[DanaC]

I went to work today and a lass from my team was desperately trying to get word of her friend who took his kid sister to the concert. He wasn't answering his phone, he wasn't responding to texts.
She eventually heard from him about 2pm - his phone had powered down. He and his sister had stayed in Manchester overnight as they couldn't get a train back to Yorkshire.


Something I find very, very sad in all this, is that the bomber was only 22. He was barely a grown up himself. I'm sure he felt very grown up. A year younger than my eldest niece.

He took a couple of steps from the nest and ...

Angry and violent young men (mainly) who for whatever reason feel the world is against them, or that their parents don't understand them, or that life needs some greater meaning than it has, have always been vulnerable to extremist recruitment and/or influence. They're also vulnerable to a bunch of other stuff, like depression and suicide.

IS and their ilk are insidious. The mechanisms they employ in recruitment, whether to formal engagement or informal association, are highly sophisticated and very effectively calibrated for their target groups.

They only need to reach a handful of kids to cause unbelievable harm - both in terms of casualties and in terms of social cohesion.

And we play their game - every time we tweet or post a facebook comment that points the finger at muslims in general, we read the script they penned for us. We feed straight back into that recruitment machine.

In case you hadn't guessed from the above: I made the mistake of reading some youtube comments underneath a clip of James Corden's piece about the bombing. Just made me feel even angrier. Do they think they have more right to their outrage than Mancunian muslims? Are they more personally affected by this horror than the mostly muslim taxi drivers who ferried people about Manchester all night, for free, getting kids back to worried parents? How about the muslim concert goers?

Fucking hell, man. What a mess. 22 dead, 59 injured, and how many traumatised for life? How do you explain something like this to those kids?