When you look and listen to the journalists on the more moderate television news organisations, the one thing that stands out is how they are struggling to comprehend the events in Paris on Friday evening.

Personally, I keep trying to look deeper in to it all rather than getting embroiled in emotional knee-jerk responses, because the easy thing to do is demand retaliation and start quoting 20th-century politicians with a lust for tyrannical ambition without tolerance…Enoch Powell and Oswald Moseley spring to mind.

To add to the complexity of it all, the region where ISIS are operating is a melting pot of Western enemies and it is incredibly difficult to understand which regime is worse than another. There are, including splinter groups, up to one thousand tribes in the region, and if ISIS is defeated, another group replaces them.

President Assad is a baddie, but ISIS are even more baddie than him, or even Al Qaeda.

As I write, France are launching a revenge attack in Syria but sadly, it looks futile, as any success they may claim, carries the potential to make the situation worse. It is like removing a trout from a chalk stream; once a is trout is caught another fills the void.

I am not qualified to know what the answers are when the enemy is less a country, more a nomadic extremist ideology, but incessant western bombing in retaliation will always run a high risk of fuelling the flames of hatred even further. Do we want to live in a world where getting blown up is just part of life?

The popular consensus is to assume that these groups hate us because they simply don’t like our democratic ideology; however, if anyone has the time or inclination to look deeper into where we are now at with the ‘War on Terror’, it is more than apparent that Western foreign policy in the Middle East, however well intentioned, has been disaster after disaster.

We have supported and armed certain Middle East nations with a hideous record of human rights (Saudi Arabia is a good example) whilst deploring the actions of others and showing scant remorse for civilian casualties when a bombing raid goes awry, wiping out a school or a truck of refugees.

Everywhere that has been bombed during the ‘War on Terror’ has been left in chaos with civilian casualties all over the place and if you look at the nations we support and then those who we attack, there are contradictions all over the place…it is, to be frank, a total omni-shambles.

If you think I am off the mark and behaving like some sort of ‘Loony Lefty’ take a look on Google at the dramatic increase in terrorism since the ‘War on Terror’ and tell me it has been a viable policy. It is like being 10-0 down in a football match and commencing your half-time team talk by saying, “same formation lads, we’re still in this.”

As I see it, the first positive steps to stop this chaos would include rethinking foreign policy and learning that a dead person is a dead person and just because we are European or American our mourning doesn’t hurt more than someone else’s.

We also need to be big enough to accept that attachment to religion plays a huge part in this mess, whether it is the West (particularly America) using God’s will as an excuse for bombing campaigns or Jihadi’s using Allah to brainwash young men into undertaking mass slaughter.

If someone can prove to me that these great men in the sky exist, and are not just objects of fantasy, I will happily change tact, but all I have seen with religion is people using the powerful tool of damnation to satisfy craving of sordid sex or barbaric wars…America always pray when they bomb other countries…“God Bless America” they say.

Its crazy that a belief in something that (unless the enlightenment fooled us) doesn’t exist, causes such wholesale slaughter? You might as well napalm Baghdad and say, “It’s okay everyone, Mickey Mouse told me to do it.” 

The events in Paris and elsewhere during the ‘War on Terror’ have shocked every decent human I know; it was a barbaric massacre of defenceless people whose only crime was to enjoy city life. However, when I saw the obligatory piece of card on a monument saying “WHY?” I had a list so long I didn’t know where to start.

Why do we keeping using a Middle Eastern strategy that constantly fails?

Why do we assume others desire our dubious version of democracy?

Why do we deny religion is an integral part of terrorism?

I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but sometimes it really does feel like Western governments would like to keep us in a permanent state of fear so they can impose more power over us by creating more state surveillance and eradicate freedom of speech and civil rights.

I find it discomforting seeing world leaders almost revelling in the “Nous Sommes Paris” rhetoric whilst allowing media groups to push ahead and accuse those with an alternate view to bombing and destruction of being complicit with terrorists; the Jihadi Jez title given to Jeremy Corbyn by the Murdoch empire is a disgrace to independent journalism.

During desperate times like these, alternate ideologies should be heard by those who want peace, not ridiculed, because, even if these ideologies are not entirely practicable or indeed realistic, there may well be segments of them that assist us in getting off the river of blood we are riding.

Let’s be honest, they can’t be any more useless than the ‘War on Terror’ which carries about as much chance of success as a one-legged man hoping to reach the latter stages of an arse kicking contest . Yet the media treat pacifists as if they were child killers.

Meanwhile President Hollande has, with blind optimism, promised to destroy ISIS, which is about as likely as finding a second hand book sale without an Andy McNab novel.

In other words, don’t bank on it.