SAVAGERY IN THE U.K.
The device was apparently a crude collage of household items, nuts, screws and bolts packed around 2 lb. of explosives. Like its creator, it appears to have been made in Britain.
At about 10:30 p.m. on Monday, May 22, Salman Abedi carried the homemade weapon into the entrance of Manchester Arena, a concert venue in the heart of Britain’s third largest city, as singer Ariana Grande finished her set.
Saffie Rose Roussos, 8, walked into the spring evening, her mother and sister close by. In videos shared online, the young crowd joined Grande in the chorus of her song “One Last Time,” raising their cell phones as points of light in the darkness. “One more time,” they sang. “I promise after that I’ll let you go.”
What followed was the worst terrorist attack in Britain in more than a decade, with at least 22 people killed and dozens more injured. But it fit a pattern that has become depressingly familiar across Europe over the past two years: a homegrown extremist, with links to jihadism, discovered too late—in this case, a first-generation Briton, 22, born to Libyan parents. The gleeful claim by the Islamic State. The images of the victims, forever smiling, displayed by the media. The cycles of pain, outrage and resilience.
The pain was especially acute this time because many of the victims were children and teenagers, like Saffie Rose, who died in the blast. Many girls were seeing a hero in the flesh for the first time; Grande sings sweet songs of female empowerment, which made the attack an assault on girlhood (see report, right).
Terrorist attacks have a complicated impact on national psyches, but one common thread that has emerged as ISIS has waged an increasingly violent war on Western Europe is a shift by its governments and citizens to the right. France remains under a seemingly perpetual state of
