Islamic State appeal really isn’t radical at all

The latest approach will stress the need for “social cohesion”. Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs Concetta Fierravanti-Wellshoped to engage “the views of the Muslim community” and address “gaps” in the program of counter-radicalisation.

Last week, the Victorian and NSW governments announced funding amounting to $72m to address radicalisation. Explaining the Victorian programs, terror expert Greg Barton observed that they “aimed at ensuring young people … do not fall under the spell of those that would seek to radicalise them and damage their lives incredibly badly”.

The new push reflects the fact, despite more than a decade of funding for deradicalisation ­programs, they have, as one government spokesperson acknowledged, “failed to hit the mark”.

Yet in the same week that state and federal government announced the new initiatives, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the transnational Islamist party headquartered in London and that established a presence in Australia after 2001, denounced the Australian oath of allegiance and the “forced assimilation” implied in singing the national anthem. Evidently, deradicalisation so far has not even got near the mark.

In other words, while Islamic State offers jihadi cool messaging, the government responds with ­insipid pieties about cohesion achieved through culturally sensitive deradicalisation programs that in Europe and Australia have proved expensive and ineffective.

In this context, it may be worth asking, before engaging more academics and bureaucratic agencies in taxpayer-funded ­programs, what precisely does the counter-terror community ­understand by radicalism and radicalisation?

A cursory survey reveals that no government agency or counter-terror expert has paused to consider whether the term, in fact, captures the process that converts a young Western Muslim to the ­Salafist cause.

Yet political terminology matters. An adequate response needs an accurate diagnosis. George Orwell observed in 1948 that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts”.

“Political chaos”, he argued, “is connected with the decay of language” or, more precisely, with prevailing ­orthodoxies that “conceal and ­prevent thought”.

This is precisely what has happened with the misuse of the term radicalisation. Radicalism, in fact, has a precise etymology. It entered modern usage in the 19th century in the context of political and economic reform and social pro­gress. It was the 19th-century secular, liberal, utilitarian reformers associated with Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (John Stuart Mill’s ­father) who devised the modern understanding of radicalism. It stood for a program of rational, constitutional, social and economic reform.

Radicalism as an ideology dismissed religion as irrational superstition and sought political reform along secular, capitalist and progressive democratic lines.

The one thing we know about Islamic State and its message is that it is does not do democracy or secular modernity. Thus it is not radical nor does it engage in ­radicalisation.