Responses to "Terrorism is Information Warfare disguised as Military Action"
- Thread starter Mike Bobbitt
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A bit more food for thought/debate....
Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act - http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-e.html#rid-33409
Why language matters in media
Terrorists and journalists have entered into a bizarre symbiotic relationship that begs a discussion of the meaning of language in context.
Doron Zimmermann, ISN Security Watch, 6 Jul 06
Imagine a terrorist attack, as opposed to some other kind of military engagement, and nobody to witness it. Such a supposed terrorist attack is at best a non-event, at worst a farce. Conversely, this counterfactual proposition also reveals a key dimension of terrorism, which is the need for an audience. In fact, the greater the audience, the better.
A crucial function in the terrorist cycle - from actor, via victim to audience - is the transmission of the dramatic experience of terrorist performance violence to the mesmerized crowds. Today, this function is carried out by the media. Early on, Latin American terrorists realized that one bomb in the city that was reported on in the press was worth more than 30 liquidated government troops somewhere in the remote countryside.
Without the media to proliferate knowledge and imagery of terrorist violence to a mass audience in the main consisting of consumers of print or audiovisual media, we are back to square one - our proposition of a non-event. The absurdity of this dynamic was aptly captured by the admission of a terrorist, who maintained that “we would throw roses, if it would work.”
Since the late 1960s, terrorists and journalists have entered into a bizarre symbiotic relationship. As the doyen of terrorism studies, Walter Laqueur, once pronounced: “[V]iolence is news, and peace and harmony are not.”
Terrorism has evolved into a sophisticated form of psychological warfare, whose principal modus operandi is the weaponization of the communicable act of terror. And in the terrorists' calculus, the media’s role is frequently that of a delivery system.
At the heart of terrorism’s perceived success is an insidious dynamic characterized by the confluence of interests of all participants. And while reforming or dissuading terrorists is at the center of many national and international security policies, the fact that the media is not infrequently an unwilling accessory to terrorist violence cannot be glossed over.
In an age of diminishing journalistic returns, with editors demanding ever more stories while deadlines keep piling up, and an inexorable pecuniary logic at work in most media outlets today, the journalistic ethos has suffered egregiously. And journalists themselves are often the principal victims of editorial pressure.
The withering of investigative journalism seems a foregone conclusion, while the professional commitment to dispassionate observation and factual exactitude, coupled with linguistic rigor, have engendered a thinly veiled partisanship. Worse, a majority of the readers and viewers presumably do not care or are not aware of the situation, having been demoted to mere consumers of infotainment.
Many such consumers and purveyors of terrorist performance violence today are either evidently insensitive to journalistic values of integrity and rigorous standards in reporting; or cynically share an implied understanding that the imperatives of the free market these days supersede the right of the public to conscientious and honest reporting, based on verifiable and viable sources, and devoid of exaggeration and distortion. And never have these values been more important than in the age of mass casualty terrorism, where equivocacy and double standards in the media are on a rampage.
In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes massacred in cold blood and brought home to approximately 400 million viewers achieved the desired objective of excoriating the suffering of the Palestinian people. On the 11 September 2001, al-Qaida upped the ante to the tune of near 3,000 victims to deliver its most mediagenic yet. Fewer casualties might not have drawn enough of a virtual crowd.
Terrorists’ methods are decidedly utilitarian, not nihilistic. In the context of this latest development of terrorism, there are plenty of reasons that ought to weigh heavily with proponents and opponents of a return to a virtuous journalistic ethos.
The most obvious problematic consequence of the media’s symbiotic relationship with terrorism is the demise of accountability, responsibility and culpability.
Let it be understood that partisanship is never a crime in an open society. However, at the same time, the maintenance of the semblance of professional integrity, neutrality and dispassion projecting a false sense of objectivity while engaging in an almost commonplace but profoundly dishonest form of advocacy has become an accepted norm.
On an operational level, this kind of abuse in the media becomes evident when editorials and news articles blend, with opinions corroborating stories, and stories reinforcing opinions. The result is that commentary and news become quite indistinguishable. As opposed to the seen opinion leaders, whose debates resonate with portions of the public, and who themselves are open to criticism, these are the unseen and unaccountable manipulators and manufacturers of public opinion.
