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If you're expecting me to make light somehow of the activities of the past week, forget it. I believe that you can find humour in almost everything. In most cases, even black humour is a mechanism to deal with grief and pain. But I can't find a single shred of humour in the wholesale slaughter of innocents. I don't find humour in the Holocaust, in Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine, the Vietnam war, the massacres …

…of justice. Why? Because we are better than savages, and due process is a central tenet of our deeply-held series of shared beliefs. So let's back-off on the cowboy rhetoric and remember that Tuesday's victims died in an attack not on property, but on those values we hold dear. If we abandon our ethics for a quick-fix response in white-hot anger, then the terrorists will have done more damage than they ever hoped to achieve.