According to Phillip Hammond, anyone who seeks to explain or contextualise the acts of terrorists bears responsibility for their acts. He says, in effect, that those who seek to blame the security services for driving people into radicalism are just as responsible for atrocities as those who plant the bombs. I’m sorry, but this is just plain stupid – what is a person who sees things so simply doing in power?! There are always motives behind acts of violence, and one of them will be our own actions; the only way we can possibly counter terrorism is to think in such terms. But instead, Hammond says it’s wrong to do so, and that it is apologetic to try to blame the security services for the genesis of people like ‘Jihadi John’. Under that logic, such people just came from nothing, or are simply evil; and to try to say otherwise makes one as culpable as they are. Such reasoning is just plain wrong, over-simplistic, and it scares me that we have someone who thinks in such narrow terms governing over us.