Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and the Media’s Ceuta Invasion Blind Spot
If Fidel Castro was the “Robin Hood of the Caribbean,” Spain’s Pedro Sánchez is now the “Superman of Europe.” It’s been typeset by the New York Times in its headline saying Sánchez “Acts Fast” to head off the migrant crisis in Ceuta after 70,000 African invaders swarmed onto the Spanish territory last July 30, chanting “allahu akhbar.”
Two months after Sanchez “Acts Fast,” some 15,000 “immigrants” remain in Ceuta, turning the previously picturesque and prosperous seaside city into a cesspool of crime, sexual assaults, shantytowns and disease, overwhelming local sanitation, police and health services, forcing residents to lock themselves in their homes and close their shops. Migrant loiterers masturbate on the street in front of women and children, crash out in schools, break into unprotected houses and attack police while Sánchez patiently prepares their “processing” into Europe. (RELATED: Sánchez Under Fire Over Ceuta Border Crisis)
Tent cities are being erected near schools, military bases, and the port area — from where those with the cash can hop onto drug boats for the run across the Gibraltar Strait to avoid paperwork and waiting time for government NGOs to ease them onto Spain’s mainland. Any migrant claiming to be a “minor” who reaches Spain by sea has an automatic right to asylum under court rulings recently engineered by Sánchez, which brought on the migrant surge. (RELATED: Spain: Pedro Sánchez Declares Border War on His Own Country)
Those who can fork out the money for the speedboat or jet ski ride are likeliest to be the hardened criminals camping out in makeshift shacks crowded into narrow beaches where Spanish families would otherwise be enjoying the pleasant last weeks of summer. Ceuta’s sandy coves have been turned into open sewers with scenes of machete fights between rival gangs as locals look on with terror from their shorefront homes.
“It’s not a simple migrant crisis, but an authentic invasion which has totally overwhelmed our operational capacity due to institutional inaction and lack of personnel,” reads a statement from Spain’s National Union of Police. “There are between 15,000 and 20,000 migrants still in Ceuta,” the police say, well above official government figures that started at 1,500 a month ago, escalated to 13,000, and are rising. (RELATED: You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics)
“The police are confronting delinquents armed with clubs, knives and machetes,” according to union spokesmen. “The level of aggressiveness is such that there are direct attacks on police and members of the military. Intervening under these conditions without the necessary numerical superiority against the armed mobs and riots could lead to disaster”
High-level security officials have raised objections to erecting the tent city in Ceuta’s harbour. “Such an installation for migrants increases risks to a strategic facility,” State Security Secretary Ana Maria Calvo told the press. She has been summarily fired by Sánchez as his crackdown on critics goes into overdrive. An official who told the press on July 30 that the number of migrant invaders was 49,000 got similarly dismissed. And not because her estimate was below actual figures of between 70,000 and 80,000, which the government finally had to admit. (RELATED: Spain’s Sánchez Compiles Blacklists of Journalists and Tries to Tamper With the Electoral Roll)
Americans know the script, having suffered years of weaponized migration under the Democrats whose globalist playbook Sánchez is following with rigid tenacity.
Disagreements between Sánchez and his security services over what conservative opposition leaders call his “treason” of Ceuta became evident last week when his defense minister, Margarita Robles, remained seated and refused to clap at the end of a speech in parliament where he flagrantly lied about not receiving intelligence warnings of the impending invasion, trying to pass on responsibility to the military.
But the world media remains solidly behind Sánchez, lionized by the Wall Street Journal as “the leader of western opposition to Trump” since he crowned himself with the title in Davos last year. Even London’s conservative Daily Telegraph is running with the pack. It ran an Aug. 25 front-page story with the headline “Secret Agents in Ceuta Failed to Alert Spain about Migrant Influx.” (RELATED: What’s Wrong With Spain? It’s Pedro Sánchez.)
The report was based on nothing more than statements by Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, notorious for his stumbling attempts at muzzling the multitude of scandals surrounding Sánchez. Well-sourced accounts to the contrary reported by The American Spectator weeks earlier and subsequently confirmed by defense minister Robles and Spanish courts investigating the border breach were ignored by the U.K.’s newspaper of record.
Madrid’s foreign press corps, of which I was once part, appears to have lost its shine since the days when Ernest Hemingway played Russian roulette with one of Stalin’s generals advising Spain’s 2nd Republic during the 1930s civil war. It got lively again following the 1975 death of general Francisco Franco, the war’s victor who gave Spain decades of economic prosperity, crushed the communists and fought off Moroccan attempts to seize Spanish territory in a 1950s desert war.
