Political Violence and the Media

dublin | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Tuesday June 17, 2008 11:16 by Yuri

Why Terrorism Works

If an act of savagery such as the bombing of an airliner, the murder of captive on an internet video, the assassination of a politician etc with the publicity it generates in the modern media can shake the will of a society that is more economically powerful and militarily stronger, an individual already contemptuous of decadent democratic politics, might be inclined to believe it is a greater crime not to use political violence and information manipulation to achieve his ends.

Political violence by its very nature requires publicity to be effective whether it is state orchestrated or committed by a non-state actor such as a terrorist group. Conflicts can encompass either full-scale invasions of enemy territory, border clashes, cross-border raids into a neighbouring jurisdiction. Civil war, insurgency, rebellion, terrorism and rioting can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from each other. In many conflicts the debate regarding what is morally legitimate and illegitimate and criminal is an irrelevancy to those who fight. Combatants and civilians become targets and sometimes the distinction between both is quite blurred. However governments, even dictatorships, are often accountable to some higher authority. A democratic government that uses force cannot ignore the need to justify its actions to the people it represents. A dictatorship that uses force may be in a position to ignore the will of the people but it is often constrained by its diplomatic relations with other states and international bodies such as the UN who can impose sanctions or authorise military action. Terrorist groups, though, operating secretively, do not have to worry about diplomatic niceties or public opinion if they can use violence to get political recognition from governments and manipulate the public by creating an atmosphere of fear through media manipulation.

In Western style democratic societies stable government institutions, separation of powers and the rule of law facilitates free discourse. Moderate political views tend to sideline extremist political views when filtered through the process of public debate. If a reasonable argument is put forward it has greater likelihood of gaining popular acceptance. In democratic societies like, all human societies, public debate is dominated by elites with influence, wealth and power. However there is a also a much higher degree of social mobility and reasonable dissent is not met with arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution. Generally speaking only insignificant minorities out of profound cynicism with democratic society are prepared to vote for political parties who espouse extremist views. The only recourse for extremists when faced with general public apathy or hostility are to moderate their views, use non-violent civil disobedience or use political violence to force the majority to submit to their worldview. In Western style democracies political violence generally originates from groups and individuals who are associated with the extreme right (e.g. Neo-Nazis) or extreme left (e.g. Action Directe, Baader-Meinhof), religious extremism (e.g. Al-Qaeda, Aum Shrinrikyo) and separatist causes ( e.g. Provisional IRA, ETA). Environmentalist and animal rights extremist violence exists but is less prominent.

Individuals can be motivated to commit acts for the same ideological reasons and can often be as effective as a large group. David John Copeland, a right-wing neo-nazi targeted gays and minorities in Soho, London with homemade bombs killing three people in 1999. Lee Harvey Oswald, a self proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a police officer on November 22, 1963, events probably as shocking to Americans as the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and 9/11. Heshem Mohamed Hadayet, an extremist Muslim, killed two Israelis at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport motivated by anti-Israeli and anti-American views. None of these men could be directly linked with organised Neo-Nazi, Marxist-Leninist or Islamist groupings though they created an atmosphere of terror and levels of publicity that terrorist groups literally kill for. The worldview of the convicted neo-primitivist terrorist Ted Karzcynski, nicknamed “The Unabomber”, encapsulates the contempt that violent extremists have for the alternatives of nonviolent civil disobedience and peaceful protest in his notorious polemic Industrial Society and Its Future:
“20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they prefer masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.”

Kaczynski, a talented mathematician, delegated to adopt the life of a hermit. He took up living in a remote cabin out of a paranoid philosophical rejection of modern technology. From the late 1970’s to the mid-1990’s he posted bombs to universities and other targets killing three people to gain publicity for his extremist political ideas. He insisted that all 35,000 words of his aggressively anti-technology anti-social polemic Industrial Society and Its Future should be published and this request was granted by the New York Times and Washington Post. During his trial the prosecution portrayed the reclusive Kaczynski as cynical and sexually confused. He later complained: “By discrediting me personally, they hope to discredit my political ideas.” But by using violence Kaczynski achieved a level of celebrity and media exposure that he might not otherwise have achieved. Time magazine reported that he had become something of a cult hero in the internet community.

