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These days, one event runs so quickly into another that it no longer makes us recoil in horror.

There is always a portion of mankind who will seize a convenient “cause” to cover the exercise of unbridled sadism and murder. There will always be isolated souls, angry at their own insignificance and emptiness, who seek the cloak of a “purpose” to justify or rationalize striking out against innocent civilians, when all they are really doing is attempting to mask the hollowness of their own lives. But these days, one event runs so quickly into another that it no longer makes us recoil in horror. Indeed, most of us barely have time to process the moral dimensions of the latest hideous attack before the next one consumes the headlines.

No one knows how to stop these attacks — certainly not how to stop them over any quick period of time. We do, however, know that the evasion of naming them for what they are is not the route to travel. Swaddling ourselves in earnest hashtags, movie stars or first ladies taking grim-looking selfies while holding up the latest pasteboard slogans (“Bring Back our Girls”) are pathetic, excusatory diversions from any real call to action. Singing hymns to diversity, or the endless search for “root causes” and “explanations” — when the plain cause and explanation is usually present out of the mouths and declarations of the killers themselves — is no way forward.

Western leaders spend more time trying to muffle the domestic reaction to terror attacks than on the terror attacks themselves. They readily fire up the increasingly numb and hollow tropes of racism and xenophobia when ordinary people speak what they actually feel after each fresh horror. It is little wonder, then, that people turn to more radical solution offered by the likes of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage: when legitimate expressions of concern are put off limits, people will seek a voice for their fears and worries.

The events in Nice should not be allowed to fade from our collective memory. An age of terror is upon us. The sight of the bodies of children on a highway in France should provoke a response that is far more permanent and substantial than doe-eyed leaders trotting out the tired litanies of “our thoughts are with the citizens of (fill in the location of the latest atrocity).” The merciless character and unappeasable appetites of murderous jihadism call for real and determined leadership.

National Post