One mistake and you're damned

Friday July 29, 2005
The Guardian

I touched on the touchy subject of terrorism and political correctness last week and the events of the past eight days have given me more cause for restless nights. Also the change in the weather has given me a dull headache and reduced my clothing to three things that I want to wear. All of them cover my recently acquired and much-vaunted tan.
Phone-ins and news programmes keep drip-feeding the public the comments that the policemen who shot the young Brazilian were trained by "the Israelis". The words "shoot to kill policy" and "Israelis", are never far apart. It's as though the force has been, in some way, directed by the Israelis to kill innocent people.

It's worth pointing out that the reason the Israelis were consulted by the Metropolitan police is because they have dealt with 160 suicide bombs as opposed to our four (or should that now be nine?). For decades their everyday lives have been as frightening as ours are now. Living under siege and under threat of losing your country breeds a certain mindset. Shooting to kill, tragic though it is, is the accepted way to halt the thinking process of someone bent on dying, before he takes a few hundred people with him.
It is so easy to knock the police for making one tragic mistake in a situation of terrible tension. The voices of anger are now out against the "Israeli-trained" police. Yet it may also be worth mentioning that an Israeli surgeon, here on holiday, spent three days digging out the dead after the blast on the Underground.

It's a progression of the anger that I mentioned last week. Not only is one not allowed to make a mistake or to fail just once, but all the good one may have previously done is written for ever out of history. This is true for politicians, actors, doctors, football managers and heads of industry. Anyone in fact, in the eye of the storm. We have no way of knowing just how many lives have been saved by the same police team who took, as it turned out, such a wrong decision on that fateful day.