July 21, 2006

Apology to Generalissimo Franco

Thousands of Spaniards rallied in Madrid yesterday against Israel's action in Lebanon. This account is from the Spanish blog Última Hora and by somebody who was there:

7000 people have protested Thursday in Madrid against Israel, summoned by the PSOE [Partido Socialista Obrero Español], the trade unions and other associations of the Left.

The tone of the manifestation could not have been more aggressive against Israel, with Palestinian and republican flags mixed with placards and shouts of insults against Israel, like terrorists, genocidals, assassins.

There were posters with as abject mottos as: "Nazi, Yankee and Jewish, no chosen people anymore". Also, the State of Israel was accused openly of genocide.

Israel "Nazi" and "Assassin"

However, there was not a single placard against the terrorist acts that Israel suffers. Even worse, a citizen who "dared" to show a placard saying "Israel wants peace, those who vote for Hamas and Hezbollah don't", needed police protection, while the attendants of the Socialist rally shouted "Nazi" and "assassin" at him, among other improprieties.

The ambassador of Israel had already said hours before the rally that it would become "a premium for the terrorists". The leader of the PP [the conservative Partido Popular], Jorge Moragas, demanded, unsuccessfully, from Zapatero to revoke the authorisation for a march summoned by his party against a state who is an "ally and friend of Spain" and that could become "the prelude" of a "serious diplomatic crisis".

That are, mind you, the same people who are considering to award human rights to apes and I'm beginning to believe that in that country nobody would notice the difference anyway.

Incidentally, it was a Spaniard, the journalist Sebastian Villar Rodriguez who summed it up quite nicely:

We must admit that Europe, by relaxing its borders and giving in under the pretext of tolerance to the values of a fallacious cultural relativism, opened it's doors to 20 million Muslims, often illiterates and fanatics...

We also have exchanged culture with fanaticism, the capacity to create with the will to destroy, the wisdom with the superstition.

We have exchanged the transcendental instinct of the Jews, who even under the worst possible conditions have always looked for a better peaceful world, for the suicide bomber. We have exchanged the pride of life for the fanatic obsession of death. Our death and that of our children.

But it's even worse than that. We actively invited, to demonstrate how far we have ourselves removed from Nazi-intolerance and how tolerant we have become, the most intolerant and Jew-hating people existing, who are now threatening our entire civilisation itself.

Inside Europe: Iberian Notes offers an interesting bit of insight:

Note: Jews were not persecuted under Franco, nor were Jews who escaped to Spain during WWII sent back to the Nazis. One of the few semi-decent things that hard, cold old man did.

I think the qualification "semi" ought to be dropped.

Hat tip: Koslowski!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

More than that. Franco ordered that any Sephardi Jew with a connection with Spain, however remote (i.e. going back to the expulsions of the sixteenth century) should be issued with Spanish passports and offered passage to Spain. This saved tens of thousands and Jews, and allowed the Italian war hero Giorgio Perlasca - disguising himself as a Spanish diplomat and calling himself Jorge Perlasca - to save some five thousand Budapest Jews, sometimes literally taking them from the hands of raiding SS in the final days of the war. Perlasca, by the way, is also embarrassing because he was a Fascist, who had gone to Budapest on a commercial mission for Mussolini's puppet government, and who had learned his Spanish in the Civil War.