Atrocities make for hard choices - Confronting the terrorists

THE tens of millions of words, in many, many languages, written about last Friday’s terror attacks in Tunisia, and the millions more yet unpublished, are part of the dividend sought by the murderers.

Without the fear the reportage of attacks provokes the hate-filled barbarisms of Islamic State would be pointless. The entirely natural long-term response, in the civilised world at least, will have a negative and distressing impact on the beleagured people of that country — and the wider region — as tourists leave hotel rooms empty. This will perpetuate a vicious circle. Fewer jobs in the region, more migrants, more young people marginalised in hate-fuelling poverty, only to be driven into the arms of a nihilism determined to destroy the world that they believe has failed them so very badly. And maybe it has.

The tremendous inequality, the almost obscene concentratrion of wealth among Arab oil state rulers, while the great majority of the people living in that region struggle in almost medieval poverty, must drive that march towards radicalisation too. This issue is not confined to that region but it seems a particularly sharp divide in the oil-sustained fiefdoms that dot the Gulf, fiefdoms the West indulges because we are addicted to their life-sustaining oil.