Terrorist savages have struck Europe again, claiming another life in a seemingly endless tide of violence.
It is horrific. Indeed, it is especially horrific – a Catholic priest had his throat cut in the middle of Mass.
But attack after attack strains everybody’s ability to respond with the levels of emotion such atrocities demand.
A martyr looks like this.
Fr Jacques Hamel, killed while celebrating Mass,
like Thomas of Becket and Oscar Romero. pic.twitter.com/bjIsbim4O7— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) July 26, 2016
Earlier today a doctor was shot dead by a patient in a German clinic, but attention was dragged elsewhere by events in Normandy almost immediately.
In the previous week in Germany alone there has been a fatal machete attack, an axe attack on a train, a suicide bombing and a shooting rampage in a shopping mall.
It is twelve days since crazed trucker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel mowed down 84 people – ten of them children – in Nice.
It was only late March when three suicide bombers killed more than 30 people in Brussels, which in turn came months after the larger-still rampage in Paris – about which horrors are still emerging.
Most are linked to the Islamic State, some are not, some could yet be.
German police yesterday made clear the scale of the problem when they said they had 410 separate leads on potential terrorists.
.@skymarkwhite has the latest after reports that knifemen who'd taken hostages at a church in Normandy are shot dead https://t.co/VFJNyTgNXN
— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 26, 2016
Germany’s interior minister told his citizens to “expect attacks”. Manuel Valls, the French president, said his nation should “learn to live” with random mass murders.
Their defeatism helps nobody – but is increasingly shared by those around them.
Regardless of the intricacies of motive, modus operandi and death toll, it is becoming an inescapable truth that terror attacks are now happening practically – in fact almost literally – every day in continental Europe.
