HEY, I SWEAR I didn't say anything to The Scotsman:

BASQUE nationalist lawmakers were yesterday accused of teaming up with terrorists to win passage for a proposal seeking to make the region virtually independent from Spain.

(background info here)

UPDATE. Joe Gandelman comments on my yesterday's post, and quotes the Basque blog Ingeleraz as saying:

What a day, I'm not sure how to feel, I guess I'm shocked....The message is clear, the future of the Basque Country will be decided by the Basques.

Which is THE recurring rhetoric in some quarters: anyone who disagrees with the ultra-nationalist, ethnicist, separatist ideology is, well, simply not a Basque, not a real one. So he or she can be intimidated, forced out of the region even killed. It's the de-humanization of the opponent; the first step to very ugly things. The same ugly things we have witnessed several times in Europe in the last decades.

Of course, I'm not accusing Ingerelaz's author of any relationship with Basque terrorism; I don't know him and have just seen his blog for the fist time. What I'm pointing out is that what he writes is the foundation upon which the extreme forms of the ideology are built.