Junk the jihad, it's jargon we need

Don't you just love it when things are "rolled out"? Supermarket unit pricing is rolled out; new radar system for the boys in Afghanistan is rolled out; Nokia rolls out an Apple apps store.

The latest rollout was announced this week by the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland. It's a "national roll-out of a project to promote the consistent use of language in engaging with communities on national security issues". It's branded as the "Lexicon on Terrorism".

It's not quite roll out the barrel, but it's still going to be a lot of fun. The first thing the project should examine is the use of the words "roll-out" and while they're at it "going forward" also needs some attention.

Mr McClelland's announcement was necessarily fuzzy. "We need to use language that does not inadvertently glorify terrorism but rather describes it in terms of base criminal behaviour of the most reprehensible kind." Inappropriate use of language in a terrorism context can lead to "misunderstanding".

Fortunately, work on the project is being led by one of the most culturally sensitive organisations in the country, the Victoria Police, in partnership with the Victorian Premier's Department, the Australian Multicultural Foundation and the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department.

Attorney-General McClelland is confident that if we get the lingo right "community harmony" will be strengthened and extremists "disempowered".

The United States, the European Union and Britain have all done lexicon of terrorism projects and produced guidebooks for official use.

For instance, in the US the Extremist Messaging Branch of the National Counter Terrorism Centre issued a memo in March 2008 which the State Department approved for use by US diplomats. "It's not what you say but what they hear," it declared, which basically boils down to not using in conversations words such as "jihadist" or "mujahideen". Presumably, "Islamo-fascist" is also out.

According to Associated Press, which reported these developments last year, it now appears that these terms could actually encourage support for extremists "by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offence to moderates".

It might have saved a lot of lives and misadventure if only we'd known earlier that jihad doesn't just mean "holy war", but can also mean "struggle for good". The Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Centre in a report on the lexicon added that even if "jihad" is used accurately and in context it still may not be "strategic" to use it.

And whatever you do, don't call al-Qaida "a movement".

According to the Americans, the appropriate terms to use to "define our enemies" are "violent extremist" or "terrorist". It would not surprise if the Victoria Police, the Multicultural Foundation et al came up with a similar set of language guidelines to help strengthen our "community harmony" and "disempower" the bomb throwers.

A year before the US report, the European Community and the British were on to the same idea.

The EU's guidelines were designed to separate terrorism from Islam. Certainly a heroic mission.

Even more conscious of sensitivities than the Americans, the EU has banned not only "jihad" but "Islamic" and "fundamentalist". It was also suggested that "Islamic terrorism" be replaced with the phrase "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam". Many agreed that made them feel a lot better.

Meanwhile, we wonder the effect on terrorism and extremism of presidential words such as "evil-doers" and "worst of the worst" to describe the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or the behaviour of the US military guards at Abu Ghraib, or the invasion of Iraq based on false intelligence, or the regime of "harsh interrogation techniques" i.e. torture, or stitching up Dr Mohamed Haneef on the strength of a whole pile of politically doctored "facts". Probably no effect whatsoever compared with getting jihad or mujihideen mixed up.

The problem that 75 per cent of the detainees the US held at Guantanamo turned out not to be terrorists does have the potential to create "misunderstandings", but with any luck the Taliban won't be too picky about it.

What is now interesting is that the really serious "evil-doers" will have to be detained indefinitely because they can never be tried as the evidence against them has been tainted by torture. The new gloss for indefinite detention without charge or trial is "terrorist incapacitation".

It is interesting that McClelland pointed to the need to recalibrate our language so that terrorism is expressed in terms of "base criminal behaviour".

This is indeed what many lawyers in the US have urged for some time. That "terrorists" be tried in the criminal courts for what essentially is criminal conduct that had nothing to do with the law of war.

Instead, an entire edifice of black hole incarceration, bogus military commissions and charges unknown to the law of war were invented to deal with an endless, bottomless "war on terror".

This particular "law of war" meant rounding up anyone, even before there was a war and even if they were outside a theatre of war, and creating the nomenclature "enemy combatant" to try to remove them from the habeas process or the Geneva Conventions.

The idea of "war" became confabulated with any political notion that needed to be foisted on to a readily fearful and gullible electorate.

The British Terrorism Act of 2000 actually defines terrorism in terms of conduct that could be applied to any war or conflict. Someone, somewhere raised the question, was Churchill a terrorist when he ordered the bombardment of German cities in breach of the second protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which was designed to prevent nations from conducting warfare on civilian populations? In terms of the current British legislation he would be.

When strategies turn to custard the thing to do is redefine the message. George Orwell, where are you?