Let the Standard Response Begin

The standard response now goes as follows. First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains. Briefly there is some shock. On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing ‘Imagine there’s no countries’. Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn as ‘inappropriate’. I see that the Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was this morning’s Twitter miscreant, foolish enough to say in the wake of the Brussels attack that the EU might not make us very safe. One may agree or disagree with this sentiment, but Ms Pearson should have known that the only acceptable thing to do after a suicide bomber detonates beside the European Commission is to acclaim the Commission as one of the few entities able to keep us safe.