I remember, as a young reporter for The Economist, seeing the BBC’s Charles Wheeler turn in disgust as a Spanish multitude saluted with raised arms at Franco’s last rally on the Plaza de Oriente. I also sadly recall the grizzled hard-drinking dean of our press club, Roy Rutter, from London’s Daily Express, falling flat-faced dead on the marble top table of one of Hemingway’s old haunts, after finishing what would be his last bottle of Bacardi.
Rutter scorned the excessive coverage his colleagues were giving to the bull ring rallies organized by Spain’s revived Communist Party in the first post-Franco election, featuring the legendary and by then octogenarian Stalinist firebrand Dolores Ibárruri, “La Pasionaria,” in her much celebrated return from a 40-year exile in Moscow.
“The communists have no power in Spain,” he would say. “We are being conned by the coms.” The PCE never scored much over single digits in any election. But the Socialists who emerged from the first post-Franco vote as Spain’s government-in-waiting now manipulate the media in ways that La Pasionaria could never have envisioned. They don’t make fiery speeches, just banal-sounding directives carefully crafted to sound like announcements of new fashion lineups at a department store, to turn the country on its head.
The Financial Times recently tried to marry Sánchez with Italy’s Georgia Meloni in a piece highlighting similarities in some of their EU-designed economic policies. But the smorgasbord of salacious infamies plaguing his government, on which journalists might normally feast, remains largely untouched. Revelations that his mentor, closest confidante and previous socialist president Rodriguez Zapatero received priceless jewelry from Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in a multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme merited little attention — even as the diamond-studded pieces were carried off by police from his safe at Socialist Party headquarters in front of TV cameras. So it’s hardly surprising that Spain’s obsessively image-conscious globalist leader believes that he can get away with murder in Ceuta.
The day after Sánchez lied before Spain’s parliament, with The Telegraph seconding the motion, intelligence documents declassified by Spanish judges and congressional leaders clearly demonstrated that CNI agents in Ceuta and in Morocco had informed government authorities about the impending invasion at least 24 hours in advance. They were monitoring viral social media posts telling masses of military-aged males gathering at the border that “The moment is now. Authorities of King Mohammed are too busy with his anniversary festivities to interfere.” Sánchez has since prohibited any further declassification of official documents without his express authority.
It may be because similar calls are now going out to more hordes marching up from the Sahara Desert or down Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to “take advantage” of elections later this month in which Mohammed won’t want to have his police seen beating and gassing beloved brothers breaking into Spain, which the absolutist monarch has vainly threatened to do with tanks.
The chief of staff of the presidential office in Ceuta, Miguel Ángel Pérez, who acknowledged receiving the CNI warnings and passing them on to the relevant ministries, has resigned, while his boss, or head of the “Government Delegation” in Ceuta who acts as the official link to the presidential palace, is AWOL.
Sánchez doesn’t really see a role for Spain’s army, police, or spy agencies in his plans for Ceuta. The $150M in funds that the EU has allocated for Ceuta’s border crisis are going to Soros-linked NGOs working with the recently created Ministry for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration headed by his close aide and chief spokesperson, Elma Saiz Delgado, who openly talks of her self-appointed mission to “transform Spanish society.”
Police are getting in the way. They are investigating an NGO connected with Soros’s Open Society Foundation network, called No Name Kitchen, whose operatives have been training migrant invaders in making IEDs with commercially available chemicals and tin foil that are being thrown at army vehicles. One of its leaders, who is a well-known pro-Hamas activist, was filmed ushering the migrants into Ceuta when they broke through the barrier gates. She is suspected of organizing “resistance cells” among Jihadis who rushed in with the initial wave, linked to ISIS and other terror groups, as reported in some detail by the U.K.’s mass-circulation tabloid, The Sun. Another NGO sneaking into Ceuta is connected with Sánchez supporters from the far-left Basque terrorist group ETA, according to local civic leaders who are denouncing its presence.
Americans know the script, having suffered years of weaponized migration under the Democrats whose globalist playbook Sánchez is following with rigid tenacity. Millions of Spaniards filling plazas and streets in more than 200 cities and towns across Spain in support of their distressed compatriots in Ceuta and calling for Sánchez’s immediate resignation and new elections don’t move him a bit.
Popular rejection isn’t kryptonite for progressive socialists. Firm international condemnation of their actions or lack of them might be. But NYT’s newly arrived Madrid bureau chief, Jason Horowitz, just published a sophomoric vanity piece about his thrill at “covering a nation in transition,” reporting that the mild-mannered technocrat heading Spain who slips into a red cape and shiny suit to save the planet has all sorts of “exciting” new ventures planned — with China.
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