Investigators hunted Tuesday for possible accomplices of the suicide bomber who attacked an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, killing 22 people and sparking a stampede of young concertgoers, some still wearing the American pop star's trademark kitten ears and holding pink balloons.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Monday night carnage, which counted children as young as 8 among its victims and left 59 people wounded. British police raided two sites in the northern English city and arrested a 23-year-old man at a third location.
Yes, the jihad struck a brave blow against little girls by blowing them up.
Whether this was planned or inspired from abroad matters nothing to the dead and their families.
I hope we don't descend into weepy passivity over yet another jihadi attack. Aren't we tired of that?
Aren't we sick of immediately worrying about the "backlash" against Moslems before the dead victims of jihadi rage have been identified and buried? Can we worry a bit more about the "lash" that hits first and regularly in our cities?
Certainly, Moslems are not guilty as a class for these monsters who kill in their name.
But let's get on with killing the jihadis whenever and wherever we find them. Don't shed a tear for their deaths.
This won't win the Islamic Civil War that counts Westerners as collateral damage in that fight, but it will slow them down. And if we kill enough, it will put the fear of death and failure into them rather than drawing them to fight the jihad for their personal glory to redeem their sorry lives.
UPDATE: On TV, Prime Minister May says troops will deploy to free up police for other work.
As has long been said, if you don't fight (and kill) jhadis "over there," we must fight them "over here." Scarce British troops will now stand guard over here.
UPDATE: The British are raising their threat level to the highest grade based on threats to the British people.
I think the British could use a new threat scale that focuses on what Britain will do to the jihadis.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn has thoughts:
All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.
Resist the killers. And kill them, of course. It's not the ultimate solution. But it is a necessary start.
UPDATE: More resistance to an actual enemy, please.
