Goodbye, citizenship! Australia takes a cynical turn on Muslim radicalisation | Jason Wilson | Comment is free | The Guardian

Some of the initial critical commentary on Australian plans for citizenship revocation and approach to radicalization, along with the perennial values debate. Echoes of C-51 Government messaging and issues:

You may notice if you read the transcript of Abbott’s press conference that this is political communication that doesn’t impart any information. Is “radicalisation” the same as “violent extremism”? Does one cause the other?

Are they linked in a causal chain? What should we be looking for? What is acceptable for citizens in a democracy to say, think, or read and what isn’t? What is the distinction between “extremism” and ordinary Muslim belief that the government keeps insisting that they respect? From whence comes the assumption that this is related to an insufficient inculcation of the virtues and responsibilities of citizenship?

Anyone who looks to the attorney general’s department’s materials will find a lack of clarity on all of this that is either chilling or embarrassing, depending on your point of view.

We’re told that “People can become radicalised to violent extremism due to a range of factors.” We’re also informed that people can get grants for combatting it to provide support for a range of activities, including mentoring, counselling, “case management” and sport, “But we are open to a wide range of ideas!” And we’re also told that the list of organisations offering services in this area will be collated without being made public. All in all, it’s bewildering.

To the observer, it may seem that debate without any specific terms is being had about existing schemes without clear public criteria of success, with the promise of further discussion whose terms are murky. There’s no reference to the extant scholarly and professional discussion about why and how people drift to Islamism, which emphasises the role of perceived injustice.

More cynically, you might say that this all works pretty well to keep terms like “radicalisation” and “extremism” as content-free, flexible terms that do little more than gesture towards the Muslims in our midst as a source of potential danger, and authorise governments to protect us from that danger, whatever it is, and empower them to police deviations from an equally imaginary moderate middle. A lot of reporting is not helping to clarify the situation: it’s simply taking all of this as read.

This effort by government to produce a vague sense of insecurity, then offer to protect us from it, can lead us in strange and alarming directions. Last week Christopher Pyne mooted a “jihadi-watch” scheme for schools, where education authorities would move to train students and teachers “to watch for shifts in behaviour such as students drifting away from their friends, running into minor trouble with the law and arguing with those who have different ideological views to their own”.

Goodbye, citizenship! Australia takes a cynical turn on Muslim radicalisation | Jason Wilson | Comment is free | The Guardian.