Must reading for anyone trying to get a bit of a large context view of the Spanish stuff. The article I'm posting was written a few weeks after 9/11. The last paragraph is especially interesting:
israelinsider.com
Bin Laden, Columbus, and the Jews
By Reuven Koret October 12, 2001
"Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Andalusia be repeated in Palestine," Osama bin Laden said in his taped cave-side address. "We cannot accept that Palestine will become Jewish."
The allusion to Andalusia evidently refers to the Christian re-conquest of Spain from Muslims in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella led the Spanish forces in seizing control of the glorious Moorish palace of Alhambra, a turning point in the drive to expel the Moors from the European continent.
It was not a good year for the Jews either, as it marked the royal edict expelling them from Spain. It was in this year, too, that Christopher Columbus departed Europe, bound to find what would come to be called America.
In bin Laden's remark we see the extent to which historical humiliations inform his thinking. He seeks to avenge the defeat of the Muslims at Granada by the Catholics, and the defeat of the Muslims by the Jews in Palestine. We see, too, how he thinks in symbols: Andalusia 1492 is being repeated in modern-day Israel.
Columbus Day, October 12, commemorates the European "discovery" of America in 1492, and 1492 represents the year in which Islam began to be pushed out of Spain. In bin Laden's mind, these two events are inextricably linked.
On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked at sea by two suicide bombers on a speedboat.
Exactly one year earlier, on October 12, 1999, a covert operation to send 60 Pakistani commandos to Afghanistan to capture or kill bin Laden was aborted when a military coup overthrew Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Exactly one year before that, on October 12, 1998, the late Eqbal Ahmad, a follower of bin Laden and a Professor at Hampshire College, gave a presentation at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He said: "History unfortunately recognizes and accords visibility to power and not to weakness. Therefore, visibility has been accorded historically to dominant groups. In our time, the time that began with this day, Columbus Day."
Professor Ahmad explained: "The time that begins with Columbus Day is a time of extraordinary unrecorded holocausts. Great civilizations have been wiped out. The Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs, the American Indians, the Canadian Indians were all wiped out. Their voices have not been heard, even to this day fully. Now they are beginning to be heard, but not fully. They are heard, yes, but only when the dominant power suffers, only when resistance has a semblance of costing, of exacting a price. When a Custer is killed… that's when you know that there were Indians fighting."
I have no clue whether the FBI warning that a major attack by bin Laden's al-Qaeda this weekend has anything to do with the historical significance of October 12. But for him and his followers, this is considered a holy day of revolution, when the weak communicate through terror to the strong, when the tribes strive to overturn the colonial powers. The fact that an assassination attempt against him was thwarted on that very day by virtue of a revolution must have appeared to him as a divine validation.
Columbus Day, October 12, is a dangerous day for the enemies of bin Laden, and I pray that it passes without serious event. But even if the present FBI alert proves to a false alarm, the legacy of the war against Columbus and what he stands for, will continue to animate bin Laden and his allies.
And yet, in bin Laden's historical and symbolic reduction of the world into a war of the oppressed against the oppressor, there is a self-contradiction that betrays the weakness of his moral argument. For 1492, year of the Jewish expulsion from Spain, is also a tragic watershed for another tribe, forced to flee from country to country after being forced into exile from its native land.
The wandering tribe of Israelites is the world archetype for the freedom fighter, emerging from slavery and exile and Holocaust to return at last to its native land.
By contrast, unlike native Americans and other native peoples, the Palestinians are a pseudo-nation, impostor tag-alongs who largely came to Palestine only after the Jews began to make it flourish. Originally an indistinguished part of the larger Arab nation, they assumed the name of the unrelated Philistines to stake a claim to a land they never owned. Indeed, Palestina was the name the Romans slapped on to the Holy Land after expelling the Jews with the express purpose of obscuring the original name of Judea.
History has known many tragedies, and the world should work to assist peoples displaced from their native lands. The Jews, more than perhaps any other people, have known dispersion. The state of Israel absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, from the ruins of Europe and from the Arab and Muslim lands where they "enjoyed" second-class dhimmi status.
Israel is a nation of immigrants, and part of its mission is rescuing Jews from faraway lands in which they are trapped or persecuted. In the last decade, that includes the Russian remnant and the Ethiopian "House of Israel." The real tragedy of the Middle East is that the Arab States have kept Palestinian refugees in camps, fostering a culture of hatred and resentment and revenge, rather than resettling them or encouraging them to do something constructive with their lives.
This is not to say that there are no displaced or suffering Arabs, or that the phoniness of Palestinian claims and propaganda means that the human rights of individual Arabs should be ignored. But it does mean that the burden of resettling Arab refugees should fall primarily on the Arab States. And it also suggests that self-identified Palestinians should concentrate on building their own nation on part of the land, rather than denying the Jews their fair share of what was originally theirs before they were forcibly dispersed.
Osama bin Laden represents the failure of true revolution, and a disaster in the making for the Palestinians in particular: his message is only endless destruction. By the same token, Israel--a nation of returning natives from the four corners of the Earth--is the truly revolutionary country, while those who, like bin Laden, "cannot accept that Palestine will become Jewish," are the ones who literally missed the boat. And so, as even the Palestinians say with genuine dismay, he is "hijacking" their cause, at their great peril. They are aboard his jet, and he holds the box-cutter.
"Palestine" is the name given by the imperialists, colonialists, and terrorists--from Rome to Great Britain to Arafat and bin Laden--to conceal the Holy Land's original and rightful ownership. Sorry, Osama, too late: "Palestine" is again a Jewish State. The Jews have returned to Judea, never to leave again.
The historical legacy of the Holy Land is enshrined in the Bible and verified by archaeology, all the more reason why the Arabs seek to distort the Biblical record and destroy Jewish antiquities. The Biblical legacy of the "promised land" also represents an implicit bond between America and Israel--one more reason why bin Laden feels so terribly frustrated on Columbus Day.
And it is why he, like a rebellious brat who cannot get his way by constructive work, threatens to throw another destructive tantrum. If he makes enough noise and wreaks enough havoc, maybe people won't notice that he is, morally and historically, a fraud and a failure.
Postscript, added October 13th: Yesterday, just before midnight, a powerful car-bomb exploded in an underground parking lot in Madrid's Plaza Colon, named for Christopher Columbus and the site of a monument in his honor. The car had been towed to the lot after being illegally parked near the crowded site where the former King of Spain, Juan Carlos, appeared earlier in the day. As a result, no one was seriously injured. No terrorist group has yet claimed responsibility for the blast.
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