There are no two ways about it: either we agree that terrorists are always terrorists, or we don’t. If we make exemptions and allow, for example, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Lebanese Hezbollah to become a happy band of freedom fighters, we have obviated the concept of terrorism and all and sundry violence of all shades thus becomes qualitatively indistinguishable.
The corollary to this equation of every form of violence is that the right to self-defense becomes the first casualty. It is no coincidence that the adoption of a universal definition of terrorism has been time and again successfully torpedoed by a lobby in the United Nations General Assembly - the selfsame Organization of the Islamic Conference. In the field of terrorism studies, the meaning of the term terrorism, though guarded against by most researchers in its function as a moniker and tool of political stigmatization, has become a commonplace, although one of the lowest common denominator.
It could be stated that there is a broad and pragmatic consensus among specialists that terrorists are people who indiscriminately murder civilians and soldiers alike, irrespective of their age or gender in order to intimidate immediate and/or remote audiences in the furtherance of religiously or politically ideological objectives.
The sophistry of terrorists’ apologists would have us equate the incumbents and insurgents, governments and non-state political violence movements. While not every government deserves that designation if measured against the benchmarks of old democracies, terrorism is not a term most of us use to describe operations of a regular armed force that acts under a genuine public mandate and is subject to verifiable parliamentary and judicial scrutiny.
This also holds true when military forces of a democracy kill innocent bystanders and non-combatants - so-called collateral damage - in hot or cold pursuit of the terrorists. And here comes the key difference: it is one of legitimacy and intention. The chronic muddling of the question of legitimacy and intention in the media is tantamount to moral relativism.
Finally, the privileges of the media are in need of a reappraisal. The media has a fundamental obligation, and not an institutional choice, to inform the public in a manner consistent with the values and dignity of an open society, whom it principally serves. The bond of this obligation is indisputably true when reporting about forces, whose very acts expose them as utterly opposed to the very values, without which there would be no free press in the first place.
Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act - http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/info/act-e.html#rid-33409
Why language matters in media
Terrorists and journalists have entered into a bizarre symbiotic relationship that begs a discussion of the meaning of language in context.
Doron Zimmermann, ISN Security Watch, 6 Jul 06
Imagine a terrorist attack, as opposed to some other kind of military engagement, and nobody to witness it. Such a supposed terrorist attack is at best a non-event, at worst a farce. Conversely, this counterfactual proposition also reveals a key dimension of terrorism, which is the need for an audience. In fact, the greater the audience, the better.
A crucial function in the terrorist cycle - from actor, via victim to audience - is the transmission of the dramatic experience of terrorist performance violence to the mesmerized crowds. Today, this function is carried out by the media. Early on, Latin American terrorists realized that one bomb in the city that was reported on in the press was worth more than 30 liquidated government troops somewhere in the remote countryside.
Without the media to proliferate knowledge and imagery of terrorist violence to a mass audience in the main consisting of consumers of print or audiovisual media, we are back to square one - our proposition of a non-event. The absurdity of this dynamic was aptly captured by the admission of a terrorist, who maintained that “we would throw roses, if it would work.”
Since the late 1960s, terrorists and journalists have entered into a bizarre symbiotic relationship. As the doyen of terrorism studies, Walter Laqueur, once pronounced: “[V]iolence is news, and peace and harmony are not.”
Terrorism has evolved into a sophisticated form of psychological warfare, whose principal modus operandi is the weaponization of the communicable act of terror. And in the terrorists' calculus, the media’s role is frequently that of a delivery system.
At the heart of terrorism’s perceived success is an insidious dynamic characterized by the confluence of interests of all participants. And while reforming or dissuading terrorists is at the center of many national and international security policies, the fact that the media is not infrequently an unwilling accessory to terrorist violence cannot be glossed over.
In an age of diminishing journalistic returns, with editors demanding ever more stories while deadlines keep piling up, and an inexorable pecuniary logic at work in most media outlets today, the journalistic ethos has suffered egregiously. And journalists themselves are often the principal victims of editorial pressure.
