The New Face of Terror

Source: The daily Beast.

A blood-splattered jihadist with a meat cleaver in one hand declaring to a bystander’s smartphone camera “Allahu Akbar” and “we will always beat you” in a pronounced south London accent?  While waiting twenty minutes for the police to arrive after he’s taken part in what seemed like a ritual assassination of a British soldier?  Exactly what terrorist profile does this conform to?

London Beheading
Following the attack, a man wielding a machete with bloodied hands approaches a camera in an attempt to justify what just he just did. (ITV)

that’s what concerns British terrorism officials. Is this bizarre episode the beginning of a new, unpredictable pattern of loners operating without any organized backing behind them, or a one-off?

The two assailants could, indeed, just be a couple of deranged freelancers. But the guidance British ministers have been giving reporters assumes something much graver, a form of terrorism so unsophisticated and amateur that it can’t be detected by existing surveillance methods.

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