The first of its kind lexicon in Australia is going to guide politicians, police and public servants on how to speak about Islam and terrorism without implicating the peaceful religion, in a bid to defuse growing anti-Muslim sentiments in the country. “Talk about ‘violent extremists’, because that’s what they are, or name the group,” Hass Dellal, head of the Australian Multicultural Foundation (AMF), reportedly said on July 20. The book, A Lexicon on Terror, is sponsored by Dellal’s Foundation and the Victoria State Police.
It is to be published and distributed among Victoria officials and politicians by the end of the year, Stephen Fontana, Assistant Commissioner and Head of Counter Terrorism Coordination and Emergency Management for the Victoria Police said. He added that even before its release, the book is becoming so popular that it became a national project.
In the book, politicians are told there are terms to be avoided while talking about terror, including “Islamic terrorism”, “Islamo-fascists” and “moderate Muslims”. Other terms are “Middle Eastern appearance”, which suggests that ethnicity and physical appearance can be linked to terrorism. But the number one term officials are going to be asked to ovoid is “war on terror”, Dellal says, as many Muslims interpret it as a war on Islam.
Australia is not the first country to adopt the linguistic approach to disassociate Islam from terrorism. In 2006, Austria drafted a document of vocabulary on Islam as part of efforts to issue the first public communication lexicon aimed at avoiding stigmatising terminology in dealing with the other. The document ruled out “Islamic terrorism,” because it brackets Islam with terrorism. The British Foreign Office has told UK diplomats and spokespeople around the world to stop using the “war on terror” phrase to “avoid reinforcing and giving succour to the terrorists’ narrative” by using language that could be counter-productive.