America’s Marxist revolutionaries, led by the guerrilla group “Antifa,” co-opted Columbus Day (October 9th) for a day of rage and vandalism against the legacy of Christopher Columbus, or as he is known in the Spanish world, Cristobal Colon. Antifa has actually done us a service by bringing attention to a monumental historical event that (under pressure from the left, ironically) has been increasingly downplayed in America, where it has been relegated to the status of a boring bank holiday alongside “Presidents’ Day.”
Unexpectedly, my current research project in Spain on the “Golden Age” of Christian/Jewish/Moslem harmony on the Iberian Peninsula has been dominated by the phenomenon of Columbus Day and I can tell you that the Spanish go “ALL IN” for Mr. Colon on this massive national holiday, which was celebrated here in Spain on October 12th.
World Net Daily published my article “Antifa Turns its Guns on Hispanics” on October 8th http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/antifa-turns-its-guns-on-hispanics/ in which I discussed the interesting timing of Antifa’s day of rage against Columbus monuments in the US and the announcement by the (leftist) Catalonian separatists that they would declare independence from Spain on the same day (though that declaration has yet too occur – thanks to the major pushback by the conservative Spanish government and an exodus of multinational corporations from Barcelona, the capital of the Catalon province). As I pointed out in my article, the Catalonians are casting themselves as anti-Fascists much the same as the hard left is doing in the US, and this all seems to be part of a global strategy by the left. http://abcnews.go.com/International/strikes-catalonia-leaders-push-independence-spain/story?id=50260034
My wife and I flew into Barcelona from Tel Aviv just hours after the vote for independence and got caught up in some street demonstrations as we drove north across Catalon to Andorra then next day. We have been touring Spain ever since, arriving on the 7th in Valladolid – where Christopher Columbus died in 1506 — just as both the secession news (and the Antifa news back home) was peaking, so I wrote my WND article and included a few pictures, including one of the massive monument to Columbus in Valladolid.
Two days ago, on October 12th, we arrived in Granada without having known either that this was the Spanish Columbus Day or that this was the city in which Columbus received his commission from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to make the journey that would result in his discovery of the Americas. (An impressive monument commemorating that meeting stands just a hundred yards from our hotel.) Consequently for us, the city is simply mobbed with people, and tickets to the Alhambra (Moorish) fortress above the city were completely sold out (though so much of the site is open to the public that we really don’t feel like we missed anything).
My point in writing this short update is just that Americans shouldn’t allow political correctness to rob us of our heritage. Columbus Day should be an even bigger deal in America than it is here in Spain.
I also want to thank God for arranging this completely unique experience for Anne and me. Arriving in Barcelona, Valladolid and Granada just when we did and in that precise sequence, with no prior planning or awareness, what a remarkable thing!
Oh, one last item. At the end of our day at Alhambra, as we were walking back to our hotel, talking religion, history and politics as we always do, we stopped in a park at the base of the mountain fortress to rest. Spray painted across the stone bench there was the bare message “Anti-Fascists.” It was just that singular, incongruous exclamation with no apparent logic or purpose for being in that spot, except perhaps as a wink and a nod of confirmation from the Lord that I was on the right track in my assessment of who’s really driving the secessionist movement.
