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This article appears in the October 8, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

For Spain, Zapatero Opposes
Aznar's Crusade, With Dialogue

by Cynthia R. Rush

The beast-men in Washington grouped around Vice President Dick Cheney could not have been pleased with the Sept. 21 speech given by Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in New York. Speaking at the 59th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Zapatero intervened forcefully against Samuel Huntington's fascist "clash of civilizations" thesis, used by the Bush Administration to justify its war against Iraq.

Pointing to the carnage in Iraq, which has claimed "thousands of victims" among Iraqis, soldiers, and civilians, Zapatero said: "I want to propose before this Assembly an alliance of civilizations between the Western world and the Arab and Muslim world. One wall came down, and we must now prevent hatred and incomprehension from building another one." Spain, he said, would recommend to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that a High Level Group be established to implement this initiative.

Zapatero also warned that there can be no real peace in Southwest Asia until UN resolutions and the "Road Map" for peace are fully implemented. He strongly defended a "viable Palestinian state which is democratic and lives in peace and security with the State of Israel." As for Israel, it "can count on the international community, to the extent that it respects international law." But Ariel Sharon's building of the wall of separation between Israel and Palestine "does not do this," he said.

Zapatero also underscored that Spain is well acquainted with terrorism. It has fought it for the last 30 years, and most recently suffered the horrific March 11 bombing in Madrid. But, he warned, in an undisguised attack on the Bush-Cheney duo, "the risk of a terrorist victory is greater when in fighting terror, democracy betrays its own essence; states limit freedoms, question judicial guarantees, or carry out pre-emptive military operations."

For Iraq, he said, the priority now is to contribute to "completely reestablishing its sovereignty and independence.... We shall spare no effort in doing this."

A New 'Reconquista'

That it was Zapatero who called for an alliance of civilizations to address the Southwest Asia tragedy is particularly appropriate, given that Spain's own rich cultural heritage is a product of cooperation among the country's Christian, Muslim, and Jewish populations.

But it is this very same cultural legacy that is an object of hatred for the synarchist madmen represented by Samuel Huntington, or Zapatero's predecessor, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar. On the same day that Zapatero was addressing the UN, Aznar used his inaugural lecture as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to espouse the clash of civilizations criminality. Speaking in mangled English, Aznar attributed the Madrid bombing to al-Qaeda, but its cause, he said, dates back to the 8th-Century invasion of Spain by the Moors, and the successful resistance which led to the "Reconquista" by the Catholic Kings (Ferdinand and Isabel) at the end of the 15th-Century. Aznar then boasted that Spain "refused to become just another piece of the Islamic world. It refused to give up its identity." He then added, ominously, that "many radical Muslims remember that defeat. Osama bin Laden is one of them."

Before an audience which also included an admiring Rodrigo Rato, Aznar's former Vice Premier who is now Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Aznar repeated his warning from May, that a terrorist attack could occur in the United States around the time of the November elections. "I think the terrorists will want to be present in the November elections, through direct operations in the United States, or indirectly."

As one Spanish analyst correctly noted, Aznar's Georgetown speech was a call for "a holy Crusade," reminiscent of the Inquisition. He fails to understand that "Arab culture on our peninsula, through eight centuries of uninterrupted residence, wasn't foreign to us; it was our own." But during the Reconquista, "the triumphant culture sent anyone who disagreed, to the Inquisition's bonfire, and it is to that that Aznar still belongs."

In the immediate aftermath of the March 11 Madrid bombing, Aznar was prevented from cancelling scheduled elections and staging a coup, by the intervention of Spanish King Juan Carlos. EIR has learned that Juan Carlos also recently made a speech, in which he said that he did not need to welcome Jews to Spain, because the Jews are part of Spain's culture and development. Spain is also their land, he said.

The same day that Aznar was singing his ode to Hispanidad at Georgetown, Samuel Huntington was in Veracruz, Mexico, warning that illegal Mexican immigrants might carry weapons of mass destruction into the United States to stage a terrorist incident. Repeating the thesis of his latest fascist tome, Who Are We? The Challenges To America's National Identity, which portrays Mexicans as the new enemy image, Huntington described illegal immigrants as a U.S. national security threat. Speaking in Nuevo León, LaRouche Political Action Committee representative William Wertz responded that Huntington's synarchist faction intended to use his book as the ideological justification for a military attack on Mexico.

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