If the lethal actions of these individuals had been devoid of any political context they would be indistinguishable from serial or spree killers. The mysterious Zodiac Killer who was never apprehended after a series of murders in California during the 1960’s and 1970’s regularly taunted the police with coded letters. More recently the spree killer Seung-Hui Cho posted his disturbed video rants to a TV station before he shot and killed 32 people Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia in 2007. The notorious UVF terrorist Lenny Murphy, the alleged leader of “The Shankill Butchers” who mutilated his innocent victims with butcher knives, was a sadistic psychopath who would have killed people regardless of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Due to the fact that they are an unpopular minority with insufficient numbers or resources to launch full-scale insurrections terrorist must direct their violence at specific usually symbolic targets representing the values and physical authority of the establishment they wish to overthrow. Their chief aims are to achieve maximum publicity for their cause and maximise the level of insecurity, terror and paranoia within the general population whom they despise. Terrorists often seek the suspension of the normal rule of law, to achieve victim status and thereby win sympathy. The internment of suspected IRA members by the British government in Northern Ireland during the late 1960’s and 1970’s, in a direct response to Republican violence, was a propaganda coup for the terrorist group who styled themselves as defenders of the Nationalist and Catholic community attempting to “liberate” the “occupied six-counties” even though a democratic system of government, albeit deeply flawed, already existed. Many innocent people were arrested in the round-up allowing propagandists to further undermine Nationalist confidence in British rule already weakened by Unionist intransigence to many legitimate political grievances of Roman Catholics. The sectarian violence between Protestant and Catholic communities necessitated the presence of British troops on Northern Ireland streets but the militarised situation unquestionably contributed to the deaths of unarmed demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday” January 30, 1972 at the hands of elite paratroopers normally assigned to front line combat rather than the role usually performed by civilian riot police. The massacre swelled the ranks of the IRA with young Catholic men who might never have contemplated political violence otherwise. The IRA claimed justification for the bombing and shooting of Protestant and British civilians in response to heavy handed British tactics. The actions of a violent minority in the IRA therefore often had a stronger influence on events in Northern Ireland than the democratic leadership of the SDLP who represented the majority of the Catholic community in the House of Commons during most of the period.

Since the early 1990’s the internet has revolutionised global communication and has transformed democratic government, business practice and societal discourse. Any person with a computer and an internet connection has almost unrestricted access to practically limitless quantities of information and theoretically can communicate with millions of people throughout the world. It is taken for granted that governments, media organisations, universities, businesses, political parties, activists and individuals operate websites. Therefore it is no surprise that terrorists and other extremist groups have a web presence too.

The 9/11 attacks exploited modern communications media to their fullest possible extent terrifying hundreds of millions of people who saw the airliners crashing into the World Trade Centre, the victims choosing to leap to their death rather than burn alive and the final catastrophic collapses live on television It was possible that many international viewers had forgotten about the deaths of 146 US Marines in a Hezbollah attack on their base Beirut in 1983, the original Al-Qaeda bomb attack on the Twin Towers in 1993, and had overlooked the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 which were clearly preliminaries to 9/11. However it is unlikely that many people who awoke on September 11, 2001, went to bed that night unfamiliar with the name Osama Bin Laden. The most shocking implication of the 9/11 attack was that nineteen young men could outwit the entire military and intelligence establishments of the most powerful nation on earth and create such mayhem and destruction while armed with mere carpet knives. Exposing the insecurity of democratic societies might yet prove to be more damaging than the destruction of buildings and human lives.

That fact that US government traded on the invincibility of its military and intelligence establishment in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union is evident in its influence on pop culture. The success of paranoid television shows in the 1990’s such as the X-Files or the 1998 movie Enemy of The State which portray an all knowing US government would not be credible post-9/11. The huge interest in the conspiracy movie Loose Change which claims that the 9/11 attacks were in fact orchestrated by the US government demonstrates that the terrorists tapped into a deep anxiety among many Americans toward the power of the federal government. The emergence of groups of crackpot academics such as Scholars For 9/11 Truth and Justice who allege there was a “controlled demolition” of the Twin Towers resembles the paranoia of their 1960’s predecessors who convinced themselves that the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a government conspiracy despite overwhelming evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald alone was responsible.

This malaise is merely a reflection of the deep ideological divisions from the Vietnam Era that have resurfaced in post 9/11 American politics between bitterly opposed Democrat and Republican rivals. Since the 1960’s Democrats had been traditionally pacifist, favouring a less militarily aggressive and more conciliatory approach in global politics toward Soviet Russia and today toward the Arab Middle East. Republican leaders especially George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain who have been vilified and lionised in equal measure have instead advocated a Reagan-style policy of directly confronting foreign aggression, promoting democracy and flexing American military might. Al-Qaeda cynically stoked up these bitter ideological divisions during the 2004 Presidential election when Osama Bin Laden effectively endorsed the Democratic candidate Senator John F. Kerry (who infamously “flip-flopped” on many crucial foreign policy issues) by criticising President Bush only days before voting day.

The political sophistication and ruthless cunning of Islamic terrorists was exemplified when Islamic fighters operating in Iraq against Coalition forces carried out a series of highly publicised kidnappings of Westerners including Ken Bigley. The hostages were displayed on videos posted in Islamist websites pleading for their lives and the withdrawal of British troops. Bigley was shown wearing an orange jumpsuit reminiscent of Al-Qaeda suspects held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and sitting chained in a metal cage. Ken Bigley’s elderly mother made a heartrending public appeal to the kidnappers to release her son alive. The kidnapping was clearly calculated to take advantage of anti-war British sentiment and to undermine the position of then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Inevitably, it seemed, Bigley was beheaded by his captors and a gruesome video of his murder was posted on the internet. Among the chief demands of the kidnappers was the release of two female scientists who had worked on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program from US custody. The kidnappers had sought to undermine Western morale and succeeded to a large extent judging by the reaction of Western newspapers including the Irish Times which was highly critical of the US and British governments’ approach:
“It requires and demands a much more cohesive and credible international response. Mr Bigley's murder will reinforce Mr Tony Blair's difficulty in justifying his Iraq policies. But there can be no quarrel with his refusal to deal directly with the kidnappers or to concede a linkage between hostage-taking and terrorism. That is not to say that the refusal of the US government to change its policy on releasing the two women scientists who worked with Saddam Hussein can not be criticised.”

Meanwhile other Islamist terrorist organisations such as Hamas openly promote violent jihad, Islamic fundamentalism, and anti-Israeli propaganda at political rallies to a radicalised Palestinian audience who have suffered decades of misery under Israeli military occupation. The Palestinians portray a more palatable version of their struggle with Israel to English speaking audiences on the website of The Palestinian Information Centre. The site links to the website of the British leftist Stop The War Coalition who peacefully campaign against and demonstrate their objections to the military conflicts against in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. It is important to point out that most British leftists who are opposed to US and Western military involvement in armed conflict in Muslim countries are also adamantly opposed to the Islamist violence espoused by the leading Palestinian political organisations. Meanwhile organisations such as CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), alleged to be a front for Hamas and Hezbollah promotes an uncritically positive image of Islam. During the 1980’s Iranian-controlled Hezbollah hijacked passengers airliners, regularly attacked Israel and took westerners such as Terry Waite and Brian Keenan hostage in Beirut in order to win global publicity in the western media and concession from Western governments. Today Hezbollah funded by Iran operates its own television station and accompanying website that promotes its pro-Iranian anti-Israeli anti-Western Islamist agenda. The Israeli Defence Force website promotes an unwavering hard-line stance toward Palestinian terrorism insisting that their military actions in Gaza and the West Bank are in response to Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. When Palestinians civilians are killed as a result of Israeli military action the most negative spin possible is created by Palestinian leaders.

