Town Hall, Malaga

Source: Bigstock

Over in Spain around this time of year, during Holy Month, a specially chosen prisoner is picked out for sudden early release by the ever-generous Spanish State and let back out into the wild as a kind of non-chocolaty Easter present to the nation, a tradition dating back to 1759.

To qualify for early release, a convict must first be nominated by a favored Christian order, that of Jesus El Rico, whose members deem his case deserving—or so it would initially appear. In fact, members of Malaga’s local government pick a few inmates with “the right profile” (i.e., no pedos), then instruct the monks to send a letter requesting their immediate pardon to the Spanish Ministry of Justice, whereupon the mandarins of the day pick out the candidate they deem most worthy.

Who gets chosen? During Easter 2024, it was the turn of Jose Manuel, previously serving three years for a strangely unspecified “crime against public health” (maybe he once went outside during Covid-19 without wearing a mask?), whilst last year’s winner was a completely harmless-sounding individual named Antonio Daniel, a 31-year-old convicted drug dealer. Apparently, “practically all” of those given early release under the scheme never go on to commit any further crimes—a good thing, as they have apparently included rapists and murderers in the past. How very reassuring that single word “practically” is there, then.

Is the Pope Muslim?
If the clergymen of Jesus El Rico wish to ensure a guaranteed genuinely harmless individual is released for Easter Month 2025, perhaps they should pencil in the name of another local holy man, Father Custodio Ballester, a 59-year-old Catholic priest who it emerged recently could face a $1,600 fine and three years locked away underground in a Spanish oubliette for supposedly committing some imaginary new modern class of offense known as a “hate crime.”

What did Fr. Ballester do? Lynch a local Blackamoor? Forcibly carve a swastika into a Murano Jew’s forehead with a rusty crucifix whilst calling him a Christ-killer? No, he just said some unacceptably accurate things about radical Islam.

In 2016, the Archbishop of Barcelona had written a public “Sunday Letter,” titled “The Necessary Dialogue With Islam,” in which he had argued that the “Necessary Dialogue” between Christians and Muslims of the future should go something like this: “Hello, please come and take over our societies completely en masse in the name of your Blessed Prophet, PBUH, and how much jizya tax would you like us to pay you each month from now on, Abdul?”

Of course, I paraphrase slightly. Actually, the Letter of Archbishop Apostate praised the current Pope Francis for saying things to that same basic effect, the Pope having just traveled to Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, generally considered the Muslim world’s chief seat of learning outside of the North Luton Islamic Center, where he had given a public hug to its Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the highest theological authority in all Sunni Islam.

This cheering public demonstration of interfaith public frottage was not necessarily taken overly well by certain Christians with functioning memory cells, however, as all such contact between the Vatican and Al-Azhar had previously been suspended following a minor incident in 2011 when Islamic extremists had peacefully car-bombed the Coptic Christian cathedral in Alexandria, killing 23 worshippers.

The then Pope, Benedict XVI, had used this as an opportunity to condemn the widespread persecution of Christians in Muslim countries—Christians are in fact the world’s No. 1 persecuted group globally these days, not obese black transsexuals, as the mainstream media would prefer you to believe—which did not go down terribly well in Egypt, with Al-Azhar University calling Benedict’s words “undue Western interference.”

But now, things were all A-OK between Christianity and the Muslim world, wrote the naive Barcelona Archbishop in his 2016 Letter, as the new Pope and the Grand Imam had spoken of their faiths’ “common commitment” to “peace in the world” and “the rejection of terrorism.” Did anyone tell the terrorists that when they planted their car bombs outside Alexandria Cathedral?

Papal Bullshit
Father Custodio Ballester read the Archbishop’s Letter and decided to publicly pen a Letter of his own, “The Impossible Dialogue With Islam,” arguing that his Catholic superiors, far from being Infallible, were talking complete cassocks: “Islam does not admit dialogue. Either you believe, or you are an infidel who must be subdued one way or another.”

That is what Fr. Ballester thought, anyway: “In countries where Muslims hold power, Christians are brutally persecuted and killed. So what dialogue are we talking about?” The one that tells us heathen folk we should supinely bend over and submit, I suppose; no true dialogue, just an immediate order. The Koran, Ballester said, is “indisputable and uninterpretable”; it places five key, nonnegotiable obligations upon the faithful: “Prayer, almsgiving, pilgrimage to Mecca, jihad and the extermination of the infidels!” Within this context, “a hug and a photo” between Pope and Grand Imam “mean nothing,” any more than a hug and a photo between Chamberlain and Hitler once did.

Jesus was “the Crucified One,” whereas Muhammad was “the warrior,” meaning the one would always inevitably try to conquer and subdue the other, the priest explained. “Nice difference, isn’t it?” he asked. Not to the contemporary Spanish State, it isn’t, as Fr. Ballester has just received a summons for prosecution from a provincial court.

As Ballester has pointed out, up until about five minutes ago criminal charges in Spain were reserved purely for use against those who “had actually done something.” “If I am convicted, this will no longer be Spain but Pakistan,” he added, “where you can be killed for blaspheming the Koran or Muhammad.” This was supposed to be the era of Spanish democracy, wasn’t it? Were we going back now to the bad old days of General Franco? Not necessarily, the persecuted padre explained—because, back then, he would actually have been treated rather more fairly.

