London now joins a lengthening list: New York, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya, Moscow, Madrid, Bali, Baghdad, Darfur, and others.
Office buildings, restaurants, discotheques, busses, theaters, trains, schools, hospitals, embassies.
An ideology is loose in the world that sponsors murder, beheadings, torture, honor killings, kidnappings, bombings, rape. It is the spiritual heir of communism and fascism, the twentieth century totalitarian ideologies that killed millions in the name of the people.
There are countries that sponsor or harbor these terrorists, or are developing weapons of mass destruction in order to assist them. The world negotiates with them.
There are societies currently using and condoning terror in the hope the world will give them a state, and the world complies.
Winston Churchill, in his first volume of his History of the Second World War, wrote it was a tragedy that could easily have been prevented, a story of:
how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic States . . . lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.
May God comfort the injured and the families of the murdered, and may we not let the list of cities grow longer before we recognize we are in a new world war.