I WAS in Westminster on Wednesday. As I stood waiting for the security guard at Portcullis House to finish the hand search of my trolley bag that had already been X-rayed, I couldn’t help noticing the threat level from terrorism on a digital wall screen read: “Severe”. In itself this was not particularly significant, given that it had registered the same level some months ago, when I was last in the Parliament building.

“Bit of nice light reading?” inquired the friendly security guard, noticing the book in my bag as he rummaged through my belongings. I told him that I was here to chair a conference on jihadist terrorism. The book on the Islamic State (IS) group, I explained, was authored by a friend and colleague, who would be speaking at the event, and I wanted him to sign it for me as a memento.

Just after three o’clock that same day, around the time my colleague was addressing the audience, we were suddenly interrupted and ushered out of the committee room adjacent to the Parliamentary chambers. At the intersection of every corridor, special armed response police, some masked, kitted out in Kevlar body armour and helmets and carrying automatic rifles, stood on alert.

Out into Speakers Courtyard we were led, along with MPs, cabinet ministers and a party of visiting schoolchildren. As we filed past the spot where the body of brave PC Keith Palmer lay, who just a short time before had been stabbed and killed at the Parliament gates, I realised once again how easy it is for terrorism to touch all our lives.

I say once again, because I’m no stranger to such things. The same, too, can be said of some of my conference colleagues who were with me at Westminster on Wednesday. Among then was an Arab journalist who once spent days sleeping in Afghanistan’s mountain caves in the company of al-Qaeda, meeting and interviewing Osama bin Laden. Two others included a Syrian peace activist, and a man who has spent a great part of his working life in the dangerous world of counter-terrorism.

For all four of us the terrible human cost that lay before us at Westminster was sadly all too familiar.

The bodies of the police constable and others who died on Westminster Bridge inevitably made me think of two weeks before, when I was in Iraq covering the battle for Mosul.

For most of the last three years in Iraq’s second city, the barbarism of IS has haunted the lives of more than one million Iraqis, just as it does countless other people in parts of neighbouring Syria.

The Westminster attack came almost a year to the day when 32 people were killed at Brussels Airport in Zaventem. It came one day, too, after the US and UK governments announced that for a number of Middle East-based airlines flying to America or Britain, passengers would no longer be allowed to bring larger electronic devices such as laptops and tablets into the cabin, but instead will have to put them in their checked luggage.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that a generation ago jihadist terrorism was not the fact of life that it is today.

Only recently in Europe did it become so, with the London and Madrid bombings, and then with the IS-inspired and controlled attacks in Paris and Brussels. Only even more recently has it graduated to the use of trucks and knives as weapons.

Our Westminster conference on jihadist terrorism on Wednesday was the subject of Chatham House rules, so I’m in no position to detail who precisely said what.

But time and again, even before real-time Islamist inspired terror came to within yards of the event, there were recurring motifs and themes among what my colleagues were saying about the way we tackle this scourge.

Whether home or abroad this is not a something that can simply be left to politicians and bureaucrats, almost all opined.

I listened as each of them repeatedly called for a reassessment of just exactly what the term “them and us” means, which so often occupies discussions on radicalisation and terrorism. I listened too as the case was made for greater interaction with a Muslim youth that in many instances feel increasingly alienated.

Over and again the words marginalisation, humiliation and military intervention all lent weight to the arguments that were made as to what provides the germ of the Islamist terrorism that has come to inhabit our modern-day lives.

How many more times do we have to listen to the bankrupt proposition that the way to fight terrorism is to declare war on terrorism? To gallop into yet more overseas military adventures only succeeds in inciting more terror.

We cannot bomb ourselves free of jihadist terrorism; that is no more likely than the belief of those same jihadists that such violence can bring about their caliphate.

Do those who are taking the fight to IS in Mosul really believe that once the city is liberated the jihadists will not metamorphose into another form or simply export their violence somewhere else like Yemen or Libya?

In tacking such terrorism we must first understand it at the human level if we are to persuade terrorists of an alternative direction. When I say this I’m not talking about appeasement here, but empathy.

Good human intelligence and data about terrorist organisations’ structures remain vital if we are to stop attacks like that at Westminster. But equally important is the need to get beneath the skin of jihadist terrorist motivation in other ways.

Reluctant as many are to admit it, the time has come to recognise that this is also about the relationship between individuals and the societies in which they find themselves. It’s about how much those individuals feel they have a level of emotional and intellectual engagement with the societies in which they live or the lack of it.

As long as people continue to be exposed or subjected to repression and injustice, terrorism in many forms will flourish. It will continue to impact on all our lives as it did on those innocents in Westminster on Wednesday and in Mosul for the past two and a half years.

Despite the tragic events in London the other day my colleague signed my copy of his book for me. Unfortunately however, the date of his inscription will now linger as y et another infamous day among many when jihadist terrorism left its scar.