Deadly echoes of antiquity
The Spanish authorities are not the only ones hoping the 10 bombs that killed an estimated 192 people in Madrid on Thursday were set by ETA, the Basque terrorist group. They were quick to point the finger at ETA - not only because hardline elements within the Spanish government wish to step up their long-running war against the separatists, but because the alternative is too terrible to consider.
But a statement released by the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri claimed that its death squads had penetrated "one of the pillars of the crusade alliance, Spain." It went on to state: "This is part of settling old accounts with Spain, the crusader, and America's ally in its war against Islam".
The bombings sound a truly ominous note for Europe, which had hoped that with its Muslim-friendly immigration policies, it would escape the wrath of the reawakening jihad movement that had slumbered for almost 1,300 years following the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 718. While Americans, whose tenuous grasp of history begins more than a thousand years later, have a tendency to assume that the Crusades were fought entirely in the Middle East, both Europeans and Arabs know very well that the Reconquista, too, was a crusade of sorts.
The Reconquista ended in 1492 when Isabel of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon, the married Catholic monarchs of united Spain, expelled Boabdil of Granada, the last of the Moorish rulers, from the newly formed country. This is the most egregious of the old accounts to which the Brigade refers, and the cause of many a furrowed brow across Europe today.
For like the Reconquista, most of the Crusades were a reactive martial effort against the dynamic and fast-growing empire of "the Turk." There are few medieval documents which do not refer, in one way or another, to the ever-present danger posed to Christendom from Poland to Sicily by the expansionist imperial armies. As for the Holy Land itself, it was first taken from the Byzantine Empire in 637 - the crusaders reclaimed it from the Seljuk Turks in 1099, only 24 years after the Seljuks themselves had seized it from their fellow Muslims in 1075.
Moving forward in time, the last 30 years have seen a peaceful movement of peoples from Arab nations to European lands, one that has worked out remarkably well for both parties ... until recently. But the realization of shifting demographics combined with the stark division between the half-hearted support of European governments and the vehement opposition of European Muslims for the U.S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq has divided Europe in two.
If these Madrid bombs do, indeed, represent the first strike of violent Islamic forces against their European hosts, then the world has reached a new and ugly stage in what some have predicted as an inevitable clash of civilizations.
The European mood, for all of France and Germany's well-known recalcitrance on Iraq, had already begun to shift. The List Pim Fortuyn, a Dutch party founded by a left-wing homosexual, swept into power not long after the assassination of its eponymous founder largely on the strength of advocating immigration restraints far harsher than the most anti-immigration Republican could imagine. And even before the bombings, the electoral success of the List was likely to be soon replicated by parties in other European countries, especially Germany, France and Denmark.
A country surely has the right to decide who is permitted to immigrate and become a citizen of that country - that is not the issue. The question of the day is what is likely to happen as the peaceful detente between aging European nations and their Gastarbeiten begins to break down on the treacherous fault line of religion. Europe has never been kind to those its rulers view as troublemakers.
So, while there is still hope that this is nothing more than a peculiarly Spanish affair, I am not so optimistic. We will have the answer soon enough. If the horror of Madrid is followed by similar scenes in Berlin, Paris, Oslo or Rome, it will be difficult to place the blame at the bloody feet of the Basque terrorists.
For almost three years, George Bush has been insisting he is not fighting a Crusade. The bombs of Madrid and the rulers of Europe may soon force him to rethink that insistence.