It is time to ditch once and for all the old lie that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. No cause, however noble, can justify the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. It is not a matter of what these people believe in or support. It is what they do. Those who set out to kill harmless civilians are terrorists, nothing less. That goes for individuals, organizations and governments. Those who set out to kill civilians are terrorists.
Freedom fighters are men who fight soldiers. Terrorists are cowards. They target ordinary men, women and children, who bear no arms and who pose no threat. Their bodies can be blown apart or riddled with bullets as they go about their daily lives.
Yesterday’s rush-hour train massacre in Madrid is the latest crime in a long series that has reached around the world and disfigured most societies.
Early suspicions say the massacre was carried out by ETA. The Basque killers have mounted many bloody attacks, but nothing as horrific as this. From 1968 until yesterday just over 800 people had died in ETA violence. If yesterday’s slaughter was their doing then they have pushed their toll of victims past 1,000 on a single day. ETA has not won power in the polls. If the Basque people wanted to break with Spain, they would have voted for the one party advocating such a break, ETA’s political wing Batasuna. But the Basques have consistently rejected Batasuna at the polls. If the bombings were ETA’s response, that would show that they are not fighting for freedom but for tyranny.
The US, on the other hand, initially rushed to blame the attack on Al-Qaeda. That has been its reaction to any attack anywhere in the world, because it wants to mobilize worldwide support for its “war on terror” — a catch-all device for anything from its invasion of Iraq to its increasing undermining of civil liberties at home. But that is not to say that Al-Qaeda could not have been behind it. Any member of the coalition now occupying Iraq may seem fair game.
Spain, for its part, has an election ahead, and blaming the attacks on ETA may be politically convenient. An Al-Qaeda operation in Spain could be embarrassing for a government that to many Spaniards has been too slavish in its support for the US in Iraq. Going into Iraq could be seen as having provoked Al-Qaeda. Blaming ETA, by contrast, would drive many wavering voters into the arms of Jose Maria Aznar’s conservatives, which are thought to be tough on separatists.
If terrorists are evil, it is because they have no regard for innocent human life. Those who seek to make political capital out of terror attacks, too, show contempt for the victims these attacks claim. Both must stop.
