OT:Three European Elections In 2 Years Decided By Murder? ( Re: OT: To our friends in the US - is this true?
Edmund Kerry
David, I think you need to be a bit more concerned about what is going
on on your side of the Atlantic.
1. Pim Fortyn (Holland) 2002 - gunned down by a left wing kook
opposing Pim's reduction in uncontrolled immigration.
2. Anna Lindh (Sweden) 2003 - stabbed dozens of times in a department
store while dozens of people looked on and did nothing.
3. 200 people (Spain) 2004 - killed by Islamic terrorists. Spanish
socialists blame Aznar, Bush and Blair for the mass murder. The
Socialists would not want to "anger" the actual Islamic murderers -
fools.
Meanwhile, left wing kooks in Europe prattle on spewing Michael Moore
rubbish about 2000 stolen elections & police dogs in Flroida blocking
Democrats from voting. LOL!.
Mark Steyn got it right.
The Spanish dishonoured their dead
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 16/03/2004)
"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will
like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video
appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might
have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose
between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general
election an exercise in mass self-gelding.
To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances
to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors
reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the
face of the emerging evidence, that Thursday's attack was the work of
Eta, when it was obviously the jihad boys. One's sympathy, however,
disappears with their decision to vote for a party committed to
disengaging from the war against the jihadi. As Margaret Thatcher
would have said: "This is no time to go wobbly, Manuel." But they did.
And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the
background - just the final score: terrorists toppled a European
government.
What was it all those party leaders used to drone robotically after
IRA atrocities? We must never let the bullet and the bomb win out over
the ballot and the bollocks. Something like that. In Spain, the
bombers hijacked the ballot, and very decisively. The Socialist
Workers' Party wouldn't have won, except for the terrorism.
At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is
Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very
much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy.
Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity,
in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration
through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster
inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved
to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain
falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and
the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed
to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish
knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their
own dead.
And, if it works in Spain, why not in Australia, Britain, Italy,
Poland? In his 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans", Bin
Laden cited Washington's feebleness in the face of the 1992 Aden hotel
bombings and the Black Hawk Down business in Somalia in 1993: "You
have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew," he wrote. "The extent
of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear." To the jihadis'
way of thinking, on Thursday, the Spaniards were disgraced by Allah;
on Sunday, they withdrew. The extent of their impotence and weaknesses
is very clear.
Or, as Simon Jenkins put it in a hilariously mistimed cover story for
last Thursday's Spectator arguing that this terrorism business is a
lot of twaddle got up by Blair and Bush: "Bombs kill and panic the
panicky. But they do not undermine civilised society unless that
society wants to be undermined." And there's no chance of that
happening, right?
Jenkins's argument, such as it is, is that a bomb here, a bomb there,
nothing to get your knickers in a twist about: that's one thing we
Europeans understand. But what he refuses to address is the shifting
facts on the ground.
Europe's home-grown terrorism problems take place among notably static
populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make
generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern
Ireland to what HMG used to call an "acceptable level of violence".
But in the same three decades as Ulster's "Troubles", the hitherto
moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalised by a
politicised form of Islam; previously broadly unIslamic societies such
as Nigeria became Islamified; and large Muslim populations settled in
parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.
You can argue about what these trends mean, but surely not that they
mean absolutely nothing, as Sir Simon and the Complaceniks assure us:
nothing to see here, chaps; switch back to the Test and bring me
another buttered crumpet; when Osama vows to avenge the "tragedy of
Andalucia", it's just a bit of overheated campaign rhetoric, like
Kerry calling Bush a "liar", that's all.
For the non-complacent, the question is fast becoming whether
"civilised society" in much of Europe is already too "undermined".
Last Friday, for a brief moment, it looked as if a few brave
editorialists on the Continent finally grasped that global terrorism
is a real threat to Europe, and not just a Bush racket. But even then
they weren't proposing that the Continent should rise up and prosecute
the war, only that they be less snippy in their carping from the
sidelines as America gets on with it. Spain was Washington's principal
Continental ally, and what does that boil down to in practice? 1,300
troops. That's fewer than what the New Hampshire National Guard is
contributing.
The other day, the editor of Le Monde, writing in the Wall Street
Journal, dismissed as utterly false the widespread belief among all
Americans except John Kerry's campaign staff that France is a
worthless ally: "Let us remember here," he wrote, "the involvement of
French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the
operations launched in Afghanistan to pursue the Taliban, track down
bin Laden and attempt to free the Afghans."
Oh, put a baguette in it, will you? The Continentals didn't "launch"
anything in Afghanistan. They showed up when the war was over - after
the Taliban had been toppled and the Afghans liberated. And a few
hundred Nato troops in post-combat mopping-up operations barely
registers in the scale against the gazillions of Americans defending
the Continent so that EU governments can blow their defence budgets on
welfare programmes that make the citizens ever more enervated and
dependent.
The only fighting that there is going to be in Europe in the
foreseeable future is civil war, and when that happens American
infantrymen will want to be somewhere safer. Like Iraq. There are
strong horses and weak horses, but right now western Europe is looking
like a dead horse.
