The formula and factors behind why someone might be compelled to partake in terrorism is varied and complex, whether it is a soldier led to believe that a foreign government’s overthrow will bring stability or a schoolkid led to despair by oppressive state policing.

When I was in southern Pakistan last year, I spoke with poor youths who are continually approached by freedom fighters, viewed as terrorists in the government’s eyes. The youths told me that constant police pressure – harassing them under the pretense that by appearance and surname they are terrorists – combined with unrelenting unemployment made joining the militias the only viable means of survival.

A Syrian soldier I spoke to in northern Iraq told me the very same thing that Syrian activists in eastern Turkey had said: Many of those who join ISIS are young Sunni Muslims who were suffering under Islamophobia in Syria and a xenophobic government in Iraq, and that their religious practice was constantly being undermined.

There is a difference between understanding and justifying – and unless we try to understand why Jihadi Johns manifest, we do little to avert these disaster cases.

Lyricist Jinn, a U.K. rapper vilified by mainstream media in the U.K. and U.S. after MI5 said he was one of three people who may be "Jihadi John," was an acquaintance of mine. The last time I saw him I remember his music career enjoying increasing success. However, I also remember his numerous accounts of being monitored by intelligence agencies.

Jinn's father, Adel Abdel Bari, faced numerous attempts at character assassination by politicians and mainstream media; he was one of many clerics facing deportation under U.K. anti-terrorist measures. There's no doubt that these pressures, both on himself and his father, contributed to Jinn leaving for Syria.

Since the identity of Jihadi John was revealed last week as Mohammed Emwazi, CAGE, a charity that campaigns for people detained often unjustifiably under terrorism charges, has come out with media statement making an unequivocal case that harassment by counter-terrorism law is seeding a new generation of extremists.

As someone who has been stopped by police twice under Section 47a of the Terrorist Act, I can speak to the frustration and oppression such measures place on an individual. It is oppressive to freeze somebody’s human rights under pretexts that suggest s/he is a terrorist or has the intention of committing terrorism. It is frustrating because it's clear this accusation is often racially motivated – and that the rhetoric of danger is a manufactured hysteria.

The shooters behind the Charlie Hebdo attack were people forced to exist in the cracks of the state, relegated to suffering in silence under its structural violence and infrastructural racism. As the anti-immigration rhetoric spirals out of control in Europe, the white majority often doubles up the pressure on minority groups. Just the other day I was randomly confronted by a white man on the street who shouted me down as a "head-chopping Muslim bastard."

The numbers of how many Britons are flying out to join ISIS are underestimated. Assisting refugee groups in the Middle East, I had an opportunity to speak to Kurdish freedom fighters from Kobane, the only people who are seriously combating ISIS. Those fighters told me an extremely large contingent of ISIS fighters are foreign; the group, they said, is comprised of "nearly 70 nationalities."

These Britons, fleeing and returning to the Middle East, are the result of a nation wrestling with both a despicable foreign policy and a hyper-oppressive domestic policy. They are people pushed to the brink by prejudiced newspaper headlines and racist attitudes. A recent British Social Attitudes survey showed how one in three Britons now self-identify as racially prejudiced.

Jihadi Johns – young boys who would have opened the door for you, young boys who queued for the newest PlayStation game, young boys who loved ideas of freedom and justice – are being walked into the arms of radical clerics by our lazy and apathetic approach to deep-seated conflicts in our country. Unless the bigoted attitudes of our leaders and their corporate chums are challenged, ordinary people will inevitably pay the price and this cycle of hatred will continue to spiral out of control.

Joshua Virasami is a musician, writer and activist. Follow him @joshuavirasami.

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