What the commentators said

Regardless of who planted last week’s bomb, the internet companies have “blood on their hands”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. “Incredibly”, manuals for making bombs like the one at Parsons Green could still be found online several days after the attack. One “TV chefstyle video” even showed a masked man giving step-by-step instructions in a domestic kitchen. Google and other “amoral, soulless leviathans” disclaim any moral or legal responsibility for what appears online, claiming they are merely “intermediaries”, rather than publishers. That’s absurd. Unless they clean up their act fast, they must be “made subject to criminal law”. And that’s something the British public might find quite acceptable, said former CIA director David Petraeus in The Times. A report this week for the Policy Exchange think tank found that twothirds of Britons believe the internet giants are not doing enough to fight radicalisation; threequarters want them to do more to delete “extremist content”. And they are right to be worried. More jihadi material is accessed online in the UK than in any other European country. The internet companies must not sidestep the obligations that go with their power and wealth.

What people seem to forget is that “Britain is at war”, said Paul Rogers on Opendemocracy. The Parsons Green bombing – the fourth Islamist terror attack in the UK this year – was a reminder that for three years we have been engaged in a bloody conflict with Isis. On the very day of the bombing, the Us-led coalition launched 28 air strikes in the Middle East. The conflict may get scant coverage in the British media, but its ferocity helps explain why the terrorists see Britain – the largest contributor to the coalition after America – as a major target. Expect plenty more attacks, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. Under fierce military pressure, Isis’s self-proclaimed caliphate, once the size of Britain, has shrunk to just a few enclaves. But “the weaker Isis becomes, the more it will want to show it is still in business”.