Telegram Heather
news:591fe4e7.04031...@posting.google.com...
> 2. Anna Lindh (Sweden) 2003 - stabbed dozens of times in a department
> store while dozens of people looked on and did nothing.
What election did that decide?
> Mark Steyn got it right.
>
> The Spanish dishonoured their dead
> By Mark Steyn
> (Filed: 16/03/2004)
<snip>
For something bit less shrill and blinkered:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/16/spain/index.html
"The shattering defeat of the conservative Spanish government by the
Socialist Party, with its promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq and
end Spanish support for the Bush doctrine, was a striking sequel to the
terrible act of terror that struck Madrid. What happened at the polls on
Sunday in Spain, however, can only be understood by retracing a half-century
of Spanish history.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco, victor in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War
(with a great deal of help from his allies Hitler and Mussolini), was a
survivor. He abandoned his German and Italian friends as the fortunes of war
turned against them, and he lived on as head of an authoritarian regime
until his death in 1975. His regime was near collapse in 1959, but was saved
by cash and support from the Eisenhower administration. The generalissimo
may have garroted and jailed the opposition, clubbed strikers and kept women
in medieval legal bondage, but he was, after all, reliably anticommunist. He
offered the U.S. airports and ports to defend the Christian West.
By the time Franco died, Spain had dramatically changed. For its younger
citizens, Che Guevara and Robert F. Kennedy were heroes. The young women who
earlier were confined to convent schools went to universities in miniskirts.
The aging dictator was seen as an unlovable patriarch whose time had come
and gone. The church, meanwhile, was led by the great Vatican II cardinal,
Tarracon. After one of Franco's speeches about increases in prosperity the
cardinal said, "Spain has produced more of everything except justice." I
asked a Spanish friend what it was like in 1975 as Franco lay dying. He
said, "All you need to know is that in the entire country, there was not a
bottle of champagne to be had in the stores."
The transition to parliamentary democracy was remarkably quick. The younger
and middle-aged elites of the old regime recognized that Spain could not be
deemed European unless and until it cast off fascism. In February of 1981,
the irreducible fascists in the army seized Parliament and attempted a coup.
After initial hesitation, the king put himself at the head of the nation and
ordered the generals back to their armories. The coup was denounced at once
by the European governments. (English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was
especially firm.) The U.S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said that it
was an internal Spanish matter on which he would not comment. U.S. forces in
Spain had been confined to their bases that day, before the seizure of
Parliament. Many Spaniards wondered on which side the U.S. had been so
neutral.
Democratization continued. Many exiles had returned, and Spanish culture
marvelously came to life (think of the films of Pedro Almodóvar and the
novels of Manuel Vazquez Montalbán). The country achieved in a decade what
took the Western Europeans a generation. They learned to live on the edge of
the modern age. In 1982, the great party of the Spanish Republic, the
Socialists, won the election under Felipe Gonzalez. The Socialists
instituted a Spanish welfare state like the other European countries, but
their main achievement was to consolidate the cultural Europeanization and
democratic ethos that make Spain a vital modern nation. There were plenty of
problems: A segment of the Basque movement that had been so active against
Franco demanded total independence, and used terror. The Socialists employed
repellent methods against them, death squads, which eventually came to light
to undermine the Socialists' moral credentials. There was, too, corruption
among Socialist officials, and a series of very public scandals. It is to
Spain's credit that the scandals were public, but they certainly dampened
the exaltation of the first decade of freedom.
In 1996, Jose Maria Aznar became prime minister as head of the Popular
Party. The party was, as most modern parties are, a coalition. It included
older elements distinctly nostalgic for the black-and-white (mostly black)
days of Franco, liberal Christian Democrats and followers of Opus Dei (the
half-secret conservative Catholic movement), high finance, entrepreneurs and
technocrats. Its voters were drawn from the vastly enlarged urban middle
class. Educated thanks to the Socialist expansion of higher education, their
aging parents taken care of by the new social security system, they forsook
the party that had made their prosperity possible. The Popular Party was
very much in the tradition of the Spanish right; it insisted on a
centralized Spain, sought to limit the federalism written into the
constitution, and refused any negotiation at all with the Basque movement.
Indeed, it treated the moderate Basque Party as no better than the
independence movement -- and so undercut the chance for a peaceful
compromise. Economically, the Popular Party launched a speculative boom
visible in ever more housing construction at ever higher prices -- and a
stock market surge. . ."
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Telegram Heather
> socialists blame Aznar, Bush and Blair for the mass murder. The
> Socialists would not want to "anger" the actual Islamic murderers -
> fools.
>
> Meanwhile, left wing kooks in Europe prattle on spewing Michael Moore
> rubbish about 2000 stolen elections & police dogs in Flroida blocking
> Democrats from voting. LOL!.
>
> Mark Steyn got it right.
>
> The Spanish dishonoured their dead
> By Mark Steyn
> (Filed: 16/03/2004)
We shouldn't be surprised Mark Steyn is pissing on the graves of the dead,
seeing as he recently smeared a war hero, Max Cleland, basically making fun
of him for losing three limbs in Vietnam and calling him a diva. Can't say
I'm surprised Frank's a Steyn fan.
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