Truth and the terrorist trap

From the Financial Times:

On Sunday, ministers and senior police officers defended a policy of shooting dead individuals suspected of being suicide bombers, in spite of calls from British Muslim groups, human rights bodies and politicians for a public inquiry.

Since the shooting, police have confirmed that two years ago they secretly changed operational guidelines allowing officers chasing suspect suicide bombers to shoot them in the head.

In other words, the Brazilian that some have called an idiot for failing to realize that he’d be shot in the head for the dual crimes of wearing inappropriate clothing and turnstile jumping not only had no way of knowing that London police officers considered him to be a suspect suicide bomber, but could not possibly have known about the secret policy with regards to the recommended guidelines for dealing with them.

Police heads should be rolling over this decision to enact lethal force in public without bothering to warn the citizenry of the potential consequences of their actions.

I am not, as some might claim, soft on Islamic terrorists or the sea of moderate Muslims in which they swim. The problem is that shooting innocent Brazilians in the head is not going to stop, or even slow, the spread of Islamic terror.

There are two primary goals of terrorism. One is to achieve a specific end, usually a withdrawal from occupied territory. The second, usually on the part of domestic terrorists, is to provoke a self-defeating response from the target that will swell the pool of terrorist sympathizers. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have foolishly fallen into the latter trap by appearing weak and indecisive, more prone to sacrifice the civil liberties of their own citizens and traditions of their own culture than to reduce the danger posed by the alien invaders.