In the past few days, we’ve witnessed the unsettling images of tens of thousands of Moroccans, young unemployed Muslim men, clambering over the barbed-wire fence border between Morocco and Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta.

The images conjure up several ironies of Spanish history — a reverse “Reconquista” of Spain whereby Muslims avenge the final expulsion by Christian armies of the Moorish rulers of Granada in 1492.