The most successful deradicalisation program in history is considered to be the pacification of the Black September Organisation in the 1970s, the fearsome, violent wing of the PLO. The methods used by Arafat in his attempt for mainstream appeal were simple but effective: find beautiful women for them to marry, pay them to have many children and acquire for them prestigious property in Lebanon. This method of bludgeoning once murderous terrorists into domestic, bourgeois bliss remains a benchmark of success.

Fast forward half a century and the emerging pseudoscience of deradicalisation as an arm of fighting Islamist terror struggles for success. It is highlighted in Australia by the recent arrest of a Sydney teenager for a planned attack on Anzac Day. The high school drop-out of Lebanese heritage had spent a year in a government deradicalisation program without success. It appeared no element of this program included an organised tryst with a supermodel or a long term lease in Point Piper, perhaps even in a wing of the Prime Minister’s mansion.

Earlier this year I assessed a man in jail who was referred to a deradicalisation program after assaulting someone for his lack of Islamic authenticity. As part of drawing up my treatment plan for the magistrate, I enquired about the plan and discovered it was a loose arrangement of referrals to community workers and counselors with a view to modifying anti-social tendencies. Any kind of religious engagement was to be left to an imam who reviewed Koranic verses calling for violent action against unbelievers.

The difficulties of deradicalisation are an indicator of the wide variety of pathways that terrorists originate from, varying from the Muslim converts with criminal pasts, socially awkward teenagers who develop an intense religiosity and are driven to violent action and behaviorally disturbed Muslim-derived youth who channel their anti-social traits and desire for social protest through the vehicle of Islamism.

But the challenges are also an insight into some of the passive resignation that Western societies are doomed to accept after decades of Muslim migration, most notably in parts of Europe like the Belgian suburb of Molenbeek, home to several of the Paris attackers and tens of Islamic State recruits.

Despite endless pronouncements from Muslim leaders, survey after survey reveals that the views held by a significant proportion of Muslims are not so different from those ready to launch attacks. A recent British one commissioned by ICM/Channel 4 found half of those surveyed believe homosexuality should be illegal, over a quarter admit sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo attackers and 39 per cent believe wives should always obey their husbands. The key point of difference was in their propensity to engage in violence.

Despite multiple polls bearing out similar results there were the usual howls of protests from Muslim community leaders. It amazes me that there are so few such surveys in Australia, yet umpteen ones about Muslims feeling discriminated or suffering racism. In the past year, Flinders, Western Sydney and Queensland Universities have all produced research highlighting alleged racism towards Muslims. It represents a failure of the academic community and illustrates the political tilt of social science departments.

The British findings are likely to be similar in Australia. The key point of difference is that our emphasis on skilled migration means the social mobility of non refugee-derived Muslims is greater than in Europe. The sense of perceived exclusion which can potentially build personal resentment, a compulsory psychological foundation before any ideologies of political resentment can fester, is extremely rare among skilled migrants and their children. Furthermore, the larger Pakistani population may skew British results further to the illiberal, given Pakistan consistently rates among the worst in the Muslim world for supporting extremism. This was highlighted recently when a Pakistani man from Bradford, my namesake infact, drove to Scotland to murder a shopkeeper for expressing his minority, Ahmadi sect beliefs. The Ahmadis are a highly persecuted group in Pakistan.

But when it comes to deradicalisation, the majority view among Western countries is that altering ideological beliefs is very difficult, particularly given they are so tightly rooted in a major, global religion. The growing focus from Alcoholics Anonymous style groups in France to job training and counseling in Denmark is, much like Arafat did, to bludgeon former terrorists into the servitude of domesticity. They might still ultimately believe in predestined Islamic domination and that unbelievers should die, but the demands of buying groceries, checking their emails and taking the kids to school dilute the desire to act them out violently.

In keeping with this philosophy, the counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen told a Centre for Independent Studies forum last year that the priority in taming terrorism was to reduce the propensity for violence among vulnerable Muslim youth. This is known as disengagement.

In spite of this passive resignation that the genie is effectively out of the bottle, not only are we spending tens of millions of dollars on deradicalisation programs for which we have no information regarding their effectiveness, but we continue to debate the merits of large scale Muslim migration, particularly those from refugee backgrounds.

We also kid ourselves that the social media propaganda distributed by Isis is possibly the most sophisticated in the marketing world, causing the Dutch activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to jokingly call radicalisation a ‘sudden jihadi syndrome’.

The impact of social media can only be effective when youth are already primed for the message. Muslims too often project this towards the outside world in accusations of racism and discrimination when its origins lie firmly in the family and immediate community.

Sydney University terrorism expert, Husain Khadim, ominously points out that given families are so often at the core of the radicalisation process, they must also be at the forefront of attempts to deradicalise. So far there have been few attempts to link deradicalisation efforts beyond the individual or terrorist cell, but Khadim’s observation underlines the deeper oppositional malaise that so often afflicts a significant minority of Muslim families. The idea of innocent bystanders being swept away in what is seemingly the most sophisticated social media propaganda through the likes of Isis is more likely a myth and the reality is that youth like the Auburn teenager were low hanging fruit ripe for the message of terrorism.