More later but....

Generally i prefer to have a good read of the paper and then post my thoughts on the stories of the day. I'll do that on the way to and from playing football tonight and will therefore post more later. I have been skimming through my paper though and i chose to read a column by a guy called Bruce Anderson. He clearly a bright chap, and he makes a good case for why the police were right to shoot the innocent Brazilai Jean Charles de Meneze despite hindsight showing him to be innocent. There is a degree of giving the police the benefit of the doubt, in particular the police most directly involved as they were probably relying on the intelligence provided by others. They it appears with no little bravery chased down someone they believed was a suicide bomber and dealt with them.

Tragicaly the dead man turned out to be completely innocent of what he was suspected of, though he may have been working illegaly here providing a possible reason why he ran when challenged by the police, there are still to many unknowns to make definative judgements just yet.

He goes onto defend MI5 and state his believe that we need to remove the Human Rights Act to improve security, he may be right on the former but i'm less sure on the latter. It's the last point he makes where i just thought to myself, "that is bollox."

"But as soon as science stops one up one rat hole, the fanatics will find another. To defeat them, we will have to summon up our stoicism, and hope for good luck."

If we want to stop terrorism we need to do a lot more than summon up stoicism and hope for the best. I maintain that people do not become suicide bombers without reason. No matter how horrific the results of their actions are and how hard it is to empthaisize with people that are willing to take innocent lifes we have the capability to get to the cause of this problem.

To address the given reasons behind the suicide bombings is not giving in to terrorism, it is to take a long hard look at policies which were clearly wrong before 7/7, before 9/11 and beyond to i'm not quite sure how far back.

To shamelessly steal some examples from someone elses blog, Native American's committed terrorist acts, black slaves committed terrorist acts, black South Africans committed terrorist acts. While their actions caused the deaths of innocents and were just as horrific as the recent spate of suicide and attempted suicide bombings it no more made the genocide of Native Americans right, nor did it make slavery any less wrong, nor were the Apartheid policies of the white South African government justified.

So as i feel i'm rather clumsily putting this, stop with the tough rhetoric, look at the real problem and then we can all live in a better world.