The withering of investigative journalism seems a foregone conclusion, while the professional commitment to dispassionate observation and factual exactitude, coupled with linguistic rigor, have engendered a thinly veiled partisanship. Worse, a majority of the readers and viewers presumably do not care or are not aware of the situation, having been demoted to mere consumers of infotainment.
Many such consumers and purveyors of terrorist performance violence today are either evidently insensitive to journalistic values of integrity and rigorous standards in reporting; or cynically share an implied understanding that the imperatives of the free market these days supersede the right of the public to conscientious and honest reporting, based on verifiable and viable sources, and devoid of exaggeration and distortion. And never have these values been more important than in the age of mass casualty terrorism, where equivocacy and double standards in the media are on a rampage.
In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes massacred in cold blood and brought home to approximately 400 million viewers achieved the desired objective of excoriating the suffering of the Palestinian people. On the 11 September 2001, al-Qaida upped the ante to the tune of near 3,000 victims to deliver its most mediagenic yet. Fewer casualties might not have drawn enough of a virtual crowd.
Terrorists’ methods are decidedly utilitarian, not nihilistic. In the context of this latest development of terrorism, there are plenty of reasons that ought to weigh heavily with proponents and opponents of a return to a virtuous journalistic ethos.
The most obvious problematic consequence of the media’s symbiotic relationship with terrorism is the demise of accountability, responsibility and culpability.
Let it be understood that partisanship is never a crime in an open society. However, at the same time, the maintenance of the semblance of professional integrity, neutrality and dispassion projecting a false sense of objectivity while engaging in an almost commonplace but profoundly dishonest form of advocacy has become an accepted norm.
On an operational level, this kind of abuse in the media becomes evident when editorials and news articles blend, with opinions corroborating stories, and stories reinforcing opinions. The result is that commentary and news become quite indistinguishable. As opposed to the seen opinion leaders, whose debates resonate with portions of the public, and who themselves are open to criticism, these are the unseen and unaccountable manipulators and manufacturers of public opinion.
There are no two ways about it: either we agree that terrorists are always terrorists, or we don’t. If we make exemptions and allow, for example, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Lebanese Hezbollah to become a happy band of freedom fighters, we have obviated the concept of terrorism and all and sundry violence of all shades thus becomes qualitatively indistinguishable.
The corollary to this equation of every form of violence is that the right to self-defense becomes the first casualty. It is no coincidence that the adoption of a universal definition of terrorism has been time and again successfully torpedoed by a lobby in the United Nations General Assembly - the selfsame Organization of the Islamic Conference. In the field of terrorism studies, the meaning of the term terrorism, though guarded against by most researchers in its function as a moniker and tool of political stigmatization, has become a commonplace, although one of the lowest common denominator.
It could be stated that there is a broad and pragmatic consensus among specialists that terrorists are people who indiscriminately murder civilians and soldiers alike, irrespective of their age or gender in order to intimidate immediate and/or remote audiences in the furtherance of religiously or politically ideological objectives.
The sophistry of terrorists’ apologists would have us equate the incumbents and insurgents, governments and non-state political violence movements. While not every government deserves that designation if measured against the benchmarks of old democracies, terrorism is not a term most of us use to describe operations of a regular armed force that acts under a genuine public mandate and is subject to verifiable parliamentary and judicial scrutiny.
This also holds true when military forces of a democracy kill innocent bystanders and non-combatants - so-called collateral damage - in hot or cold pursuit of the terrorists. And here comes the key difference: it is one of legitimacy and intention. The chronic muddling of the question of legitimacy and intention in the media is tantamount to moral relativism.
Finally, the privileges of the media are in need of a reappraisal. The media has a fundamental obligation, and not an institutional choice, to inform the public in a manner consistent with the values and dignity of an open society, whom it principally serves. The bond of this obligation is indisputably true when reporting about forces, whose very acts expose them as utterly opposed to the very values, without which there would be no free press in the first place.
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don't watch much Al Arabiya, or Al Jazeera, do ya?Weinie said:
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you should. Even just read the English translations online. "Jingoistic" doesn't begin to cover it. If you have access to an Arabic speaker/reader, things get even more bizarre.
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