Tom Gross in the Jerusalem Post makes a strong if bitter point:

‘Had Israeli police shot dead an innocent foreigner on one of its buses or trains, confirming the kill with a barrage of bullets at close range in a mistaken effort to thwart a bombing, the UN would probably have been sitting in emergency session by late afternoon to unanimously denounce the Jewish state. By evening, 12 hours had passed since the shooting, but the BBC still hadn't interviewed a grieving family, no one had called for British universities to be boycotted, Chelsea and Arsenal soccer clubs hadn't been ordered to play their matches in Cyprus, and The Guardian hadn't yet called British policy against its Pakistani population "genocide."

‘As for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who is in overall control of transport in the city, including the train where the man was shot, and who strongly defended the shoot-to-kill policy as a legitimate way to prevent suicide bombings, he was not yet facing war crimes charges – as Livingstone himself has demanded Israeli political leaders should be. Instead on Friday, Polly Toynbee, leading commentator for The Guardian, wrote that the terrorists were "deranged," "savage" and "demented" "killers" who "murder in the name of God." This is a far cry from the habitual manner in which The Guardian and others describe the suicide killers of Israelis as "fighters" and "activists."'

Gross also makes the striking point that the Israelis do not shoot their suicide bombers – they disarm them, as happened in fact last Friday when, at the very time British police were committing their fatal error at Stockwell station, the IDF caught and disarmed a terrorist from Fatah already inside Israel en route to carrying out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Gross is right to say that the Israelis receive no credit for this. But I doubt whether he is right to say that the reports in the British press that the Israelis had advised the British police to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the brain were a lie. It all depends on where the suspected bomber is at the time. As an article in the New York Times reports, the crucial point is that the Israelis are able to disarm their human bombs because they have prior intelligence:

‘Among the differences in the situations faced by the two countries, perhaps the most significant is intelligence. Israel occupies the West Bank and its army and officials of the Shin Bet counterterrorism agency patrol it constantly. They have mapped every building and built a network of informants and collaborators. Many Israeli officers speak Arabic, and they often receive a warning before a bomber tries to attack.

‘Boaz Ganor, a counterterrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, an Israeli policy research center, said, "The key is intelligence, to know when they're coming." The last option is offense, he said, because when confronted with a suicide bomber in a crowded area, "you have to act" before the bomber can detonate the explosive. The risk of "false positives," however, is enormous, he said, as in the British case.’

They key to the debacle at Stockwell, as I said in my Daily Mail article today, is the catastrophic dearth of British intelligence on the British Islamic terror networks. Once a suspected human bomb gets into a crowded area of likely targets, there is no option but to kill him. But the aim should be to intercept him before he ever gets to that position. That can only be done by extensive and accurate intelligence – the one thing Israel has and Britain, as we are now painfully being made all too aware, does not.