“De-radicalisation” seems to be about as effective as taking homeopathic medicine to mend a severed limb. The list of supposedly “de-radicalised” swivel-eyed Islamic fanatics who went on to get all jihad-y is longer than an arm and a leg piled up in the rubble of a suicide bombing.

Parsons Green bomber Ahmed Hassan was enrolled in Prevent, “the UK government’s ground war against violent extremism”. London Bridge attacker Usman Khan was another Prevent old boy. The Vienna attackers had also supposedly been “de-radicalised”. Convicted Australian jihadi Junaid Thorne was an alumnus of “counter-terrorism expert” Anne Aly’s “de-radicalisation”.

So it’s sure to end well, when the British government turns another murderous Mohammedan loose.

The British teenager “so radicalised as to be chilling’’ involved in the 2015 Anzac Day terror plot in Melbourne, has been released on parole from a British jail.

Now aged 20, the man identified as RXG from Blackburn, Lancashire, convinced the parole board in two recent meetings that he was no longer a threat to society.

Oh, well, if a couple of social workers are convinced, who are we to argue?

“RXG” was quite the Sunni Svengali, directing a web of would-be jihadis from Britain to Australia.

RXG had been part of a plot to kill a “proper lonely person’’ and then behead a police officer while ramming a car into a Melbourne crowd.

He sent reams of encrypted messages to Melbourne man Sevdet Besim after being introduced online by the Australian radical Islamic State recruiter Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, also known as Neil Prakash.

Cambodi encouraged the 14-year-old to mentor Besim from afar to carry out an attack against Melbourne police. The plot, developed by the teenager and Besim, was to practise killing by beheading “a proper lonely person’’ and then launch the attack in the following hours at the Melbourne Anzac Day parade in 2015.

In his 2015 hearing at Manchester crown court[…]Justice John Saunders said the boy was not the one who thought up the plot or worked out details of the planning “but he played a vital part … he had some ideas himself and encouraged the killer on what to do — he ensured the killer didn’t have second thoughts or weaken’’.

The judge said RXG played his part hoping and ­intending the outcome would be the deaths of a number of people.

Even a bunch of school kids were able to see what the parole board apparently can’t.

The court had heard how RXG had been so radicalised he was nicknamed by school peers as “the terrorist’’.

In allowing RXG’s release the parole board took evidence from RXG’s probation officer based in the community, officials supervising his case in detention, staff from the Youth Criminal Justice Service, an Imam who has worked with RXG, two psychologists employed by the prison service, a psychiatrist who has worked extensively with RXG, a psychiatrist commissioned by RXG’s legal representative and RXG’s Leaving Care worker.

I’m reminded of the case of Paul Beecham, cited in Christopher Berry-Dee’s Talking with Psychopaths and Savages. Beecham convinced psychiatrists that he was “unlikely to kill again” and was duly paroled. Three months later, he murdered his new partner, then killed himself.

All the cool kids are doing it. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.

But I’m sure they’ve got it right about the jihadist, this time.

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Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade...