Terror attacks show why all Scottish police officers must be trained to use guns |
Todays world demands that every police officer in Scotland should be trained in firearms and have access to them in their patrol vehicles, argues columnist Calum Steele
Such is the nature of the modern world that the recriminations of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack were in full swing almost immediately. They began before the bodies of those killed and injured had even been recovered from where they had fallen.
Friends and families whose lives had been turned upside down in a heartbeat were reduced to mere soundbites. Thoughts and prayers were deployed to mask an ugly urgency to apportion blame, with correlation and causation treated as if interchangeable – in a way that seems only ever permissible when the subject is anti-Semitism.
The brutal murder of (at the time of writing) 15 innocents, including a 10-year-old girl, is almost too horrific to imagine. An attack which simultaneously cared not who its victims were but was unquestionably designed to target Jews, shocked the world, as modern technology meant the savagery of the attackers – and the bravery of those who intervened – was captured for eternity on hundreds of mobile phones.
The normalisation of anti-Semitism, the expansion of hate protests, and the condemnation of those who didn’t condemn – or didn’t condemn correctly – were all vociferously expressed. But the one thing that isn’t tolerated is nuance – for that might actually help understand the whats and whys, and that just isn’t allowed.
It is an unavoidable reality that the surge in anti-Semitism has coincided with the war in (or on, depending on your point of view) Gaza. Pretending otherwise is as utterly disingenuous as........