Monday, June 19, 2017

Another day


It's another Monday morning and we're digesting another terror incident in our Capital, sadly, it seems like barbaric terror attacks are becoming part of the fabric of things, could we see a point when they're almost expected?

It's early days but I'd bet a lot of money on the motivation of this attack being some twisted notion of revenge for Manchester and Borough Market (and possibly other actions) My worry is that this kind of tit-for-tat killing will start to become a "thing", you kill one of ours and we'll kill one of yours. We've heard it all before in Northern Ireland, that little spat lead to over 30 years of terror attacks that created inconsolably deep divisions between communities based along religious and cultural fracture lines, it's easy to see how that kind of intractability and frustration could easily emerge from the current situation and would probably be far worse.

It's at times like this we look to our leaders to lead; unfortunately we seem to be in a deep trough of despair at the moment in terms of the quality of leadership we should expect. I can only hope that our Prime Minister doesn't go for the low hanging fruit of censorship in a futile attempt to shut down debate and criticism of religion so as not to "offend" the sensibilities of Muslims (or capitulation to violence as I would call it). I can already see some of the warning signs of this, that silly word-salad of  "Islamophobia" and "racism" is being liberally sprayed around the news today and no doubt we will hear lots of victim-hood speeches from "pop-up" Islamic apologists as the investigation continues.

The attributes and motivations of the murderers  in recent events were certainly different but from the perspective of how we should respond, and what laws and processes we use to do that, no distinction is needed.

No comments: