Time: Violence and fear travel swiftly, and faster still in the era of tweets and status updates and 24-hour rolling news. Just after 2 pm on May 22, police answered a call to an incident in Woolwich, southeast London. A 25-year-old soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, leaving the local barracks, had been hit by a car and then hacked to death in front of horrified onlookers. One of his alleged killers, later identified as Michael Adebolajo, linked the attack to the British military presence in Muslim countries. “We must fight them as they fight us, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” he said, waving a bloodied cleaver. Video, filmed by an onlooker, was quickly picked up by news organizations and disseminated on social media.
Categories: Europe