For many years General Franco’s regime used the slogan “Spain is different” to attract tourism. Spain had sun and great beaches, unlike, say, Germany and Belgium, but the country was also a dictatorship and lagged economically and socially. We were indeed different from the rest of Europe. Today, Spain is still different, particularly in relation to Islamic terrorism.

Spain was the site of the deadliest post-9/11 jihadist attack. On March 11, 2004, Madrid’s railways were bombed: 192 people died and more than 2,000 were injured in the worst terrorist event ever suffered in Spain. But with a few exceptions, people judged the government at the time ultimately responsible for the attacks, and even today the average view is that those attacks were a sort of punishment for the prime minister, José María Aznar, for being too arrogant, too active in the international arena, and too close to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.