From Crikey’s Bernard Keane today (who does politics so much better than economics):
“The best defence against radicalisation is through well-informed and well-equipped families, communities and institutions,” the Prime Minister claimed this morning, announcing a package of over $60 million in measures targeting “young Australians being radicalised”.
Wrong, PM. The best defence against radicalisation is to avoid gratuitous military attacks on Muslim countries. Who says? Baroness Manningham-Buller:
“By 2003/2004 we were receiving an increasing number of leads to terrorist activity from within the UK and the — our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people, some British citizens — not a whole generation, a few among a generation — who were — saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam… Of course, also we were dealing at that time with a number of young British citizens who went to Iraq to fight not with Her Majesty’s forces but against them …”
Manningham-Buller is better known as the former head of MI5, and that was her evidence to the Chilcott inquiry in 2010, in which she explained at length how the UK’s participation in the attack on Iraq substantially increased the threat of terrorism to Britons.
This “young jihadis” line from the government, in co-operation with News Corp tabloids, is another stage in its hyping of the terrorist threat of the Islamic State, which has proved a useful distraction from the government’s domestic problems. Not that the Abbott government is the only government doing this: the Obama administration has been guilty of the same wild hype, with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last week declaring IS a greater threat than al-Qaeda… at the same time that Hagel was claiming IS a bigger threat than al-Qaeda, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were saying it posed “no specific or credible threat” to the United States.
