Media, Religion and Conflict

Lee Marsden, Heather Savigny, Lee Marsden, Heather Savigny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367605575
• eBook ISBN: 9781317098676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International relations as a discipline has largely ignored the role of religion in shaping international events. The growth of Islamist militancy, the increasing influence of the Christian Right on US foreign policy and George Bush's war on terror changed this for good. Now more than ever we need to analyze this change and consider how religion and the way it is represented affects international politics. Lee Marsden and Heather Savigny uniquely bring together some of the leading figures in the fields of politics and media, international relations and security, and international relations and religion, including freelance journalist and newspaper columnist Nick Cohen, the international authority on politics and religion Professor Jeffrey Haynes, and Professor Justin Lewis who has a number of BBC commissions under his belt. The volume offers a series of case studies reflecting on how the media covers religion as conflict within and between states. It challenges readers to critically examine how media reportage and commentary influences perceptions and responses to religion and security.

Chapter 1
‘Islamic Terrorism’ and the Repression of the Political

Justin Lewis, Paul Mason and Kerry Moore

Introduction

In the ideological struggle between terrorist groups and nation states, there is often a battle between cause and effect. The aim of political violence is to further a cause, while nation states try to limit discussion to the violence itself (Hacker, 1983). So, for example, while Irish Republicans fought for political recognition during the troubles in Northern Ireland, Margaret Thatcher insisted on depoliticising their actions as purely ‘criminal’. As Hayes notes:

The overall objective was to construct a particular perception of the conflict and, more specifically, manufacture a negative image of its political adversaries. The aim was to portray the British state as essentially benign, acting as a neutral arbiter between irreconcilable communities, and the PIRA as a malevolent criminal conspiracy and primary cause of the violence (2003: 133).

This denial of political motive is, in part, an attempt at delegitimation, allowing a form of condemnation without the need to make a more subtle point about ends and means (Stohl, 2008). Indeed, Miller suggests that ‘defining opponents as terrorists represents an active pursuit of legitimacy. Such legitimating strategies are central to the operation of all governments, whether they are dictatorships or liberal democracies’ (Miller, 1994: 14).

This repression of the political is facilitated by the way in which, as Dan Berkowitz puts it, such motives get ‘lost in the rhetoric of journalism, a journalism that focuses on what was done, not why’ (Berkowitz, 2007: 178). While this denial is understandable – to publicise the political might be seen as rewarding the violence – the recent history of Northern Ireland suggests that repressing the ‘political’ in political violence sustains the struggle rather than containing it. The ‘troubles’ are over, in part, not because Irish Republicanism was obliterated but because it was treated overtly as a political movement (Rolston, 2007).

In this chapter we will argue that the repression of the political in discussions of 21st century acts of terrorism has taken a very particular – and more elaborate – form. Traditionally, the repression of political motives rests upon a cross between a syllogism and a self-fulfilling prophecy: terrorist acts are committed by terrorists, who are bad people inclined towards political violence (Stohl, 2008). This mirrors the way in which the causes of crime – despite Tony Blair’s famous pledge1 – are often seen only as a product of the presence of criminals, with no further explanation required. Any discussion of causality thus focuses on individual pathology rather than social conditions (Barton et al., 2006; Hillyard, 2004; Sim et al., 2009).

There is no doubt that elements of this reductive framework remain in place, but in the ‘soul searching’ that occurred after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, it was put under considerable strain. The debates about the question ‘why do they hate us?’ that took place in the US in the aftermath of the attacks forced attention onto questions of causality, even if it unleashed an extraordinary public display of denial, in which the political – raising the inevitable spectre of the uglier aspects of US foreign policy – was seen as off-limits (Kellner, 2002; 2004). Thus Chomsky’s blunt observation – ‘everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way – stop participating in it’ (2005: 54) – was so far outside mainstream discourse that it was not even deemed worthy of discussion. This left commentators and politicians offering decidedly unconvincing tales of ‘evildoers’ motivated by a hatred of freedom and democracy (Laquer, 2001; Nacos, 2003). Behind these explanations lay a more sinister stock of stereotypes, and it is here that we can begin to see the emergence of more explicit, well-developed narratives about Islam. The coverage of ‘Islamic terrorism’ has thereby taken a different turn, which does deal with the question of motive, but in a way in which political motives are more thoroughly sidelined.

While the conflict in Northern Ireland was demarcated along religious lines – Catholics against Protestants – this division was seen as sectarian rather than doctrinal. Although the history of Catholicism is full of intolerance and political violence, the culture and practice of Catholicism was considered irrelevant. More recent coverage of terrorism, we shall suggest, does deal with both cause and effect, but in a way that foregrounds religion – specifically Islam – as the explanation for terrorist acts. The phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ – a classic example of Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation, being both a coupling and expression of an ideological position (Hall, 1986) – does this in an instant, and, in so doing, represses the political motives behind recent acts of political violence.

In what follows, we shall explore how UK print media coverage of British Muslims has developed a narrative in which terrorism is represented as a religious rather than a political act. This is not to say that the religious and the political are somehow mutually exclusive. Our argument is that reducing motive purely to religion means excluding the more secular political context. The stakes are high here, since, as Richard Jackson argues, if the language used to understand or counter terrorism fails to address the ‘political’ in political violence, it risks exacerbating the problem, as the militarisation of the ‘war on terror’ appears to have done (Jackson, 2005).

The Northern Ireland comparison is pertinent. To assume that because terrorist acts are carried out by Islamic groups they can be reduced to the role of Islam is as facile as seeing IRA terrorism reduced to the role of Catholicism. This is not to say that such an argument cannot be made: in both cases the identity of those involved is defined partly by their religion, in both cases that religion can be associated with more extreme and intolerant versions, and, historically, with acts of violent repression. But to make such an argument is to ignore the vast majority of people practising both religions, as well as the political conditions that lead people to adopt terrorist tactics. Any serious analysis of the much reported terrorist acts of the last decade – in the US in 2001, Bali in 2002, Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 – reveals that while Islam may be invoked, the motives are rooted in politics (notably a reaction to post-World War II Western foreign policy in the Middle East, especially support for repressive regimes in the region (O’Duffy, 2008; Stohl, 2008).

This is, emphatically, not a defence of terrorism – the ends do not justify the means – but an attempt to understand what drives it (and hence, the most successful ways to deal with it). Nor does it turn a blind eye to the ways in which Islam is appropriated by political movements and repressive theocratic regimes. But the use of religion in politics is hardly unique to Islam: a doctrinal form of Christianity – specifically the Dutch Reform Church, with its racial inflections on biblical stories – provided the moral underpinning for apartheid in South Africa (Adam and Giliomee, 1979). Indeed, the term first recorded use of the term ‘apartheid’ came from a Dutch Reform Church pamphlet in 1929 (Giliomee and Mbenga, 2007: 259).2 More famously, many leading figures in the right of US politics clearly articulate their politics as an overt expression of their Christian beliefs. In short, religion and politics inevitably intermingle. Both are, after all, based on sets of moral presuppositions. But we cannot answer the question: ‘why do some people, who happen to be Muslims, commit acts of terrorism?’ (any more than we can say why Catholics joined the IRA) without understanding the political grievances that motivate them.

The Narrative of 21st Century Orientalism

Many studies of the portrayal of Muslims and Islam begin with the work of Edward Said. His book Orientalism (1979) explores the ‘idea that Islam is medieval and dangerous, as well as hostile and threatening’ and the succession of stereotypical representations that make this idea ‘a kind of a priori touchstone to be taken account of by anyone wishing to discuss or say something about Islam’ (Said, 1997: 157). As Said suggests, this is hardly a new phenomenon: the history of Western culture is replete with images of an Islamic culture that is sinister, malevolent and brutal. Reading Orientalism, it is easy to understand how the link between religion and terrorism became ‘obvious’ in the case of Islam in a way it was not with Irish Catholicism. Catholicism is too deeply embedded in our cultural and political history to see it as a sinister, malevolent force, and yet Islam was already established – through a long history of cultural stereotyping and usually at a distance – as just such a force.

The notion of Islam as a threatening ‘other’ finds its apotheosis in the coupling with terrorism. If this articulation came to the fore following the terrorist attacks in 2001 in the US and 2005 in the UK (and, to a lesser extent, in Bali in 2002 and Madrid in 2004), it is based on a well-established set of orientalist assumptions. These were most graphically revealed in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when media coverage – backed by ‘unofficial sources from the FBI’ – quickly leapt to the assumption that the terrorists came from the Middle East (Said, 1998). The fact that the bomber turned out to be a white American Christian was, in many ways, not surprising (Timothy McVeigh was, in fact, much closer to the profile of perpetrators in the recent the history of terrorist incidents in the US than someone from the Middle East), but it was not enough to dismantle orientalist assumptions about terrorism.

During the build up to the 2003 war with Iraq (a period that has become associated with official claims based on flimsy evidence) the Oklahoma City bombing was – despite the weight of evidence used to convict McVeigh – audaciously recast with Arabs, once again, in the leading role. As the Evening Standard reported:

Senior aides to US Attorney-General John Ashcroft have been given compelling evidence that former Iraqi soldiers were directly involved in the 1995 bombing that killed 185 people. The methodically assembled dossier from Jayna Davis, a former investigative TV reporter, could destroy the official version that white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were solely responsible for what, at the time, was the worst act of terrorism on American soil. Instead, there are serious concerns that a group of Arab men with links to Iraqi intelligence, Palestinian extremists and possibly al Qaeda, used McVeigh and Nichols as front men to blow up the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (Evening Standard 21 October, 2002).

