What the commentators said
Spain has suffered more than its fair share of terrorism over the years, said Tobias Buck in the FT. The Basque separatists Eta murdered more than 800 people in a campaign of violence that only ended in 2011. In 2004, al-qa’eda sympathisers bombed commuter trains in Madrid, killing 192 people – the deadliest attack on European soil since the Lockerbie plane bombing of 1988. Over the past decade, though, Spain has been “largely spared from terrorist atrocities – a rare period of tranquillity that has now come to a brutal end”.
Last week’s attacks were more indiscriminate than the 2004 bombings in Madrid, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. Spain was targeted back then partly because of “the historic resonance for militants of the Islamic kingdom of Andalusia, lost to Christendom 900 years ago”, and partly because al-qa’eda wanted to undermine Spanish support for military intervention in Iraq just before Spain’s elections. But Isis isn’t interested in sending specific messages. It is out to attack “anyone, anywhere, anyhow”. Every public space is a target.
It’s tempting to conclude that we should just get used to living with this threat, said Matthew Parris in The Times. But that’s unduly defeatist. While we can’t protect every public space, we can do more to protect the relatively small number of high-profile ones by, for instance, installing bollards to prevent vehicle rampages. “Remember, jihadists are doing this to shock.” Reduce their ability to do that, and you’re halfway there. Technology can also help in this struggle, as was shown by the 2016 attack on Berlin’s Christmas market. The death toll in that event (12) would have been far worse had the careering truck not been fitted with an automatic emergency braking system, which stopped the vehicle after it registered the first collision. Such systems are being made mandatory in new vehicles in the EU. Now that Isis’s hopes of achieving its own caliphate have been dashed, it will need to maintain its “mystique” by pulling off spectacular acts of violence, said Ben Rich on The Conversation. But the more attacks it launches, the more it “risks a growing public apathy towards its activities”.