A suicide bomber inflicts hell at a concert hall in Manchester, England that’s full of children, as though that was the point — to murder children.
The horror of war . . . well, terrorism . . . doesn’t get any worse.
And the media, as they focus on the spectacle of what happened, as they cover the particulars of the tragedy — the suspect’s name and ethnicity and apparent grievances, the anguish of the survivors, the names and ages of the victims — quietly tear the incident loose from most of its complexity and most of its context.
Yes, this was an act of terror. That piece of the puzzle is, of course, under intense scrutiny. The killer, Salman Abedi, age 22, was born in England to parents of Libyan descent and had recently traveled to Libya (where his parents now live) and Syria, where he may have been “radicalized.” He likely didn’t act alone.
