This is all getting horribly predictable. The West wages war and in doing so ostracises and radicalises a new generation of terrorists who bring the war back to their front doors with a vengeance.

Said Western state condemns the attacks as cowardly assaults on their freedom and way of life and vows to escalate the bombing and crack down on civil liberties at home, thus ensuring the cycle continues in perpetuity.

Other nations jump on the band wagon and use said atrocity to ratchet up the fear quotient in their own countries as a pretext for brutal repression and the further erosion of free speech and human rights in the name of national security.

Rightwingers seize the news agenda with their denunciations of barbaric Muslims, as if there were some form of hive mind in action and billions of people around the globe thought as one in their hatred of the West.

’Twas ever thus. The enemy may change but the response and rhetoric do not.

And of course as the true extent of the sickening massacre in Paris unfolded they took primacy over attacks mere days beforehand in non-western countries including Egypt, Lebanon and just yesterday Mali, not to mention the almost daily slaughter in Iraq and Syria.

But then they’re all savages over there and that’s just what they do, right?

These atrocities warrant no more than a few column inches or a soundbite on the news, and then usually only if there are any white westerners involved.

This is despite the glaring fact that most of the fighting and factionalisation in these regions can be directly traced back to colonialism, imperialism and Western intervention.

There was no Al-Qaida in Iraq until the 2003 invasion.

For all its faults Iraq was one of the only secular states in the Middle East. Now it is riven with sectarianism and extremism by Sunni and Shia alike.

Likewise Isis did not exist until the assaults on Libya and now Syria.

No one in their right mind would attempt to justify the barbaric slaughter that claimed over 120 lives on the streets of Paris in the space of just a few hours.

The murder of innocent civilians can never be justified under any circumstances.

But there is a massive double standard at work here.

Are the appalling deaths of innocents in Paris somehow worse than the deaths of tens of thousands of blameless people across the Middle East and Africa?

Does the fact that it is the state carrying out these killings make them justifiable, merely unfortunate collateral damage as the time-worn phrase would have it?

To both of these questions I would argue that the answer is an emphatic no.

By the same token, is it more cowardly to murder civilians with assault rifles and suicide vests than from a comfortable seat thousands of miles from the carnage operating an unmanned drone as if playing the latest playstation game?

Or by be-suited warriors in Westminster, Washington of elsewhere giving the go ahead for indiscriminate bombing raids and pontificating about the righteousness of their cause?

I think not.

Murder is murder.

There is no grey area or ambiguity here.

At the risk of sounding cynical and indifferent there is a simple correlation here: France does not send forces to Iraq, no attacks on French soil. Sarkozy gleefully cheerleads for the bombing of Libya and the policy is extended by Hollande…

So now we face the prospect of spiralling even further into a hell of our own making.

Greater oppression, greater suspicion, further attempts to justify the intensification of the abhorrently racist asylum and immigration systems in the majority of EU states. 

Closing the borders to the needy and starving, the further paramilitarisation of the police and the granting of even more invasive surveillance powers to the security forces.

It will not make a blind bit of difference in terms of preventing or deterring such horrendous atrocities, only a major shift in Western foreign policy can do that.

But then it is not really meant to. It is all a pretext for suppressing dissent and criminalising free thought.

While peoples of all nations stood in solidarity and sympathy with the people of Paris, their governments are using it as an opportunity to force through their own draconian agendas.

Now that is truly despicable.