So many pretty lights have been lit for the latest 34 victims of terror, so many mournful words said and sympathetic memes posted in solidarity. It’s now been four days since the multiple terror attacks in Brussels that took 34 lives and injured 230, and those days have been spent producing countless articles describing “a new world outside our window” and urging us, the citizens of Europe, to answer this hatred with love, opening our hearts and doors to the fleeing and the downtrodden.
But this is not a new world we see, it is an old one — one that the European continent has done its utmost to forget. By referring to the last years of escalating terrorism as “isolated events” and “acts of violence” we have stayed away from the word that would force us to act.
