Horror must not be met with horror

The death toll in Paris has exceeded 120 130 and there are nearly 100 people on the critical list, not to mention those with lesser injuries. The scale of mortality is the worst since the second world war, but in nature the terrorism ranks with that of the red brigades in Germany and Italy. Good sense in these two countries prevented a spiral of violence in the 1970s.

Sal Brinton, in her address as federal president to the Welsh Liberal Democrat conference yesterday, called for a measured, intelligent response to the dreadful terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut. (This was echoed by the leader in the Independent.) She warned that far-right groups were already capitalising on the indication that at least one of the dead terrorists had come in to the EU with refugees on a Syrian passport, possibly fake. We must resist simplistic, repressive, policies. If there is a lesson, I feel it is that we must increase our resources for vetting asylum claimants, in the UK and the continental EU, as well as improving our intelligence.

There is a comment on al-Jazeera about that finger-pointing and Simone Frosini Simon had an appropriate pictorial comment, passed on by the splendid German anti-Nazi website Storch Heinar: