Media and Terrorism

Global Perspectives

Des Freedman, Daya Kishan Thussu, Des Freedman, Daya Kishan Thussu

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781446201589, 9781446201572
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is an excellent source which puts students in the heart of the contemporary discussion and encourages them to form opinions. It is a great resource for seminars as well as gateways to research.
- Paul Matthews, University College Birmingham

"An excellent text that covers not only how the media cover acts of terrorism but also how terror groups can manipulate the media."
- David Lowe, Liverpool John Moores University

Have the media contributed to exacerbating the political, cultural and religious divides within Western societies and the world at large? How can media be deployed to enrich, not inhibit, dialogue? To what extent has the media, in all its forms, questioned, celebrated or simply accepted the unleashing of a ?war on terror??

Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives brings together leading scholars to explore how the world?s media have influenced, and in turn, been influenced by terrorism and the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. Accessible and user-friendly with lively and current case studies, it is an essential handbook on the dynamics of war and the media in a global context.

1

INTRODUCTION

Dynamics of Media and Terrorism Des Freedman and Daya Kishan Thussu

Virtual or real, national or transnational, state-sponsored or executed by small groups, terrorism in all its forms remains a central concern for contemporary societies. It has not disappeared with the assassination of Osama bin Laden nor the emergence of a new narrative of democracy during the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011. Terrorism defines politics and international relations as well as social and cultural interactions in our globalizing world (Laqueur, 1977; Stepanova, 2008; Pape and Feldman, 2010; Foreign Policy, 2011; Schmid, 2011). According to the Global Terrorism Database compiled by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), part of the Department of Homeland Security, more than 87,000 terrorist attacks took place worldwide between 1970 and 2008, attributed to over 2,100 terrorist groups. The US government data shows that, in 2009 alone, 11,000 terrorist attacks occurred in 83 countries, resulting in more than 15,700 deaths – the largest number taking place in South Asia.

As Table 1.1 shows, the countries afflicted most by terrorism are located in the global South, and yet terrorism remains a major geopolitical concern in the West, especially since 9/11. Media representations of terrorism are also skewed in favour of Western perceptions of and perspectives on the global and open-ended ‘war on terror’. As we mark the tenth year after the events of 9/11, this book provides an opportunity to examine, in a global context, what the ‘war on terror’ has meant for media and its study. It is an appropriate time to evaluate the media’s relationship to a changed geo-political environment and to pose questions about media performance and influence. In the years since 9/11, the world has witnessed two major conflicts – Afghanistan and Iraq – both continuing despite American ‘combat operations’ in Iraq being renamed as ‘stability operations’. The NATO-led bombardment of Libya in 2011 is a continuation of the policy of ‘regime change’, which the US has enunciated and mainstream Western media largely endorsed.

Table 1.1 Top ten countries affected by terrorism, 1970–2008

Country	Number of fatalities
Colombia	6777
Peru	6038
El Salvador	5331
India	4323
Northern Ireland	3770
Spain	3176
Iraq	2968
Turkey	2695
Sri Lanka	2591
Pakistan	2529

Source: START, n.d.

As soon as President George W. Bush announced the official Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) on 20 September 2001, barely ten days after the attacks on New York and Washington, than the phrase ‘war on terror’ was snapped up by the US media. Given the latter’s global reach and influence, the phrase gained worldwide currency, legitimizing the phenomenon, though how a state can wage a war against ‘terror’, which is neither an organization nor a state, remains, to put it mildly, deeply questionable.

The news media have played a crucial role in developing the narrative of the ‘war on terror’ as an ever-breaking global story, thus projecting the ‘war on terror’ as the most serious threat in our collective imagination. The conflict has given the media world a ‘global vocabulary war’ (Halliday, 2011: xi), with new words and phrases such as ‘waterboarding’, ‘Shock and Awe’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’. The term ‘war on terror’ continues to be widely used in the media, though it is now officially given a less aggressive title under President Obama as ‘overseas contingency operations’. Yet its open-ended, pre-emptive and global remit remains unchanged.

In the post-Cold War, post-Soviet world, the ‘war on terror’ has had an Islamic connotation. Unlike the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or Euskadi ta Askatasuna – Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) (which are not labelled Catholic terrorists), or Sri Lankan Tamil separatists and Indian Maoists (not described as Hindu terrorist groups), the ubiquity and danger of ‘Islamic’ terrorism, exemplified by shadowy networks with their alleged links to ‘rogue’ states, are constantly invoked in the media. This view of Islamic militancy is undifferentiated: Islamist groups in different parts of the world – al-Qaeda (reputedly led by Osama bin Laden, himself partly a creation of the CIA which was also instrumental in his assassination in 2011) in Afghanistan/Pakistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, al-Shabab in Somalia, Chechen groups, Lashkar-e-Toiba in Kashmir and Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia – are all too often presented in the mainstream media as part of a seamless transnational terror network which links terrorist activities in such diverse locations as Madrid, Mumbai and Moscow.

