You know, there are a lot of different ways people can get things wrong. They can just plain misunderstand or misinterpret the facts, and they might do this for various reasons: deep-seated prejudices, stupidity, ignorance, fear, poor reasoning skills. (The last one, I'm afraid, is very common. Then again, so are the rest.) The facts might be presented to people badly; this could be an accidental error, or it could be prejudice, stupidity, etc. on the part of the informer. A person might be flat-out crazy, which of course leads to misjudgment. A person may think he's learned something from experience that he really hasn't, for whatever reason (he was drunk, he met a weirdo and took him for normal, he jumped to his own conclusions, he fitted the incident into his mind to fit his prejudices). Or a person might just be stone evil, wanting to hurt others out of malice.

Well, as usual, Balto Porcel, Catalonia's official Nobel Prize candidate and author of much pretentious wank, is slandering the United States, Israel, and the Jews in La Vanguardia.

Where does Porcel fit into the above list of causes of being wrong? I've thought about it for about twenty seconds and have come to the conclusion that he is a sad and confused man.

Here's today's staining of the sheets:

...Israel has become angry about that European Union survey that was so unfavorable. So, it has accused the Old Continent of being anti-Semitic again. And Europe has been this, and much more, since the Nazi holocaust could not be understood without a past of terrible genocides--I can't understand it even in this way--in which we see the Spanish Inquisition, Calvin burning Miquel Servet, Russia massacting Chechenia for two centuries, France and the Church eliminating the Cathars, Stalin wiping out social classes and peoples, the Serbs eating their neighbors alive, the gypsies devastated by all the rest, Carrasco i Formiguera shot for being Catalanist.

Without counting other nations: the attacking and attacked Incas, the Japanese against the Chinese, the Muslim slave raids in their centuries of conquest, Belgium massacring and looting the Congo, and the United States to the Indians. Israel has suffered as much as many other peoples. Although it is one of the few who, with more than extraordinary tenacity and intelligence, has managed to subsist and even thrive. Its great example is that of its resistance and resurrections.

However, all this has little to do with the growing European rejection of Israel, because we're not dealing with going back to Torquemada, the "progroms" (sic), and Hitler, but rather that Israel has placed itself in this frame and Europe, perhaps cured of its reiterated genocidal crazes, will not permit them to Israel either. Israel kills, steals, dictates, the Palestinians "only" kill: Europe, in this case, is with the underdog. While Israel is with the United States, which has done as it did with terrorism: worsen the situation, turn it into a planetary epidemic. Washington, and not Europe, causes anti-Semitism.

I see only two reactions that an honorable person can have when faced with this crap: 1) we can organize a petition to get Porcel fired as morally unworthy of his daily column opposite the lead editorials or 2) we can award Baltasar Porcel the First Annual Julius Streicher Award for Just Telling It like It Is. La Vanguardia can play the part of Der Sturmer.