Jake Bilardi, the Melbourne teenager believed to have been killed in Iraq this week in the cause of the Islamic State, was the most plausible – and at the same time – the most improbable of candidates for radicalisation. A quiet though apparently bright suburban boy (and not overtly religious), Mr Bilardi's world was knocked off its orbit in 2012 by the death of his mother. Just to what extent became apparent when shortly afterward Mr Bilardi announced he'd converted to Islam and began attending mosques around Melbourne. He always had an abiding interest in overseas events accessed via the internet, and in the following two years dropped out of school, and, by the account of his best friend, "self-radicalised". In 2014, Mr Bilardi travelled to Iraq, via Turkey, to fight for IS, but not before writing a blog post in which he reportedly detailed plans for attacks in his home city if prevented from leaving Australia. His tragic journey is a timely reminder of the challenge the Abbott government faces in hindering online radicalisation in Australia.
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That there was a high probability he would not return to Australia adds a perplexing dimension to Mr Bilardi's journey last year. His was not merely a quest inspired by wanderlust, adventure or romantic, if deluded, notions. It was not a trip, in other words, that the likes of David Hicks would have embarked upon. Islamic State is a terrorist organisation that not only kills indiscriminately but glories in such killing. It is underpinned by a millenarian ideology, and fully merits Prime Minister Tony Abbott's description of it as "an apocalyptic death cult". In 2011, Osama bin Laden was warned that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of IS but then the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was obsessed with the Mahdi and prophesied redeemer of Islam, and that al-Qaeda's reputation would suffer if it failed to dissociate itself from such a murderous individual.
Millenarian movements headed by charismatic leaders have never wanted for followers, and by all accounts al-Baghdadi is a compelling personality – though reputedly more of the gangland than the end-of-days variety. However, it is IS's skills in using social networking sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook that has proved to be the group's sharpest and most effective recruitment tool. This is aimed primarily at disaffected young Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere, but as Jake Bilardi's example suggests, those messages of hate and images of wanton death and destruction can appeal to people from non-Muslim backgrounds as well.
That anyone could find such messages exciting or inspiring enough to buy a one-way ticket to a violent part of the Middle East where death is a likelihood is puzzling. However destructive behaviour is not unknown among young adults, and IS has been notably assiduous in playing to this psychological phenomenon by romanticising violent death.
Last month, the federal government announced that it had set aside $18 million to counter radicalisation on the internet, and that it would approach companies like Facebook and Twitter with a view to having them take a harder line against content adjudged as being threatening, extremist or gratuitously violent in nature. Such an approach is overdue since while these sites have policies prohibiting the posting of offensive material, they tend to remove it only when it is flagged by their users, sometimes hours or days after it appears. Filters to automatically detect terrorism-related posts are another option. However, the enormous scale of the World Wide Web means the monitoring or filtering of online content will always be a costly and not entirely effective exercise – and one at odds with view that censorship of the internet is an undesirable thing. As such, governments also need to educate parents about paying closer attention to what their children are doing online.
Formulating an effective response to IS's slick online propaganda machine will be neither easy nor particularly cheap. But government must do all it can to persuade impressionable people like Jake Bilardi of the moral case for not taking up the cause of violent jihad while minimising IS publicity on the internet.
