“Britain is a nation united in shock and in grief,” British Prime Minister David Cameron writes at telegraph.co.uk. “As the names and identities of the victims in Tunisia emerge – and the horror of what they faced becomes clear – those feelings grow. Everyone is asking the same thing: how can a day at the beach for families and friends have turned into a scene of such horror?” Because someone with a gun was able to shoot 30 defenseless British tourists (amongst others) without any immediate armed intervention? That’s not quite how David puts it . . .
The man who did this, the smiling gunman with a Kalashnikov hidden in a parasol, demonstrates the level of evil we are dealing with. It’s an evil we’ve seen on Mount Sinjar in Iraq and in shopping malls in Kenya; at magazine offices in Paris and in schools in Pakistan.
I know, right? So . . . Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxons, whatcha gonna do? Watcha gonna do when they come for you?
We will not be cowed. To our shock and grief we must add another word: resolve. Unshakeable resolve. We will stand up for our way of life.
So ours must be a full-spectrum response – a response at home and abroad; in the immediate aftermath and far into the future . . .
Across the world, we must do more to work together and build our capacity to deal with terrorism. ISIL may use ancient barbarism in its methods of killing, but it is modern in its propaganda techniques, using social media as its primary weapon.
That is why we must give our police and security services the tools they need to root out this poison. And we must look at how we can work with countries like Tunisia to counter this online propaganda.
I spy with my little eye spies with little eyes spying on me. And everyone else, especially in Britain. No matter. As the Brits are wont to say, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about. Do you, love? Anyway, the Brits have a secret weapon: their stiff upper lip!
We have something the terrorists don’t. We have the great British spirit that triumphs in the face of adversity.
It’s the spirit we have always shown when we faced threats to our nation in our history. It’s the spirit that saw London rebound after the 7/7 attacks, whose 10th anniversary we mark next month. It’s the spirit we saw as British tourists went to the beach in Tunisia this weekend, determined not to be cowed by the terrorists.
We are the people who stand up to hatred. They are the cowards who murder defenceless people on a beach. They stand for oppression; we stand for freedom, and a peaceful, tolerant way of life.
They have guns. We don’t. Well, the British police and security services do. But not the defenseless citizens subjects slaughtered like the sheep they’ve allowed themselves to become. And so the UK anti-terrorist dudes (I believe that’s the correct vernacular) have gone into high gear. And? When seconds count, the armed police are only 3,426.6 km away.