Manuel Castells has suggested that the ‘war on terror and its associated images and themes (al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Iraq War, radical Islamism, Muslims in general) constructed a network of associations in people’s minds. They activated the deepest emotion in the human brain: the fear of death’ (Castells, 2009: 169). It is undoubtedly the case that Islamic militant groups – in Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India – have used terrorist activities (including suicide bombings) as an extreme manifestation of political protest. But what is the motivation which drives young men and women to sacrifice their lives? Is it extreme Islamist propaganda or, as Pape and Feldman have argued, that the rhetoric of Islamist extremist groups ‘functions mainly as a recruiting tool in the context of national resistance’ while the ‘principal cause of suicide terrorism is resistance to foreign occupation, not Islamic fundamentalism’ (Pape and Feldman, 2010: 20). Pape and Feldman’s study of suicide bombings shows that ‘over 95 per cent of the suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation’ (2010: 329). Hassan’s extensive and comparative research on suicide bombers also points to the diversity of motives behind such acts and the specificity of a particular political situation in a given country (Hassan, 2010).

The vast majority of the world’s one-billion Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism. Indeed, they are victims of this scourge and the ‘war on terror’ has brought misery and mayhem to large parts of the Islamic world. The death of Iraqis since the 2003 US invasion varies from an astonishing 1 million (as published in the Lancet in 2006) to the Iraq Body Count figure of more than 100,000 (Burnham et al., 2006). In other costs, the daily expenditure of the US military is estimated to be $1.75 billion, while the real cost of the Iraq invasion itself has been about $3 trillion, and arguably contributed to the economic downturn we are facing today (Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2008; Stiglitz, 2010). The US has increased its military spending by 81 per cent since 2001, and now accounts for 43 per cent of the global total, six times its nearest rival China, according to data from SIPRI (SIPRI, 2011).

Yet in a globalized world, the distinction between national and transnational terrorism has been disappearing. Traditionally, terrorists groups have depended on, and benefited from, the support – ideological, financial and political – from groups outside the national territory. There is a long history of such associations: from Russian socialist revolutionaries at the beginning of the 1900s (who planned attacks and procured material in France and Switzerland) to anti-colonial and other national liberation movements in the twentieth century which were internationalized. Cold War politics ensured that many socialist governments and European left-wing groups (such as Baader-Meinhof and the IRA) supported radical Palestinian organizations, while right-wing groups like the Nicaraguan Contras were funded by the CIA. Furthermore, just as the Soviet Union trained anti-Western movements in Africa and Arab world, the US supported mujahideen in Afghanistan and UNITA in Angola (Cronin, 2009).

However, in the post-Cold War, post 9/11 world a particular version of terrorism has come to dominate policy and media discourse internationally. The Kremlinologists have been replaced by the proliferation of ‘jihadi studies’, one leading exponent of which has baldly suggested that the ‘war on terror’ is going to be a generational event: The Longest War (Bergen, 2011). For the US, dealing with terrorism has become a major post-Cold War strategic priority. Given the primacy of the US as the world’s largest economy and its formidable media, military and technological power, this strategic priority seems to have become a global political priority. By virtue of its unprecedented capacity for global surveillance, as well as its domination of global communication hardware and software (from satellites to telecommunication networks; from cyberspace to ‘total spectrum dominance’ of real space, and the messages which travel through these), the US is able to disseminate its image of terrorism to the world at large. ‘What are the connections between technological innovations and Western imperialism?’ asks Headrick in his latest book. His answer is ‘the desire to conquer and control other peoples; a technological advantage is itself a motive for imperialism’ (Headrick, 2010: 5). ‘The Great American Mission’, to borrow a phrase from the title of a book about America’s global modernization effort – 9/11 and its aftermath – has given the US a pretext to shape the world to suit its own geo-strategic agenda (Ekbladh, 2009). It is difficult to disagree with the observations of the historian of US imperialism Richard Immerman:

The empire that America constructed in the twentieth century is the most powerful empire in world history. Its rival Soviet empire, and its antecedent British Empire, pale in comparison. Its global leadership, when measured in terms of technological innovation, manufacturing, gross domestic product, or any other frame of reference, far eclipses all competitors. Its military superiority is breathtaking, and it continues to grow. It has assembled institutions – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Organization of American States, the World Trade Organization, and more – that provide potent mechanisms for global management. (Immerman, 2010: 12)

