Lavengro in Spain

Calling a spade a digging implement

The reluctance of the BBC to refer to ETA as ‘terrorists’ is notorious (here, for example, and here). They will only admit that they are ‘separatists’ as if the means by which they set out to achieve their goal is irrelevant. And they seem not to care that they are thereby giving democratic separatists a bad name.

Police in Spain are on heightened alert after two bomb attacks in 48 hours blamed on the Basque separatists, Eta.

And that is not to mention Auntie publishing downright ETA propaganda.

Of course, it is only other countries that don’t suffer from terrorism if you follow the BBC. The UK certainly does (my emphasis).

UK terror threat level is reduced

The UK terror threat level has been lowered from "severe" to "substantial", the Home Office has said. The level was raised in 2007, meaning a terrorist attack was "highly likely". The downgrading means there is a "strong possibility" of an attack. Home Secretary Alan Johnson said there remained a "real and serious threat" from terrorists and the public would see little change in security measures.

Let's get our (British) priorities right

Two Spanish Guardia Civil officers have been killed in the second ETA bomb in two days.Scores of people including children were injured yesterday. So how does the BBC lead its European news?

Travel chaos after Majorca bomb

A car bombing in the Spanish island of Majorca has killed two Civil Guard officers and led to ports and airports being shut for several hours.

Thousands of tourists were affected as some flights were turned back or diverted to other Spanish islands.

Liverpool, a surprising city

Steven Gerrard, captain of Liverpool FC, got himself mixed up in a drunken brawl in a night club in Southport in December.

Surprise number one:

A jury at Liverpool Crown Court agreed with Mr Gerrard's assertion that he was acting in self-defence.

After all, as the Liverpool judge said:

"At all times you insisted that you only ever acted in what you believed was reasonable self-defence to what you understandably, albeit you accept mistakenly, believed was an attempted attack upon you by Marcus McGee.

Or in other words: ‘Honest Your Honour, I thought this guy was going to hit me. OK, I was wrong, but I’m a big fit world-class sportsman who knows how to use his fists so it’s not my fault I knocked his teeth out. He started it. Or at least he looked as if he was going to’

Surprise number two:

The case against Steven Gerrard, who admitted punching a man in a Merseyside bar, should never have been brought to court, his solicitor has claimed.

There were, presumably, no Evertonians allowed on the jury.

Trains

A couple of weeks ago I went to Peñíscola for the day. It is 300 or so kilometres south of Barcelona. I travelled by train. The outward journey cost €24 and the return €16.50. I travelled economy class, the difference in price being caused by different classes of train: the 08.00 long-distance train from Barcelona to Málaga and Córdoba (arrival 21.00!) is more expensive than the regional train on which I returned. The outward journey took about two hours and arrived about twenty minutes late; the return took two and a half hours and was nearly an hour late. However, Spain’s high-speed AVE trains have a 99% punctuality rate and refund the fare if arrival is more than ten minutes late.

Next month I will travel from Stansted airport to Merseyside, a journey of about the same distance. The cheapest ticket available from thetrainline.com costs an astonishing £66.50 (about €77) for a single journey. This is travelling cross country, changing at Birmingham and Liverpool. The alternative would be to travel via London, walking with luggage from King’s Cross to Euston.

Renfe, which runs Spanish trains, and Adif, which owns the track and stations, are both publicly owned. Agreement has been reached recently to transfer the Catalan regional railways to operation by the Catalan Government.

Geography

The Costa Brava is the coast north of Barcelona. Alicante is quite a long way south. The BBC doesn’t know this:

The German health minister, Ulla Schmidt, has been criticised after her official car was stolen in Spain, where she was using it during her vacation.

Thieves stole the keys from the chauffeur's accommodation near Alicante, a popular retirement and holiday destination for Germans on Spain's Costa Brava.

Map: Wikipedia Commons

Scottish Puritanism

At one time, Scottish women who were sexually provocative were denounced by puffed-up self-important Puritan preachers as whores.

Today, Scottish women who are sexually provocative are denounced by puffed-up self-important Puritan feminists, with an implication that they are connected with the sex industry.

A Scottish charity has defended remarks it made comparing victims of domestic abuse who produced a nude calendar to those working in the sex industry. (BBC)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

 

 

The old Scottish ayatollah John Knox railed against the monstrous regiment of women, by which he meant government by women. He had his eyes on the political power of Mary Stewart and Mary and Elizabeth Tudor at the time. I doubt if it ever crossed his mind that any woman would be in a position to challenge his position as the guardian of the nation’s morals.

