It’s usual to hear terrorists and their attacks being characterized as cowardly. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn’t.

I find it hard to consider those members of Hamas that launch missiles at Israeli civilians from Gaza to be cowards. They operate under the gaze of Israeli UAVs and know neither the day nor the hour they are going to be dispatched from this world by a missile fired from one. Voluntarily exposing oneself to a very high degree of danger over a considerable period of time seems to me to be an entirely different matter from strapping on an explosive belt and choosing the moment of one’s death when one has worked oneself into an appropriate frenzy of religious delusion.

Take a look at this CCTV recording from the  Mumbai railway station. The two terrorists, armed with automatic rifles, are confronted with two cops who have a single museum piece of a bolt action rifle between them. Do the terrorists take the opportunity to close with and kill two members of the security forces of the hated Indian state? No they don’t, they scurry about, they take cover and they let off un-aimed bursts of fire. Someone shooting back, even with a weapon dating back to 19^th century, was not something that was supposed to happen this early in the attack. They may have been willing to accept that they were unlikely to survive the attack as a whole but when presented with an excellent opportunity to kill two policemen at a relatively low - but not zero - risk to themselves, they bottled out of it.

Contrast their behavior with that of the police. They know that they are at a huge disadvantage, they know that they are risking their lives, they are not emboldened by fanatical religious belief, they know that nobody could really blame if they fled and yet they stand their ground and do their duty as best they can, with the one, pathetically inadequate, weapon they have at their disposal.

Fanatics intent on dying for their cause are only human. They can react with uncertainty in the face of unexpected circumstances and you don’t need to breed fanatics to fight them, you just need ordinary men and women who are willing to do their duty.