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In This Issue

• Inside Look at Madrid Train Bombing
• On Keenspace, Funnies Go Super-Mega Sweet
• Stop Aborting Our Lord and Savior!
• The Passion 2: The Resurrection
• A Trip to the Britney Spears Museum
• Mail Order Brides Reviewed
• Letters to the Feditor
• Boccaccio's Decameron Gets Zombie-fied
• Campus Tradition of Blood Wrestling Continues
• Fed Fun Book of Zombie Lore!
• Wacky Fun Skeletons
• Crane Droppings on Sharon
• Marauding Interviewer: Back to the Seventh Grade
• Meta-Marauding Interviewer: Does Kate Eat Babies?
• They Watch

On March 11th, three days before Spain's national elections, I awoke in my room in Madrid to the news that bombs had exploded during the morning rush hour on several commuter trains that run out of the city's Atocha rail station, causing about two hundred deaths and many more injuries. What bothers me besides the carnage and fear of death is the politics of it all. Everyone agrees that the attacks influenced the outcome of the elections. How, exactly, is a subject of debate.

Immediately after the attack, the government of the Partido Popular said that the Basque terrorist group ETA was the most likely culprit. There was a good deal of circumstantial evidence for this - ETA had announced a cease-fire in the region of Cataluña shortly beforehand, implicitly threatening the rest of the country, and the Spanish government had recently caught two members of ETA with a truck full of explosives. ETA had also tried to attack the Atocha station before. There was, however, other information that didn't fit. This was a far, far bloodier attack than anything ETA had ever done before. No one called in a bomb threat, the way ETA usually does. And the bombs were not rigged in the typical ETA fashion.

Yet the government pushed the ETA theory before eventually saying that it wasn't ruling anything out, and then saying that it looked like it was probably the work of Islamic fundamentalists. The daily El Pais reported that at 10AM on March 12th the authorities had given up on the ETA angle, but at 11:30AM that day, President José María Aznar made some indirect references to ETA in his public remarks, without saying that the government had reached a definite conclusion. On March 14th, the Partido Popular lost the elections. Only a week before, people had been so confident of a PP victory that the political speculation was about whether it would hold onto its absolute majority, or have to seek minor party support. There are two popular explanations for this reversal, and each one, if correct, indicates a different way of thinking among the Spanish people.

Aznar supported the invasion of Iraq and sent a contingent of Spanish troops despite the fact that 90% of the Spanish public opposed the invasion (all of the major political parties agree on that number). With Saddam's arsenal nowhere to be found, some people argue that the PP lost the election because the whole "it was ETA" thing made them seem even more untrustworthy. This could be the case. At the anti-terrorism demonstration in Madrid shortly after the bombing, people chanted "Who was it?" at the government officials present.

But there is another reading out there that scares me. Some commentators are saying that people voted for the Partido Socialista Obrero Español and, implicitly, against the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq, because that would get Spain off of the terrorists' hit list. If this is true, Spanish voters are sadly mistaken. It's tempting to believe that if only one did some concrete thing differently, there wouldn't be any terrorism, but that's just not so. Al-Qaeda explicitly mentioned Spain as a target shortly after 9/11, long before the invasion of Iraq. Spain's modern history begins with the expulsion of the last Islamic state on the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Giving terrorists what they ask for (or what you think they want) won't make them stop. As a professor of mine here put it, once you give value to something, people create more of it, not less. That's not some abstraction in an economics textbook; that's life.

This kind of thinking has been roundly rejected by Spaniards of all political stripes with regard to Basque terrorism. Every national political party has agreed that ETA will not get anything from them. Spaniards get offended when the Anglophone press calls ETA a "separatist movement" instead of a terrorist group. Spanish political culture is so firm against home-grown terrorism that I find this second theory somewhat difficult to believe.

As hesitant as I am to believe it, though, I cannot discount it. Many of the posters left at makeshift memorials say things like "Aznar responsible" and "Bush responsible," implying that the attack was the result of a specific policy or leadership and not the act of a group of fanatics who cannot be satisfied by anything short of the imposition of their vision of Islam on the entire world.

I'm no fan of President Bush; I opposed the invasion of Iraq, and I'll vote Democrat in November (even if a John Kerry/Jane Fonda porn tape hits the internet) just to put an end to the Bush Administration. But to say that Aznar, or Bush, is responsible for a terrorist act is both factually flawed (terrorist attacks preceded their foreign policy choices) and morally repugnant- it removes the blame from the terrorists and tries instead to blame the nations that suffer attacks. None of this means that I weep for the Partido Popular. A group that freely decides to flout the will of 90% of the citizenry probably deserves to lose an election or two.