If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would do the same to all the other houses in the area thought to have been the temporary or permanent addresses of the suicide bombers and their families.
After decades of deranged attacks the Israelis have come to the conclusion that this is the best way to deter Palestinian families from nurturing these vipers in their bosoms, and also the best way of explaining to the death-hungry narcissists that they may get the 72 black-eyed virgins of scripture, but their family gets the bulldozer.
No doubt there are some people in Britain — I can think of at least one Daily Mail columnist — who would approve of such tactics; but we are not Israelis, and we are novices not just at dealing with suicide bombers, but with suicide bombers as British as the fish-and-chip shops in which they grew up. They were born in our NHS, these killers. They were coddled by our welfare state, they were fed on our butties and our Spangles, they played cricket on our glum and bemerded streets. They were washed by the rains and blessed by the suns of home. They have in their houses (or, perhaps, scattered in fragments at four London Transport crime scenes) documents in which Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs requests and requires that the bearer be given all the deference and precedence that is the due of a British national.
They were not metics, or the second-class citizens of the Occupied Territories.
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