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.
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.
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.
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.Francisco, I apologise. I was wrong and you were right. Not always, but always when it mattered.
On which fpb commented:
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.
We are indeed going through a reversal of our moral values right now, of which the submission to Islam is only one aspect. Look at the comments' widget in the sidebar, too, to see fpb's other comments on older entries.
The pictures of the rally are not online anymore, but here is a short YouTube video.
13 comments:
Franco had a complex history and he was a better alternative than what was planned. Similarly misunderstood is Il Duce who really did not share the obsession with Jews of Hitler.
This is not an endorsement of either.
Merely, actual history is more complex than cartoon we are told.
Thought you'd want to see this, having blogged on a German woman who converted to Islam:
Another Bimbo Converts to Islam
Posted by Julia Gorin
http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2362
related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Left-Islam-Muslims/dp/0979267102#reader_0979267102
Beakerkin, you are wrong about Mussolini. The private diaries and papers of Claretta Petacci prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was a brutal racist, a Jew-basher, and a man of violence and uncontrolled hate. He was a brute, and, in private, detestably vulgar. Certain Italian groups have spent sixty years trying to soften his image and exonerate him from the worst crimes, but the recent and long-delayed publication of the Petacci papers proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was everything we had always known him to be. Franco was indeed different, and indeed the evidence shows that he entered into the revolt against the brutal left-wing government late and rather unwillingly.
80% of Italian Jews survived the Holocaust. The roundups occurred after 1943. Antisemitism was not a top priority of Il Duce.
That being said he was guilty of other things. People pretend Il Duce was a man of the extreme right. He was a socialist and his supporters tried to make their own version of utopia.
Il Duce is not Hilter, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. He should be evaluated
on his own history for better or worse.
BRUCE: "I’m searching for a religion that speaks to me."
As soon as somebody says that, run for the hills! Excellent blog post!
BEAK: As far as I know, FPB is Italian or of Italian stock. Are you really going to tell him how things really are in Italy, as you are telling me how things are in Germany?
Do you really think a dictator can perform anything like the Holocaust of the European Jews against the will of the people? The Italian people saved such a considerable percentage of their Jewish population, not Mussolini, as well as "Hitler" didn't perform the Holocaust. He had the vast majority of Germans behind him or it wouldn't have beed feasible.
The reason why there was no mass murder of Jews till 1943 are complex and have much to do with the Church, which resisted the infamous Race Laws of 1938, and with the increasing inefficiency of the regime. But believe you me, the 1938 laws ruined thousands of Jews, and were applied with glee by the filthy creatures of the regime. The elderly giant of mathematics, Tullio Levi Civita, one of those geniuses who make up the glory of Italy down the millennia, spent his last two years in sordid and persecuted poverty, hounded by creepy blackshirted careerists who were further beneath him, in the scale of created beings, than the average bedbug. The giant of nuclear physics, Enrico Fermi, fled to the USA, where he built the world's first nuclear reactor and made possible the creation of the atom bomb. Fermi had lived in Italy all his life and had no problem with the Fascist tyranny; it was Mussolini's despicable and treacherous autumnal imitation of Hitler that drove him into the arms of the enemy and handed the Americans the father of atomic energy. After 1943, plenty of Fascists helped their Nazi owners to hunt down Jews with enthusiasm; it was the Church and the mass of the people (the Fascist intelligence service itself estimated that only 5% of the population supported Mussolini's "republican" puppet government) who saved those who were saved. That, and the fact that by the end of 1944 most of the Peninsula had been cleared of Nazis by the Allied advance. There were Fascist heroes such as Giorgio Perlasca, and the Fascist head of police of Fiume/Rijeka, whose name I forget, who risked their lives to save Jews; but in general the "republican" Fascists were as eager to deport Jews as their colleagues in Petain's France.
As for Mussolini being a left-winger, that is the Jonah Goldberg version of history, about as relevant to reality as the average issue of PRAVDA. I have given my view of it (sorry, Editrix, more links!) here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/286650.html and especially here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/290645.html - and I suggest that you never even try to suggest the idea to any real live Italian again. You would risk being sectioned under the mental health laws as a dangerous lunatic.
FPB, as I said in an earlier comment, your links are very welcome. I'd just recommend that you wrap them in HTML code, so that they benefit your blog.
Uh.. I don't actually know how to do that. Advice welcome.
You start with the opening < followed without space by the letter a
Follows a space, followed by href=
Then follows in quotes "" the URL, for example "http://www.blogger.com"
Then follows the closing >
Then add the text of the link (for example: as I said in my blog)
Then close with <, then /, then a, then > all without spaces.
Use the "preview" functionality to see whether it worked.
Here is a good explanation.
Actually that is Falachi who stated where Il Duce came from. I have read the Goldberg book as well.
We can get into a lengthy discussion of Statism that deserves a thread of its own. Il Duce was a socialist who unlike the mendicant Trotsky was more
practical.
The role of the Church in saving individual Jews is not in dispute.
As Il Duce lost power the fate of the Jews was largely in the hands of a German occupying army. Like any other regions there were those
who collaborated. In all fairness
the levels of collaboration are nowhere near the levels found in the Baltic nations, the Ukraine and Croatia.
Il Duce is not a Saint, but he is in no description Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. He belongs in a discussion with Attaturk, Saddam and Mengistu perhaps.
Editrix does my nationality or ethnicity prevent people from offering different opinions on American or Jewish history?
I am not endorsing Il Duce. He is just not in the same discussion of criminality as Hitler. He is a lesser criminal.
Ask the Ethiopians and the Libyans whether Mussolini is a lesser criminal. Ask the victims of his seizure of power - hundreds if not thousands of socialists, democrats and priests murdered in a creeping civil war. Ask those who were there in his two last years in power, when the Fascist militias tortured and murdered with an enthusiasm that was at least equal to that of their Nazi owners. The man was a murderer, a traitor against his nation, a tyrant and the inventor of a cult that has still not ceased murdering people. There would have been no Hitler without Mussolini.
As for the Jonah Goldberg version of history, no European can take it seriously. It is a piece of provincial American party political polemic that ignorantly rewrites OUR history for the benefit of an American political movement. With the exception of a few Americanized idiots in Britain, nobody outside the USA will ever take it seriously. And I refuse to discuss it - life is too short.
Franco was very wise understanding the madness of Hitler and the implosion of Nazism at a very early time and acted accordingly
like Mannerheim in Finland
Not so fast on Franco! First, there were only 6k Jews in Spain at the time, and they were working in the regime, so circumstances, not his morals, saved him from further guilt. Now this comes out:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3908170,00.html
excerpts: Franco, whose apologists and supporters claim he gave protection to the Jews of Spain, ordered his officials during the Second World War to compose a list of some 6,000 Jews, both Spanish and foreign, living in his country.
With the defeat of the Nazis, Franco tried to conceal his cooperation with Adolf Hitler, and destroyed most of the lists of Jews. Lists that remained in the provincial governors' offices, however, found their way to the Spanish archives.
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