Mark Steyn rips calls for ‘carrying on exactly as before’ after Manchester terror attack

Author Mark Steyn took to his website to blast the “predictable” reaction by lawmakers and media after the Manchester Arena terror attack Monday night, which killed at least 22 at an Ariana Grande concert.

The author of the New York Times bestseller “America Alone,” a 2006 book that predicted the rise of Islamic terrorism perpetrated across Europe today, says the continent’s leaders are still living in a state of denial.

Mr. Steyn ripped the “pitiful passive rote gestures” encouraged by newspapers and officials as police investigated a suicide bombing by Salman Abedi, 23.

“As The Independent’s headline has it: ’There’s only one way Britain should respond to attacks such as Manchester. That is by carrying on exactly as before,’” Mr. Steyn wrote. “That’s not actually the ’only’ way Britain could respond, but it seems the way to bet, judging from the responses of the political class.”

Mr. Steyn said a nation that once allocated vast resources to prevent and extinguish IRA attacks now seems resigned to terrorism by Islamic extremists.

“Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom,” he said. “It’s just a fact of life — like being blown up when you go to a pop concert. … Theresa May’s statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be ’defiant,’ but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it.”

The author said “carrying on exactly as before” is not possible because citizens affected by repeated terror attacks are changing their behavior.

“A few months ago, I was in Toulouse, where Jewish life has vanished from public visibility and is conducted only behind the prison-like walls of a fortress schoolhouse and a centralized synagogue that requires 24/7 protection by French soldiers,” Mr. Steyn wrote. “I went to Amsterdam, which is markedly less gay than it used to be; I walked through Molenbeek after dark, where unaccompanied women dare not go. You can carry on, you can stagger on, but life is not exactly as it was before. Inch by inch, it’s smaller and more constrained. … If Mrs. May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I’d be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon — before it’s too late.”