Even in an age when terrorists have done their best to make the unspeakable routine, the hacking to death of a British soldier in London shocks.
It shocks, first, because the barbarism was no accident. It was part of the message.
And it shocks because of where it occurred. Everyone watching the footage of the murderer waving a meat cleaver red with the soldier’s blood understands the message: Whether you are walking down a South London street or cheering marathon runners in Boston, you are vulnerable.
There are those whose first instinct is to calculate the politics. By now, we should have thought it obvious that those who bomb and behead in the name of radical Islam don’t much care who is prime minister or who is president. They were at war with the United Kingdom and the United States long before a single British or American soldier set foot in Afghanistan or Iraq.
In some ways, they have more clarity than we do. They know that so long as our free societies stand, we are an obstacle to their goals. And they have learned that they cannot defeat us on the battlefield. So they seek to demoralize us by making our streets the battlefield.
In the video filmed moments after the grisly attack, one of the two men vows, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.” We do well to be equally clear about our resolve to defeat them.