It is this dialectic of traumatic collapse and ideological resurrection that fuels the lamentable, endlessly recurring cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity that has been so characteristic of human history.
If we are to break the deadly cycle of escalating violence - of strike and counter-strike, atrocity and enraged reaction - we must listen intently to what everybody, even our enemy, is saying, and be sincerely ready to let it change us: to get beyond the rhetoric, decode the imagery, and hear the subtext of rage, grief, fear, pain, hatred and despair.
Police patrols of Jewish communities in Britain are also to be stepped up amid "heightened concern" about the risk of an attack following the Paris atrocity, Britain's top counter-terror officer said.
Police patrols of Jewish communities in the UK are to be stepped up amid "heightened concern" about the risk of an attack following the Paris atrocity, Britain's top counter-terror officer has said.
Reduced government income will inevitably affect Nigeria's already limited ability to counter the Islamist extremists of Boko Haram, whose civilian atrocities have plumbed new depths.
But reactions in China to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in Paris and to recent successful counter-terrorism operations at home reveal a big gap in perceptions.China criticised the Paris attacks unreservedly.
Terrorist atrocity is followed by reprisal, and then by counter-reprisal, which leads to full-scale conflict.
Friedrich Kellner's diary counters such suggestions: A soldier on vacation here said he witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied parts of Poland.
But the seeming ease with which the bombers struck, just one month after a similar sectarian atrocity in the same city, underscored the inability of Pakistan's security forces to counter the threat from extremist groups as the country moves toward general elections expected to take place by mid-May.
Thompson also said he was concerned that officers could be outgunned during an armed terrorist attack, and the atrocity in Paris last November by marauding gunmen was a "game-changer" for counter-terrorism chiefs.
Dr. Steve Hewitt, a counter-terrorism expert at the University of Birmingham, provided a window into the effect the Paris atrocity has had on the security community.
