This past January 27th, the municipality of the Madrid suburb of Ciempozuelos announced that all ceremonies and public events scheduled for the day would be dedicated to the atrocities committed by the Jews, rather than those committed by the Nazis.

The town, home to 20,000 people, attracted global attention as a result. Israel’s Ambassador to Spain Victor Harel asked town mayor Susana Le?n to recant. Jewish organizations also issued condemnations of the move.

"Your attempt to equate the industrialized mass murder of six million Jewish women, men and children, as well as millions of others, with the situation of the Palestinian people is shameful,” wrote Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman in a statement. “It reflects an extremely disturbing tendency, which is particularly visible in Europe, to dishonor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and de-legitimize the State of Israel by seeking to eradicate the clear moral difference between the Holocaust and the loss of Palestinian lives as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict."

The decision caused heated debate within Spain, and finally the national government stepped in to pressure the town to cancel the public Palestinian Genocide observances. The town cancelled all public observances on January 27, including Holocaust memorials, to protest the move.

Ignacio Russell Cano, a Spanish journalist, wrote in Front Page Magazine, “Those studying the transformation of Europe into Eurabia will surely see the case of Ciempozuelos as the first warning of the Islamification of Spain. However, the picture is slightly different.”

Cano goes on to cite similar behavior within Spain’s central government. “In a country whose citizenship leaped into the streets to protest the Lebanon war, carrying swastikas to denounce Israel’s existence as part of the [only] western government congratulated by [Hizbullah chief Hassan] Nasrallah himself in one of his fatwa-speeches… no one in Spain – Osama, Ch?vez, Castro, Putin, and Ahmadinejad – is so heavily attacked by [the government] as Israel.”

Meanwhile, Spain’s Foreign Ministry is making great efforts to organize an Oslo Accords-style conference within its borders. Cano posits that such a conference is being pursued as it “would signal to Arab countries that when it comes to pressing for Israel’s disappearing, Spain is the right place to begin pouring petrodollars.”