Glenn Reynolds has the information for flowers for the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C. There will also be a memorial service there today. An email of condolence would be nice as well.
Mark Steyn sums it up best in an online column which quotes from an article he wrote after the Bali bombing in 2002:
Sure it might be the homegrown thugs of the ETA instead of the Islamofascists, but it doesn't make any difference. You can't live with rabid dogs. Kill 'em all.The Independent's Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason - blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: "The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. ...And now Spaniards. "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." And by "you", they mean not just arrogant Texan cowboys, but any pluralist society - whether a relaxed tourist resort like Bali or a modern Muslim nation like Turkey or - come to that, one day down the road - a cynical swamp of appeasement like France.
I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added "initial" to that French "support for Mr Bush". The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam's best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.
But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."
No problem. They are all infidels.
Unlike Mr Fisk, I don't have decades of expertise in the finer points of Islamic culture, so when people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew - like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. We are all infidels.
