internet and in the streets, Parella said.

Even those who might criticize immigrants for receiving public assistance didn’t oppose newcomers in general. “We should continue to accept people, but we have to do a better job controlling who comes in,” said Miguel Tacoronte, 36, a bartender.

The relatively restrained reaction to the attack in Catalonia is also because of the region’s well-regarded integration policies. “Catalonia is in the vanguard in dealing with the problems of Islamophobia in Spain,” Aoulad Sellam noted.

Unlike France, for example, where integration policies are centralized in Paris, Spain allows each region to respond to local circumstances. That policy has helped Spain handle a surge in its foreign-born population in the last decade to 12% of the total from 2%, the most rapid growth in Europe, Parella said.

Catalonia is among the main destinations for those immigrants, with 1.5 million new arrivals in 10 years, including the country’s highest concentration of Muslims. The majority of those are from Morocco and account for one out of five foreigners living here.

After the 2004 train bombing in Madrid by al-Qaeda that killed 191 people, Catalonia geared up its integration efforts, creating educational and community outreach programs. Barcelona has also instituted tolerance programs in schools.

Those efforts do have limitations. A social worker had been monitoring the three or four among the youngest members of the 14-man cell of terrorists behind the van attack who were all first- or second-generation Moroccans.

“Some people in Catalonia are very angry about that,” said Ingeborg Porcar, director of the Trauma, Crisis and Conflict Center at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. “They say, ‘We put them in our schools, our medical service and try to integrate them and this is how they react.’ They got to know an imam and followed the path of radicalization.”

Lola Lopez, who coordinates Barcelona’s integration efforts, remained undaunted.

“We need to continue to reinforce what we are doing,” she said. “These young people need to have opportunities like others, and many don’t these days. There have to be different ways to be Barcelonans, including Muslim Barcelonans.”

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