Cricket is a soft target for terrorists

Cricket makes for a gruesomely eye-catching target for terrorists because it is high profile and, in their eyes, dangerously decadent, writes Ed Smith in the Times.

In the terrorist mindset, the effete and Western activity of cricket distracts good Muslims from what they should be doing: praying and executing jihad. In the terrorist imagination, cricket, loved by millions of ordinary Pakistanis, is an emblem of evil Western modernity. An innocent pastime becomes a symbol of hatred.

In the same paper, Simon Barnes finds it hard to work out how sport, which is an ideal target for terrorists, has managed to live a mostly charmed life until now.

Sport is already a stage and the world is watching. All a terrorist has to do is alter the script and all the publicity in the world is his to command. I have been through a million metal detectors; my laptop has been X-rayed so often that it glows; my bag has been fumbled with and my crotch groped repeatedly by the uniformed and the charmless; and I know that all this performance is just for the look of the thing and that a professional could get through with anything he liked.

In the Guardian, Dileep Premachandran writes that after the events in Lahore, the old cliche about cricket being the subcontinent's religion can be buried forever.

If the ICC is to prove itself fit to govern international cricket, it must now accept the inevitable consequences of the terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore and announce categorically that all international cricket in Pakistan is suspended until further notice, writes David Hopps in the same paper.

Tunku Vardarajan believes the attacks on the Sri Lankan sportsmen have shown that these terrorist groups have no love for the idea of Pakistan as a Muslim democracy capable of cohabiting with a wider world. He writes on forbes.com.