Waleed Aly, in The Age, 25 April 2019, entitled “The Sri Lankan attacks are uniquely senseless”
Every terrorist attack in which innocent people are killed is devastatingly tragic. Every one of them is heinous. But what we’ve seen in Sri Lanka this week exists on a rarefied level of depravity. Of course, there’s the supreme violation of slaughtering people in worship – now an established feature of terrorism and particularly Islamic State’s violence in places like Egypt or the Philippines. Then there’s the nauseating symbolism of the day itself. Easter Sunday: perhaps the holiest day on the Christian calendar, but more than that, the day Christians mark the resurrection. The very idea of life’s triumph over death deformed into a day of death above all else.
