Satanic school slaughter: Beyond any understanding

It may seem disingenuous or hypocritical, on the island that produced the Enniskillen Poppy Day massacre and savage Omagh bombing, the Shankill Butchers as well as the IRA murder squads so adept at kidnapping and killing, to wonder how any person, how any organisation might imagine that a deadly attack on schoolchildren might further their cause.

It is difficult too to try to understand, in the digitalised, connected and communications-rich 21st century, how an organisation that seems as rooted in the past as the Taliban, who brought slaughter to a Pakistani high school yesterday, could convince anyone that by becoming terrorist murderers — and suicide bombers — that they are serving a higher, noble cause.

At least 126 people, mostly children at school, were killed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban militants trying to overthrow the government at a school in in Pakistan’s north-western city of Peshawar.

Just as it seems incomprehensible to most western societies that young people brought up in the relative comfort of countries like this might go to the Middle East and join Isis in what they imagine is a crusade but is little more than a criminal campaign of terror and anarchy.

Once again we are reminded that the incomprehension around terrorism is almost as daunting as the carnage and mayhem it causes.