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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Madrid and London

Political parties have also been united in their resolve to defeat the threat – a lesson learnt from Spain, where the political response to the attack on Madrid played straight into the terrorists’ hands. ~David Davis, The Daily Telegraph David Davis, perennial contestant for the Conservative Party leadership, might have had something valuable to say […]

Political parties have also been united in their resolve to defeat the threat – a lesson learnt from Spain, where the political response to the attack on Madrid played straight into the terrorists’ hands. ~David Davis, The Daily Telegraph

David Davis, perennial contestant for the Conservative Party leadership, might have had something valuable to say about the problem of non-assimilating immigrants, if he were not so preoccupied in his article with pandering to Muslims and bashing the BNP (British National Party) (whose views of the problem of unassimilated and unassimilable immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, in Britain seem rather vindicated by this entire mess). Having been on the road during the American hysteria over the London attacks (our commentators and radio hosts were far more unhinged than the British themselves), I did not have the chance to see British editorialists and politicians line up to distance their responses from anything vaguely BNP-like. Still, I feel sure that there was a good bit of this, instead of their focusing on the very social and immigration policy failures that the BNP alone has been seriously criticising and which helped create the horror of July 7.

But Davis’ backhanded, unnecessary slap at the Spanish was a bit too much. If it is “playing into the terrorists’ hands” to vote out a sitting government that pursued a hugely unpopular (to say nothing of illegal or immoral) policy, we should quickly shut down any future elections for fear of voting ‘wrongly’ in future. Would voting Tory at the next general election be “playing into the terrorists’ hands,” or have the Tories been stupidly docile and submissive enough to Mr. Blair’s views that one can hope the Islamists won’t notice any change? Spain withdrew from Iraq, and there has not been any attack in Spain since then. The British political class adamantly ignored the possibility that deployments to Islamic countries had anything to do with Islamic terrorism in their country, and within two weeks they very nearly suffered another terrible attack. That would seem to be a success for the Spanish approach, at least if we judge it by anything so narrow as the legitimate interests of a nation. We know that Mr. Blair will never be limited by anything so pedestrian as that, and it seems as if the Tories are intent on remaining in his shadow.

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