Guardia Uncivil
Oh, how wonderful 21st-century Spanish “democracy” is, in a country where blatant left-wing prosecutors can now seek actual jail terms for priests who tell the truth or, in another recent gross miscarriage of justice, for sports administrators briefly kissing someone after they had just won an international soccer tournament. Franco once treated Marxists similarly, of course—but now that the Marxists actually have their hands on the levers of power again, maybe El Caudillo can be shown to have been absolutely correct to have done so, in the name of maintaining the wider social good.

General Franco is often portrayed these days by Those Who Rule Us as an evil fascist, who persecuted and killed people for no good reason, and whose Nationalist troops utterly destroyed democracy in Spain—with the active connivance of the equally evil Catholic Church. But is this really so?

From 1931, when Spain’s monarchy was abolished and the “democratic” left-wing Spanish Second Republic ushered in, the benign “democrats” in question began annulling inconvenient election results and cracking down on free speech and free thought by virtue of disingenuously labeling all conservative-minded opponents as “fascists” (sound familiar to any American readers today?), all whilst mercilessly persecuting the Catholic Church and its believers.

This became one of the main triggers of the subsequent Civil War, with churches being burned, worshippers shot, nuns raped, and thousands of the nation’s clergy tortured and martyred: Here’s a photo of a dead nun dug up and put on display to be mocked and spat on by those lovely #BeKind Commies. Given such “Red Terror,” as this strangely (i.e., deliberately) semi-forgotten religious genocide became known, it is hardly any wonder the Catholic Church ended up throwing its lot in with General Franco, is it?

For Fr. Ballester today, the leftist Red Terror has once again returned, just dressed up in “kinder,” more “progressive” clothing—that of “the official ideology of the European Union” and its complicit leftist member states. In “democratic” E.U. Spain, he said, we now “cannot speak of religious freedom, but of the dictatorship of the single thought.” The secularist E.U. dictatorship, he said, displayed a “revanchist eagerness” to act like the heirs of the Second Republic leftists:

“They dream of resuming the same revolution. Now they don’t need to kill [just to prosecute under ‘hate crime’ laws], although it doesn’t seem like they would mind either, judging by their war cry, ‘You’ll burn like in ’36!’”

The Reign in Spain
Oddly enough, though, today’s anti-Catholic Spanish leftists are actually surprisingly keen on at least one form of religion being spread throughout the country—that of Islam, which had once conquered the southern portion of Iberia wholesale. The former history of the Islamic Empires in Europe (unlike that of the history of the European Empires in Islamic lands, obviously) is henceforth to be officially hymned as one long peacenik lovefest of harmony and tolerance.

In March, an ancient astrolabe—one of those contraptions used to model the planets—was rediscovered in an Italian museum. Dating from the days of Al-Andalus, as Moorish Spain was once called, it contained engravings in both Arabic and Hebrew, thereby supposedly demonstrating how, contrary to the situation in today’s appallingly white supremacist world, back when the towelheads were on top in Al-Andalus, all faiths worked together in perfect cooperation, in a regime known as the convivencia, or “living together.”

A myth of “The Andalusian Paradise” has since arisen in which Moorish Spain is imagined as having been…well, a multicultural paradise, much as Malmo, London, Marseilles, and Brussels surely are today. See? The Moors of old were not barbarians like the justly Commie-killed Catholics were; instead, they were merely olden-days versions of classic 21st-century NYT or Guardian readers, goes this utterly delusional line of thinking, as “proven” by the astrolabe.

Unfortunately, the Moors ruled Spain for hundreds of years, and, besides all those oh-so-tolerant multilingual astrolabes, you can also find equally as many instances of Christians and Jews being slaughtered, forced to convert, made to pay the jizya tax, and more. Black Africans were enslaved there. Churches were demolished or forcibly turned into mosques. There were beheadings and pogroms. Laws from Seville in 1100 declared a Muslim “must not clear [Jews’ or Christians’] rubbish nor clean their latrines” in a primitive caste system; during that same century, the Catholics of Malaga and Grenada were ethnically cleansed by the thousands into Morocco. How is the mass expulsion of Christians “living together” with them?

Just as these same historically blind E.U.-era Spanish progressives falsely imagine Second Republic-era Spain to have been one long leftist kumbaya wet dream, so they imagine Al-Andalus to have been just the same; somehow, all those dead, exiled, enslaved, dhimmified, and mutilated Christians, blacks, and Jews manage to remain invisible to their blinkered eyes. It’s El 1619 Proyecto all over again.

Back in 1492, after several solid centuries of warfare, the Spanish finally managed to throw the Muslim imperialists out forever (or so they thought). Today, Islamic extremists from organizations like ISIS promise that, thanks to E.U.-enabled mass immigration, they will return and reconquer the place anew. The current persecution being handed out against Fr. Custodio Ballester demonstrates clearly that, in their frenzied eagerness to destroy the West’s Christian heritage forever, our current quisling left-wing politicians will only aid them in this task.

Oh, Ferdinand, Isabella—why did you ever bother?