Every August, the traditional vacation month for Spaniards, those
Barcelonans who can afford to flee the city and its hordes for the green
hills and pretty beaches of the nearby Costa Brava. The legendary
boulevard of Las Ramblas, in Barcelona, snaking from the city’s downtown
along the ancient Gothic quarter to the Mediterranean Sea, is a must-do
for all foreign visitors, and it is thronged with people at the best of
times. Earlier today, Las Ramblas became the latest soft target for
terrorists, when a man, evidently swearing allegiance to the Islamic
State, drove a rented white van for hundreds of feet, hitting dozens of
people who were walking along the tree-lined avenue. Zigzagging back and
forth in an apparent effort to maximize the death toll, the driver
killed at least thirteen people and injured a hundred.

The earliest images to emerge from the scene, a few hours ago, had a
ghoulishly reminiscent quality: one of them was an iPhone video clip,
without any narrative or commentary—nor needing
any—evidently shot in the first shocked aftermath of the attack. It
showed several people, most of them in summer shorts and T-shirts, lying
dead or unconscious and badly wounded, bleeding, on a sidewalk, as
stunned survivors stumbled past.

We have all seen this scene before. It was at least the sixth time in recent years that vehicular homicide has been the weapon of choice of
terrorists in Europe. A few weeks ago, a van plowed into crowds on
London Bridge, and before that on Westminster Bridge. Last December, a truck plowed into shoppers at a Christmas market in Berlin, and among
families celebrating Bastille Day last summer, in Nice. And there have
been other incidents, of course. With increasing frequency, the episodes
begin to blur together and to merge with other attacks on innocent people attending music concerts, in hotels and bars or restaurants.

Today’s attack may have had Islamist extremism as its motivation, but,
coming on the heels of Saturday’s lethal car attack against a crowd of
counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia—which was carried out by a young neo-Nazi American—it cannot be viewed in isolation. Terrorists inspire one another, and mimic each other’s behavior, as well.

Charlottesville and Barcelona are also united by Donald Trump’s
increasingly extremist discourse—from his moral equivocation over the
white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to his posting of a tweet after the Barcelona attack citing an apparently apocryphal quote,
attributed to John J. Pershing, advocating the execution of Islamist
terrorists with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. Such talk, of course, is
hugely offensive to Muslims everywhere and is sure to inflame tensions.
Perhaps that is Trump’s intention. Earlier in the day, in an interview
with Fox, he recommended “killing the families of terrorists” as a means
of strengthening the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State.

In contrast with Trump’s remarks, the office of the President of the government of
Catalonia, the semi-autonomous region of Spain for which Barcelona is
the capital, issued this statement:

The Catalan government’s statement—carefully eschewing the easy route of
stoking fear of Muslims—made efforts to be inclusive and encompassing of
its polyglot population. It was the kind of statement previous American
Presidents might have made, sensitive to their role as moral guides and
protectors of all their citizens. It was the opposite of the statements
made by the current one.