Hi CeGe, Catalonia has always had a difficult relationship with the rest of Spain. In fact it has been divided for 300 years between France and Spain and one of the politics that have more than often been applied is to eliminate the Catalan language from any kind of social usage.
After falling in the 30 years war and the Spanish succession war, Catalonia had no strength to defend against these impositions, but in the XIX century it had a strong economic growth which allowed a political renaissance. Then some kind of autonomous governments were applied again and the language grew up strong again. But then, after the Spanish Civil War, the fascist regime in Spain took against the language trying to destroy it once and forever. Spanish nationalism has this kind of obsession against other languages, and in particular, languages spoken inside Spain.
So, for 40 years Catalan was forbidden and this prosecution has been since then associated to fascism. The current director of AirBerlin for Spain and Portugal, Alvaro Middelmann, has close relations to the Partido Popular party, which is the "white" successor of the old fascist politicians. The Partido Popular ruled Mallorca for some years and made good business with AirBerlin, but now the center-left is in power and they have lost some good contracts. Maybe this caused this stupid attack? We don't know, but when AirBerlin attacked the language, in Catalonia the link with fascism was very clear. Just check http://www.ftd.de/unternehmen/handel_dienstleister/:Benvingut%20Hunold/369301.html
There are lots of information in the net about fascist prosecution against Catalan language, so I'm not giving it to you, just the general knowledge of this very sensitive problem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Martí Cabré (talk • contribs) 21:06, 10. Jun. 2008