Can we really deradicalise Muslim extremists?

Inquests into the Lindt café siege and the death of teenager Numan Haider (pictured right) — who was killed after stabbing two police officers — show the immediacy of the threat we face from Islamic terrorism, and the latter highlights the susceptibility of young people to seduction by religious extremists.

Government-funded programs are intended to help youths at risk of being poisoned by jihadist hate-ideologies. After police accountant Curtis Cheng was murdered last year, NSW Premier Mike Baird set up the $47 million Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Program.

Now the Turnbull Government has set aside a further $4 million for a hotline for parents concerned their children could fall into the clutches of radical ideologues. The new hotline, staffed by counsellors, is aimed to help young people rather than dob them in to police.

But even the experts are not sure whether such de-radicalisation programs work at all. For instance, the Sydney teenager arrested recently for planning an attack on ANZAC Day had spent a year in the CVE program, but obviously without much success.

“I want to learn how to make a bomb,” he is alleged to have said in a text after he failed to obtain a gun. His alleged aim was to cause terror and mayhem on ANZAC Day because it was a day of celebration for Australians.

Defeating violent Islamic extremism has been a high priority for all western countries, including Australia, since the New York City attacks of 9/11 in 2001. Fifteen years later the fight against extremism has become very real for us here.

However, the threat we face doesn’t so much come from zealots flying planes into buildings as from young people who have barely left childhood behind and who ought to be looking ahead to their entire lives lying before them.

Altering any kind of ideological belief — whether religious or political — is very difficult. Once we get into our heads ideas about the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, or innocent and guilty, they can be hard to dislodge. To do so requires more than a government program.

De-radicalisation programs are unlikely, on the whole, to do any harm; indeed they may well do some good. But they won’t do the trick on their own: they are not some kind of bromide that will magically fix the threat of radicalised youths without us having to do anything more.

Right now we know we can depend on our vigilant security forces doing everything they can to keep us safe from attack. But it requires more from all of us than that. For a start, Muslim leaders must do more to persuade to their faithful co-religionists abandon any sympathy for extremist teachings.

Muslim families must assume a greater responsibility for instilling the liberal democratic values we all cherish into the hearts and minds of young people. And every single one of us has a duty to shrug off any hint of passive resignation that our society is doomed to defeat.

De-radicalisation has been dismissed by some mental health experts as little more than pseudo-science designed more for our benefit than for that of their intended clients. It makes us feel we are doing something — however faltering — about a phenomenon most of us simply do not understand.

Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, and author of the research report No Ordinary Garment: The Burqa and the Pursuit of Tolerance