The BBC deigned to report on the AVT’s demonstration in Madrid at which between 7,000 and 110,000 activists marched against the early release of José Ignacio de Juana Chaos, after he wrote threatening articles which named some judges. What’s interesting about the way the protesters and the BBC presented this demo was that it was somehow to do with de Juana Chaos’s previous offence, the murder of 25 people during his career in ETA. Ostensibly, however, that was not the aim of the march at all. After all, de Juana Chaos has served 18 years of his sentence for that crime and, were he any other prisoner would be out early. So yet again, a demonstration called against one thing ends up being really about another thing completely. Or a multiplicity of things, as there were the usual banners around alluding to some kind of Zapatero involvement in 11M.

The AVT has no credibility as a politically independent pressure group.

It was nice to see the 7,000 enjoying the sunshine in Madrid’s streets. Nice to see them waving their flags (some of them replete with fascist emblems). Nice to see their Nazi salutes while they sang the anthem of the armed forces. There’s no doubt about it: the AVT rent-a-mob are a classy bunch.

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One more thing: does anyone have any recent opinion poll stats on this topic? I haven’t been able to find anyone but was reliably informed by the BBC’s north American Spain correspondent that ‘the vast majority of Spaniards are against de Juana Chaos’s release’. That’s fine if it’s backed up with statistics… I just can’t find them. Much obliged to anyone who can enlighten me.