I can’t really relate to anything thats going on with what’s called radical Islam. Any more than I  could relate to any other fundamental religious group. Its just so far  beyond my way of thinking about other human beings, that I simply can’t get a handle on it all. 

The key thing seems to to be that someone quite ordinary turns a corner and steps over a line. Someone likely to have easily exploitable human weakness that can be molded in to a suitable image and form to do the work of others whilst believing that its of their own free will.  

This article titled “Don’t blame the intelligence agencies for jihadism” was written by Matthew d’Ancona, for The Guardian on Sunday 1st March 2015 19.28 UTC

We have refined our collective critique of Big Brother with the precision of picky consumers rather than principled citizens. Most of the time we don’t want BB around and complain of his intrusions, real or imagined. But when things go wrong – when a young Londoner suddenly becomes a global figurehead of murderous Islamism, for instance – we resent the state even more. To put it plainly: the only thing we object to more strenuously than MI5 taking action is MI5 failing to do so.

This is the paradox that has been evident once again since the naming of “Jihadi John” as Mohammed Emwazi. It is a commonplace to argue that the intelligence agencies in the country are powerful (and power-hungry) to an extent that threatens the fibre of democratic society. Yet good old doublethink enables such a claim to coexist with the charge that the security service was somehow responsible for Emwazi’s actions by its sins of commission (trying to recruit him) and omission (letting him “slip the net” and flee to Syria).

Over the weekend politicians rushed towards the controversy, megaphones in hand. David Davis, a big beast whose talents would have been better deployed as part of the coalition, made the baffling claim in these pages that the spooks settle for a “disruption and management” strategy when they and their colleagues in the police and CPS should be pursuing and prosecuting Islamic extremists.

Would that such a simple choice were available. The problem facing any intelligence agency is precisely that the evidence required to mount a prosecution is so often lacking. It follows that a suite of counterterrorist powers must be made available to such agencies by parliament and, quite rightly, subjected to regular review and structures of accountability. But what powers, applied where, and with what degree of severity?

The coalition is at present split over the ban on extremist speakers at universities. Vince Cable, who is responsible for higher education, wants only explicit incitement to terrorism to be prohibited in the guidelines; Theresa May seeks a broader definition. Both cabinet ministers, please note, are potential leaders of their respective parties: with only 66 days to go before the general election, everything they say, or allow to be known, is entangled with these ambitions.

David Cameron’s government, of course, has already replaced Labour’s control orders with Tpims – terrorism prevention and investigation measures – which have proved to be only a couple of notches up from useless. To date, two militants have escaped this weak system and absconded to Somalia.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, was quite right to argue on The Andrew Marr Show that the power of relocation, which removed the terror suspect from his geographic network, should be restored. But what will parliament actually do when it considers the question, almost certainly after the election? And will there be a stable government to lead opinion at Westminster?

To delve into such questions, one must remember that politicians, like generals, are usually fighting the last war. In the long years of opposition, many Tories came to regard the counterterrorist measures proposed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as a subcategory of New Labour authoritarianism rather than a legitimate response to the post-9/11 threat. The Conservative party postured as “hard-nosed defenders of freedom”, which is up there with “predistribution” in the annals of political nonsense. For decades the Tories had been the party of security and law and order. Yet faced with Big Blair and Even Bigger Brown, many of them embraced a retro-libertarianism that owed more to Magna Carta than Shami Chakrabarti.

This surge of “Runnymede Conservatism” reached its apogee in Davis’s resignation as MP for Haltemprice and Howden in 2008, in protest at Brown’s plan to extend the limit for pre-charge detention of terror suspects to 42 days. This strand of contemporary Toryism also helped to cement the coalition. As the Cameron-Clegg programme for government put it: “The [coalition] believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties.”

The pieties of 2010 have been eroded by the experience of office. As home secretary, May has found herself thwarted by loopholes – notably when she sought to deport Abu Qatada – rather than reining in the supposedly tyrannous state created by New Labour. To understand the Conservative urge to renegotiate Britain’s position in Europe and the status of the European Convention on Human Rights look no further than ministers’ exasperation over the pursuit of terror suspects and the limitations imposed by Brussels and Strasbourg.

The intelligence agencies themselves are constrained by a legal web, and rightly so. No less inevitably, they have limited resources.

There is a weekly meeting at MI5 at which senior officers discuss which “persons of interest” are to be monitored intensively, round the clock. There are several thousand such people – Emwazi was one – but only a few can be subjected to round-the-clock surveillance. How could it be otherwise?

When we speak of suspects “slipping the net”, we imply counterterrorist agencies can intercept every such jihadi on his way to commit violence, every such plot to spill blood at home or abroad. Given the odds, it is frankly remarkable any are stopped at all.

It cannot be stated too often: contemporary jihadis are not like the IRA, or the UDA or Eta. They exploit what the greatest guide to the post-9/11 world, Philip Bobbitt, calls the “unique vulnerabilities of globalised, network market states” and a “connectivity that allows a cascading series of vulnerabilities to be exploited”.

Today’s Islamist militants do not operate within a cellular hierarchy, but more closely resemble local holders of a global franchise. They are self-starters, morphing capriciously from one role to another (the Madrid bombers were essentially book-keepers who became suddenly ambitious). Mohammad Sidique Khan, the presumed leader of the 7/7 plot, had indeed come to MI5’s attention a year earlier, in Operation Crevice. Yet, in 2004, he was still a relatively peripheral figure.

What made Emwazi become what he has become, able to do what he has done? What we call “radicalisation” – the walk from one side of the flaming bridge to the other – often occurs in a very short space of time, for reasons that resist pat psychological speculation: to know the reasons why would be to decode the secrets of the soul. Against such mysteries it is not the power of the state that is truly frightening, but its weakness.

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