SPAIN IS WORKING HARD to take the "country most prone to surrender" title from the French:

Spain said on Tuesday it had put off a summit of EU housing ministers in Barcelona next week, fearing a repeat of violent demonstrations by anarchists who fired homemade bazookas and threw paint at an art museum.

There's been several riots in the last weeks by anti-capitalist thugs, but this is no excuse, of course.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said he was postponing the ministers' meeting at the recommendation of the region's security panel.

"The meeting has been postponed for security reasons. With peoples' safety, prevention is better than cure," he said.

Actually the right translation would be "better to be safe than sorry." Of couse, it's impossible not to paraphrase Churchill and tell Spain's interior minister: you canceled the meeting to be safe and not sorry, but you won't be unsafe and you will be sorry.

But this is not the only act of violence: in what looks more and more like the venezuelization of Spain, some leaders of the opposition party, the conservative Partido Popular, were physically assaulted by a group of thugs at a campaign rally (pictures here, in a link in Spanish). Some of the culprits were from the youth branch of leftist parties,and they were chanting "Fascists out" (yes, that's ironic). It's not the first time, but at least today all parties condemned the act, unlike the previous occasions. An official in the youth branch of the Socialist party has even been expelled (link in Spanish).

UPDATE. More:

"We are not afraid of the rioters," said a high-ranking police official. "But we don't want to help give violent demonstrators undeserved publicity."

The police accept that the squatters could celebrate the cancellation of the ministerial meeting as a victory, the official said, adding that this was "the lesser evil."

When the next meeting in the city is planned and the anti-capitalists will be emboldened thinking they've won, he'll see that it won't be the "lesser evil". Far from it.

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