The Victorian government is currently considering a raft of measures that purportedly aim to stop young people becoming terrorists.

Compiled and proposed by the Victorian police commissioner, they would subject “radicalised” individuals to forced curfews, internet bans and restrictions on personal communication with proscribed individuals, among other things.

The measures are billed as “preventative”, meaning that no evidence of violent intent would be required for the police to act in this way.

Aside from anything else, these suggestions represent an astounding attack on civil liberties. The anti-terror laws have already made thought-crime a reality, but these new policies would entail a brave new world of surveillance and constraint.

To deny people access to political content on line is a drastic expansion of the powers of the state to interfere in the lives of its citizens. It will start with ISIS and al Qaeda, but what next – the Marxist Internet Archive? After all, we too advocate the overthrow of the current political system.

The same applies to curfews and bans on human interaction. If it is established that such things can be imposed based purely on political views, without any evidence of imminent threat, there will be no end to the attacks on our rights.

For now, we should be clear that this legislation is a profoundly racist attack on Arabs and Muslims. It’s painfully obvious that the word terrorism is reserved exclusively for us.

The stage for this kind of bigoted, fascistic legislation has been set by 15 years of fear-mongering about Islam by a corporate media and a political class with no interest in discussing the real issues facing our society.

The numbers of “radicalising youth” is shocking, but not for the reason you might think. No more than 200 Australians have gone overseas to fight with an Islamic militia of some kind since 2012.

Of course, the figure would be greatly expanded if it included the terrorists who fight for the much better armed Israeli militia, but they don’t count, according to the government.

In any case, the whole policy is doomed to failure on its own terms.

Imagine a young kid who grows up seeing her family and friends harassed by police, her parents struggling to pay the bills, her culture attacked in the mainstream media on a daily basis and poverty and underinvestment all around her.

Then she gets to year 10 and is told that she’s absolutely not allowed to explore certain ideas and organisations, because they’re “extremist” and threaten to destabilise the society around her.

What do you think she’s going to do?