Islam and democracy

In a recent post I spoke of ‘the guff about democracy being essential to Islam’. That comment was inspired directly by an article that I had read in El País. The same article by Alaa Al Aswany has now appeared in the Guardian. It starts with a moan about how an American preacher who promotes silver rings for chastity is treated more mildly by the western media than Muslims who say the same thing. He totally misses the point that in one case the choice is an option that is freely available, to be accepted or rejected, while in the other it is an imposition with terrible consequences for disobedience. In other words, he totally ignores the essential role of freedom in western culture.

He goes on:

Elections recently took place in Iran and the winner was President Ahmadinejad. But there were allegations of vote-rigging. Western governments were up in arms, issuing strongly worded statements in support of democracy in Iran.

Yet Egyptian elections have been rigged regularly for many years and President Mubarak has taken office through rigged referendums, so why hasn't that provoked such anger?

Perhaps the answer is that the Iranians, unlike the Egyptians, actually tried to do something about it. But when a casual acceptance of election-rigging in Egypt is found in the same article as these words:

The westerner will never find out that the real message of Islam is freedom, justice and equality, and that it guarantees freedom of belief, in that those who wish may believe and those who do not, need not, and that democracy is essential to Islam, in that a Muslim ruler cannot take office without the consent and choice of Muslims.

I truly believe that the world has been turned upside down. Or just that Mr Al Aswany is talking utter guff.

Hitler, Saddam, Taylor, and the uses of history

In 1964 A. J. P. Taylor wrote a foreword to his book The Origins of the Second World War. In it he suggests that ‘Hitler hoped to get by without war at all’. I mention this fact as an introduction to his comment that:

‘The one thing [Hitler] did not plan was the great war often attributed to him. Pretending to prepare for a great war and not in fact doing so was an essential part of Hitler’s strategy; and those who sounded the alarm against him, such as Churchill, unwittingly did his work for him.’

Well, what if we substitute Saddam for Hitler and Blair for Churchill? Saddam certainly had weapons of mass destruction but he seems to have destroyed them, or to have allowed the chemical weapons to degrade naturally. There is more:

‘On 24 March 1935 Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden visited Hitler. He told them that the German air force was already equal to that of Great Britain, if not indeed superior. He was at once believed … Panic was created. How was it possible that a statesman could exaggerate his armaments instead of concealing them? Yet this was what Hitler had done.’

And it is what Saddam did. Sixty-eight years after Simon and Eden fell for Hitler’s trick, and 39 years after Taylor wrote his words, Blair fell into just the same trap.

When will they ever learn?

Muslims and freedom

We’ve seen a lot recently in the western media about how the Han Chinese have been repressing the Muslim Uyghurs – the usual stuff about wicked oppressors and virtuous ethnic/religious nationalists. What we haven’t seen though is an outburst of righteous indignation from the world’s Muslims. Let us remember that in 2005 the Muslim world was mightily offended by a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper making fun of Muhammad. Hundreds of people have been killed in Sinkiang (and not all of them Uyghurs) but the only people to lose their lives in the so-called cartoon riots were killed by Muslims.

The events in China have not led to widespread radical demonstrations against Chinese embassies. Of course, China’s role in he world is different from Denmark’s but even so the silence from the Muslim world is stunning.

I conclude from this that oppressive regimes – and despite all the guff about democracy being essential to Islam there is only one Muslim country (Turkey) that can be called democratic – will stick together when it comes to keeping people in their place rather than show solidarity with their coreligionists. And, therefore, that what annoyed the Muslims about those cartoons was not the images themselves but the freedom exercised by the people who produced and published them.

Dead man walking

The lid of the tomb has been opened and a fearsome creature is emerging. The Labour Party, naturally, is giving its backing to this undead creature as he sets about planning his journey to Brussels.

With a bit of luck it won’t happen. The Swedes who hold the presidency for the rest of this year won’t want a flamboyant character running the show; Spain, which takes over in January, will not want a warmonger who did absolutely nothing pro-European with his country when he had the chance; and Germany won’t want the EU run by a country that is not in the eurozone.

But that still leaves one question: If Blair doesn’t go to Brussels, will he still end up in The Hague?

PS It’s Blair on the right and Bela Lugosi on the left. Or is it the other way round?