Like many such theories, the ‘group of Arab men’ at the heart of this conspiracy are remarkably (and yet rather vaguely) well-connected. That such a convenient fabrication was taken more seriously than other conspiracy theories – this was, we were told, a ‘methodically assembled dossier’ sanctioned by US officialdom – demonstrates the strength of orientalist assumptions. Timothy McVeigh may, in evidentiary terms, have been the prime suspect, but cultural stereotyping made a shady ‘group of Arab men’ seem more in tune with conventional wisdom.

But cultural stereotypes are, by their very nature, thin descriptions of motivation. The stereotype just is: requiring little explanation or understanding. In many instances this is enough to inform a commonsense understanding – along the lines of “terrorists commit these acts because they are intrinsically bad people” (Hacker, 1983; Stohl, 2008).

However, thirty years on from the Iranian revolution, high profile events and debates surrounding Islam continue to position Muslims in opposition to ‘Western’ political culture and democratic liberal values. The so called, ‘war on terror’ has been greatly influenced by the work of neo-orientalists such as Bernard Lewis (1990) and Samuel Huntington (1993; 1996).3 Especially since the demise of state Communism, Islam has served as a ready substitute ‘enemy’, in relation to which ‘the West’ has been defined (Agha, 2000; Mowlana, 2000; Said, 2001; Macdonald, 2003). As a constitutive ‘other’ of ‘the West’ (a ‘constitutive outside’ which seems to threaten the West, but is at the same time necessary to its identity), representations of Islam have been powerfully played out in the realm of cultural politics. Debates about ‘free speech’ surrounding the 1989 publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the Iranian fatwa (Poole, 2000), for example and echoed in the dominant media representation of the 2005 ‘cartoon protests’, have clearly associated Muslims in Britain with ‘extremist agendas’ determined beyond the UK and signified a theocratic, radical and fundamentally anti-democratic Islam in opposition to ‘western liberal values’ (Poole, 2000). Suspicion of Islam as a religion and negative images of Muslims as a people are mutually reinforcing images in the news media. Colonial stereotypes which, until recently associated British Asians with passivity (Saeed, 2007) have been supplanted by images of a politicised and potentially extremist Muslim youth.

But if orientalism came to the fore following 11 September 2001, it has since, in the UK at least, moved beyond simple stereotyping. The idea of ‘Islamic terrorism’, we shall argue, has become a full-blown narrative.

The Rise of Islam as a Problematic Religion

The research we present here is based on our study of the coverage of British Muslims in the UK national press between 2000 and 2008.4 This work follows other studies indicating that, in recent years, the news media tend to rely on orientalist assumptions in their portrayal of British Muslims or Islam in general (Runnymede Trust, 1997; Abbas, 2000, 2001; Abbas et al., 2000; Agha, 2000; Allen and Nielsen, 2002; Poole, 2000, 2002, 2006; Richardson 2004; Allen et al., 2007; Saeed, 2007). Our study, which sought to test and explore the presence of orientalism in media coverage, involved four elements: a simple, quantitative search tracking the volume of stories about British Muslims in the national press between 2000 and 2008 (23,000 in total); a discursive analysis of a sample of 974 of these articles;5 an analysis of the images used in newspaper articles featuring British Muslims; and a series of case studies of particular stories. In this chapter we want to feature two case studies in the context of our broader quantitative study (see Lewis, Mason and Moore, forthcoming, for a more extensive report on the quantitative data).

As Whitaker (2002) has shown, the attention paid to British Muslims increased dramatically after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Our findings confirm this and suggest that, following a slight fall in 2002, this increase has been sustained across the decade 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: The New Left and the Old Far Right
• Introduction: Media, Religion and Conflict
• 1 ‘Islamic Terrorism’ and the Repression of the Political
• 2 Is the BBC Biased? The Corporation and the Coverage of the 2006 Israeli–Hezbollah War
• 3 Islam as a Threat? Problematisation of Muslims in the Mass Media and Effects on the Political System
• 4 Muslims in Print, or Media Events as Nodes of Cultural Conflict
• 5 The AKP Government in Turkey: Politics, Democracy and the Media
• 6 The Political Rhetoric of the Vatican: Aims and Strategies of the Holy See as a Transnational Actor
• 7 Populism and Security in Political Speechmaking: the 2008 US Presidential Campaign
• 8 Towards a Theorisation of the Link Between Media, Religion and Conflict
• Index