March 12, 2004


A TERRORIST MASSACRE IN SPAIN
and it's not ETA.

In 2002, apropos the Fourth of July attack on LAX, initially credited to a fat white guy in a ponytail, and the sniper shootings around Washington, which The New York Times et al assured us was the work of a "macho hunter" or an "icy loner", I wrote:


Broadly speaking, in these interesting times, when something unusual and unprecedented happens, there are those who think on balance it's more likely to be a fellow called Mohammed than, say, Bud, and there are those who climb into the metaphorical burqa, close up the grille and insist, despite all the evidence, that we should be looking for some angry white male.


The assumption this morning that this must be a Basque separatist attack falls into that category. Western Europe has been living on borrowed time since September 11th. Given the attacks in Bali, Istanbul and elsewhere, and given the number of Islamist terrorist networks in Europe, and given that the common travel area of the EU encompasses both stalwart allies in the war on terror (Spain) and far murkier jurisdictions (Greece), it was inevitable this would happen. As to whether it's "blowback", and if so whether one can avoid it, I addressed that in The Spectator of October 19th 2002, after the Bali bombing:  


The Independent's Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason - blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: "The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia...." And don't worry, there are plenty of others who'll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qa'eda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: "Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon..." Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add "Kill the Irish" to our "To Do" list.

I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added "initial" to that French "support for Mr Bush". The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam's best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."

No problem. They are all infidels.

Unlike Mr Fisk, I don't have decades of expertise in the finer points of Islamic culture, so when people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew - like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. We are all infidels.


And now Spaniards. "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." And by "you", they mean not just arrogant Texan cowboys, but any pluralist society - whether a relaxed tourist resort like Bali or a modern Muslim nation like Turkey or - come to that, one day down the road - a cynical swamp of appeasement like France.