Chat rooms and e-mail allow individuals to communicate with each other with little intrusion thanks to freely available encryption software maintaining anonymity if they so wish with little or no chance of law enforcement agencies intercepting them if they are planning terrorist atrocities. Anyone who is familiar with Cold War espionage fiction will be aware of the complex surveillance used to catch subversives crossing borders with multiple identities. Online it is possible to evade law enforcement by using an e-mail address for a single communication before discarding it and creating a new account to throw off pursuers. While law enforcement officials are aware of terrorists' use of the Internet, they cannot monitor Web sites for both logistical and legal reasons, according to spokesperson Steve Berry of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations' National Infrastructure Protection Center. "However repugnant to our perception and to the general public and law enforcement their Web site or use of it might be, that does not give us the authority to block them," Berry told NewsFactor. "That's free speech. That's the country we live in." A simple internet search will uncover detailed information for anybody interested in learning how to use a military sniper rifle. Other information exists relating to creating powerful bombs out of easily obtainable materials. The internet therefore allows a diffuse umbrella terror network to operate, recruiting and plotting without any centralised leadership. Al-Qaeda has become a recognisable global brand and dominates the foreign policy debates of the major world powers but may not number more than a few thousand individuals scattered throughout the world. Many in the American government have concluded that killing or capturing suspected terrorists and subjecting them to “interrogation” such as “water-boarding” is the obvious solution. The CIA and the Pentagon have long defended the use of Guantanamo Bay, a base on the eastern tip of Cuba, arguing that the detainees provide priceless intelligence to foil terrorist attacks. This activity has been highlighted by the ACLU who campaign to expose alleged abuse of suspects at Guantanamo Bay. The left-leaning ACLU has also campaigned against attempts by the LAPD to monitor Muslims on the “faulty-notion” that Muslims are “more likely to commit violent acts than people of other faiths.” The ACLU has been ridiculed by right wing commentators such as Robert Spencer:

"Of course they aren't-that's why we see Presbyterians blowing themselves up in crowded restaurants, Buddhists flying planes into buildings and Amish waving placards crowing that they will soon dominate the world. The mapping of Muslim communities is sensible in light of the violent acts committed around the world-more than 9,000 separate attacks since 9/11-in the name of Islam. But political correctness has kept law enforcement officials and the media from asking the hard questions they should ask of Muslim leaders in the United States."

US foreign policy in the Middle East since 1945 has been focused on securing oil resources for the American economy and has led to unsavoury Machiavellian relationships with Middle Eastern rulers with heinous human rights records such as the Saudi Royal family and Saddam Hussein. Many Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah provide charity and services not provided by the state and apportion blame for complex problems in their societies on secular regimes whose ideologies conflict with their religious codes, the “Little Satan” (Israel) and the “Great Satan” (The United States). In North America and Western Europe many assume that the violence committed by violent Muslim groups is motivated solely by the injustices of these Western puppet regimes. Though clearly Osama Bin Laden is a hero to many young Muslims both in the Middle East and throughout the world because he offers an alternative to corrupt Arab regimes, Westerners consistently fail to understand the primarily religious character of the Islamist violence. A deeply questionable thesis that if the US ceases to meddle in Iraq (where a “democratic” regime has been installed accompanied by a savage response from insurgents) Al-Qaeda in Iraq will cease to exist, has been put forward by left-wing commentators. In his video broadcasts Bin Laden has cynically exploited the cynicism of many Westerners who are justifiably unhappy with many aspects of modern capitalism to justify his apparent quest to forcibly convert the entire world to Islam:

“This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings and feudalism, you should today liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system. If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of "globalization" in order to protect democracy. And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; the reeling of many of you under the burden of interests-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system. So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

Fundamentally those who are engaged in political violence are risk takers and opportunists. If an act of savagery such as the bombing of an airliner, the murder of captive on an internet video, the assassination of a politician etc with the publicity it generates in the modern media can shake the will of a society that is more economically powerful and militarily stronger, an individual already contemptuous of decadent democratic politics, might be inclined to believe it is a greater crime not to use political violence and information manipulation to achieve his ends. Shameless media manipulation, questionable justifications for military interventions, the use of torture against terrorist suspects and following the rule of law as it suits by supposedly democratically accountable governments is likely to reinforce the cynical contempt that psychotically deranged individuals like Kaczynski and Bin Laden have for our flawed but sacred democratic processes.

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