The majority of mainstream media enthusiastically take part in this global management process. Immerman notes that the phrase ‘American empire’ appeared more than 1,000 times in news stories during the six months prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

The global reach and influence of American media are well documented: from traditional newspapers and news magazines (New York Times, Time), to news networks (CNN International) to online news aggregators (Google, YouTube) (Thussu, 2007). The US vision and version of terrorism is therefore extended to reach a global audience. In Russia, the government has tried to link its Chechen problem with international terrorism, with the former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov claiming that ‘the war in Chechnya is against international terrorism – not Chechens, but international bandits and terrorists’ (cited in Gilligan, 2009: 6). The suppression of Muslim minorities in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region was also framed as China’s war on terrorism (Wayne, 2009). In India – one of the countries worst affected by terrorism-related violence – large sections of the media and intelligentsia have bought into the US ‘war on terror’ discourse. Across the Middle East, often unrepresentative governments have used the pretext of terrorism further to strengthen their grip on the levers of security states as well as to curtail civil and journalistic liberties. For example, during the 2011 NATO-led bombing of Libya, the government of Muammar al-Qaddafi claimed that the rebels in the Eastern part of the country were supporters of al-Qaeda.

Terrorism discourse has impacted on international aid policy. It has been suggested that ‘development and aid policy, institutions and operations have been affected’ by the ‘shifting global politics driven and legitimated by the global war on terror regime’ (Howell and Lind, 2009: 1293). Fighting terrorism has also been accompanied by the massive expansion of the so-called private military and security companies. This privatization of state-sponsored killings and outsourcing to private security networks has been presented as being more ‘effective’ in dealing with terrorism (Singer, 2003; Stanger, 2009). Among other key benefits of such a conflict is how it fills the coffers of the world’s arms merchants: world military spending reached $1.6 trillion in 2010, according to SIPRI. The US remains the world’s largest exporter of military equipment, accounting for 30 per cent of global arms exports in 2006–10 (SIPRI, 2011). Terrorism, and efforts to challenge it, thus remain central projects inside the global geo-political environment.

Defining ‘Terrorism’

Yet despite its primacy in contemporary politics there is a distinct lack of agreement on how to define terrorism. There are, as a SIPRI study argues, ‘objective reasons for the lack of agreement on a definition of terrorism – namely, the diversity and multiplicity of its forms, types and manifestations’ (Stepanova, 2008: 5).

When Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the main suspect in the 2009 shooting of 13 army personnel at Ford Hood, Texas, was featured on the cover of Time magazine (23 November 2009), the word ‘TERRORIST?’ was emblazoned over his eyes. Jared Lee Loughner, accused of critically wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killing six others in Tucson, Arizona, also made it on to the cover (24 January 2011) but this time the headline focused on ‘Guns. Speech. Madness’. The Wall Street Journal also treated the two incidents in very different ways: ‘[Sen. Joe] Lieberman Suggests Army Shooter Was “Home-Grown Terrorist”’ was how it covered the Fort Hood story on 9 November 2009 while on 10 January 2011 the WSJ’s headline was ‘Suspect Fixated on Giffords’. The line between acts of terror and insanity was drawn very tightly. It seems so obvious, after all, that a Muslim targeting American soldiers must be a terrorist while a 22-year-old white native of Tucson must simply be disturbed.

Interestingly, the FBI stopped publishing official data on domestic terror attacks after 2005 so it is very difficult to find out how many other similar incidents have been classified as ‘terrorist’ or not. Annual reports on terrorism are now required by Federal law but only in relation to international terrorism. However, even the director of START, notes that:

the gravity of excluding domestic attacks can be felt when we consider that two of the most noteworthy terrorist events of the 1990s – the March 1995 nerve agent attack on the Tokyo subway and the April 1995 bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City – would remain unrecorded in most event data bases because both lacked any known foreign involvement. (Quoted in NCTC, 2009: 73)

Data on US domestic terrorism is still compiled and the Global Terrorism Database (hosted by START) records that, between 2006 and 2008, 62 incidents of terrorism were recorded inside the US with eight fatalities. Of those perpetrators identified, not a single one was related to Islamist organizations while all were drawn either from the Ku Klux Klan, other neo-Nazi groups or the Animal Liberation Front (START, n.d.). In Europe, the other alleged theatre of ‘Islamic terrorism’ activity, out of 249 terrorist attacks carried out within the European Union in 2010, only three were attributed to Islamic extremists, according to the Europol’s Terr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Dynamics of Media and Terrorism
• Part 1: Contexts
• Part 2: Global Representations of Terrorism
• Part 3: Terrorism on the Home Front
• Part 4: Journalists and the ‘War on Terror’
• Index