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“I am, like millions of people in Germany, shocked, devastated and deeply saddened by what happened yesterday evening in Berlin,” Merkel told a news conference.

Shocked, devastated, deeply saddened; incomprehensible. It’s the now customary syntax in the aftermaths of these bloodbaths. But the words are no longer up to the job, if ever they were. Numbed, inured and resigned might serve better. For also Monday, the Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot dead in mid-speech at an art exhibit, by a young Turkish policeman — a member of the security detail — who then shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria!” and “Allahu Akbar!” over his corpse.

In Zurich, a 24-year-old Swiss man shot up an Islamic Centre, injuring three.

Pushed down the news list — because there’s only so much room for headlines about mass-casualty terrorist attacks — was the assault by Islamist gunmen Sunday on a tourist site in Karak, Jordan, which killed ten people, including retired Canadian teacher Linda Vatcher of Burgeo, N.L., 62.

Photo by Ben Curtis / AP

Days before Karak there was Cairo — the bombing of a Coptic Christian cathedral, which killed more than two dozen and injured twice as many. A suicide bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia in mid-December, which killed 29 and injured 50, barely registered in the international media.

With each successive barbaric act, we drive our heads further into the dirt, or turn away with a narcotized, collective shrug. What can anyone do? In Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria Bashar Assad’s forces commit mass murder and bomb civilians with impunity; that was a trend leader on Facebook for a week. In Iraq the Islamic State rapes, enslaves and murders. The West’s chosen proxy fighters, Iraqi regulars and Kurdish militia, struggle to retake ground.