A chilling crime in London

The Westminster terror attack was shocking but it was also very familiar: the focus on a famous landmark, the moment of fatal confusion, then the sirens, the vigils and the hauntingly ordinary stories of the victims.

Even the attacker’s method, turning a car into a projectile weapon, was borrowed from other rampages. And this viral sort of terrorism, where each new horror is modelled on the last few, is itself familiar.

It owes much to the vast archive and network that is the internet – and it is not solely limited to Islamic extremism either. Consider the plague of US school shootings, so often inspired in detailed ways by earlier massacres.

Of course, exactly what cocktail of rage, pathology and ideology prompted this attack is still to be determined – and might not be.

Early reports suggest the assailant, named as British-born Birmingham 52-year-old Khalid Masood, had a history of violent convictions. He might have been as much thug as zealot.

The depraved fanatics of ISIS have claimed him as one of their own, but this might be convenient nonsense.

In this haze, however, a few things are clear. One is that terrorist attacks, even though they differ from other crime, should still be treated as crimes – aberrations in the social order that civilised societies can withstand, plan for and prosecute without debasing themselves or giving in to hysteria.

This is why British Prime Minister Theresa May’s defiant call for Londoners to return to their ordinary routines – while honouring Wednesday’s victims – was important and right.

A sense of proportion is part of this. The London attack, which had resulted in four victims’ deaths by yesterday, was a chilling and tragic act of violence, but it was not a serious threat to the city.

It was probably partly to do with a bloodthirsty and millenarian corruption of Islam, but only a vanishingly small minority of Muslims buy into such a vision. A wholesale backlash against adherents, in the Donald Trump style, is thus deeply wrong, as well as counter-productive.

History can help with a sense of proportion too. Terrorism is a part of 21st century European life – there can be no protecting every pedestrian from every deranged driver – but it was also a part of life (actually a comparatively bigger one) in other recent times, whether in the form of IRA bombs in London, or ETA killings in Spain, or, much further back, the anarchist bombings of the late 19th century. Every age has its murderous fanatics, in other words.

Indeed, even the JudeoChristian tradition, which white supremacists and certain White House aides like to valorise without qualification, has its own long history of fanatical and apocalyptic killing.

There is a strand of that in Islam now, and it is an undeniably frightening one. It needs vigilance and condemnation. It needs to be reduced to another footnote in history, however long that takes.

It doesn’t, however, call for abandoning the best and most hard-won values of the modern world: pluralism, tolerance, freedom of expression, basic human rights and the rule of law.

These are supreme, even in the aftermath of a wanton act of violence.

- Fairfax NZ