The leading conservative French newspaper Le Figaro has noticed the sharp contrast between British courage and the cowardice of the Spanish who, after the Madrid bombings on March 11, 2004, painted their hands white and surrendered to al-Qaeda. Yesterday, the paper wrote in its editorial: “It is reassuring to see how the English respond with that typical flamboyance they display whenever history puts them to the test.” Contrasting this to the Spanish, who withdrew their troops from Iraq in the wake of the Madrid bombings, editor Pierre Rousselin writes: “This time the terrorists will not achieve the same result.”

Puzzled by the difference between Britain’s perseverance and Spain’s “appeasement” of terrorism Le Figaro yesterday also published an interview with the philosopher and author Pascal Bruckner, who comments admiringly on the British response: “Is this a result of England’s insularity? Does it derive from a tradition that expressed itself with remarkable grandeur in their opposition to nazism? Confronted by forces of apocalyptic destruction England refuses to give in today, as it refused to give in yesterday. Contrary to the Spanish after the Atocha bombings the English react with stoicism. They do not demand that their government pull out the British troops fighting side by side with the Americans in Iraq. Blair will never go along with the demands of bombers, unlike the Prime Minister that the Spanish elected after the March 11 tragedy. Together with his people [Blair] continues a tradition of liberty which I sometimes think continental Europe has lost interest in.”

Bruckner thinks this loss is the result of the continental West European tendency to “interiorise” guilt. “Certain intellectuals and opinion makers seem to think that every crime committed against us results from Western ‘domination’ of the world.” Referring to the leftist paper Le Parisien, which the day after the London bombings headed “Al-Qaeda punishes London,” Bruckner comments: “They make it seem as if Osama bin Laden is a schoolmaster caning misbehaved pupils who had the bad idea of joining the Americans. […] This attitude [of ‘interiorisation’] is extremely perverse: it actually boils down to shifting the guilt from the criminals to the victims.”