I am not the Robot Tourist

I listened with interest to Radio 4's PM on Thursday evening when it was explained that the unfortunate Jean Charles di Menezes was acting suspiciously because his normal tube station was closed and hence he had to go by a route with which he was not familiar. Just let that statement sink in. In the midst of a highly stressful day for the Metropolitan Police (and all of London) a man was shot basically because he looked anxious because he had to go to work by a way he didn't know. Let it be known that I definitely do want suicide bombers caught just before the act to be shot (although getting them alive is good too, means they can't be 'martyrs' or shahada). However, when the surveillance team that spotted Jean-Charles didn't get one vital piece of information and then the armed officers in pursuit of him could not contact HQ when underground, everything fell apart because the Kratos plan did not include one vital component: visual identification of the bomb itself. Those supposedly trigger-happy Israelis who supposedly shoot Palestinians for fun will not shoot a suspected suicide bomber unless they can visually identify the explosive device. Even then they may try to disarm the suicide bomber. It's not a matter of bravery either, because it takes real bravery to pull a trigger, bravery that I probably don't have, but it is a matter of learning best practice.

My second point for this post is that using the Health and Safety legislation to pursue a prosecution was utterly wrong. The perception of health and safety legislation being a legalistic minefield for anyone involved in anything risky may not be correct, but that is the perception in our culture and it is deeply ingrained in the minds of all in the UK whether they realise it or not. I can accept that the Crown Prosecution Service did not want to prosecute individual officers and that I may never know what internal disciplinary proceedings, if any, were applied in this case. I don't even want to know the details of how the Met will deal with suicide bombers in the future as long as I get one thing: that any officer will attempt to visually identify the explosive device before shooting. Now of course, I accept there may be rare cases where such visual identification by the marksman himself will not be possible, but in that case there needs to be someone willing to take the personal responsibility of giving the order to shoot and preferably they will have seen the device or have excellent intelligence. Terrorists must not think they will be able to self-detonate because an officer will have to do a risk assessment on where any ricochets might go. But neither do I want to be shot if I'm in London (or anywhere else) just because I have a backpack that I am guarding (maybe it has my MacBook inside) or because I am looking anxious because I am late for an appointment (and Jean Charles didn't even have a backpack on).

I heard a little bit of Jenny Murray's 'Don't get me started' slot on Channel 5 and was rather non-plussed. Don't get me started on euthenasia.

David Aaronovitch, however, has used his slot on 'Don't get me started' to give an airing to the saner side of the British left, i.e. those who do not see it as justifiable to support Hizb-allah, Hamas or the Iraqi 'resistance'. In his documentary he may not have interviewed anyone who disagrees with him, but that is part of his point: i) given the evidence, anyone on the left who supports Hizb-allah is deranged and shouldn't be heard; ii) leftists who support Hizb-allah already get so much press and make so many protests, now this is his turn. You can watch it via YouTube with the following links (thanks to harrysplacevids for recording and uploading it):

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Weirdly enough my main moment of enlightenment regarding the middle east was a couple of years back when I was looking through some of the user pages of www.perlmonks.org and came across a picture of some boys in the balcony of an appartment block (of the type you see in most British cities) about to throw or drop concrete blocks and it was captioned something like: Naughty Palestinian boys throwing stones again. Since then I've read lots of Mark Steyn and looked up littlegreenfootballs.com and read things like http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mftoc.html. I can't excuse everything Israel has ever done, but the Israelis are clearly not as evil as they are often made out to be by their enemies.

And before you even think it, I know David Aaronovitch is a very Russian-Jewish name, so of course he _would_ support Israel, but he is not necessarily supporting Israel, he is showing up Israel's enemies for what they are really, and the moral bankruptcy of those, especially on the left, who support Hizb-allah.

I do not advocate unthinking solidarity with Israel, but all those who support the intifada, Hamas, Fatah, Hizb-allah, etc., should remember that as Mark Steyn often says, the Jews are the canary in the mineshaft of history. If a group starts advocating the killing of Jews (or Zionists), watch out, they'll be after you next.