Security Journalism and the Mainstream in UK Since 2007

7/27/2019 Security Journalism and the Mainstream in UK Since 2007

1/22

Security journalism and the mainstream

in Britain since 7/7: translating terror

but inciting violence?

International Aairs86: 4 (2010) 903924 2010 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aairs

ANDREW HOSKINS AND BEN OLOUGHLIN

Since the London bombings of 7 July 2005, political discourses amplied bywhat we shall call security journalism have raised the spectre of the internet as

a medium through which Muslims in Britain are radicalized. Might it be, on thecontrary, that it is the very messengers of the security threatprincipally themainstream media in the UKthat function, however inadvertently, as the chiefradicalizers? To put the question more simply: does BBC news radicalize?

It is commonplace to register the role of news in delivering or communi-cating terror because of its intrinsic gravitation towards that which is extremeand dangerous. Terrorists, newsmakers and audiences are all aware of this; it isa taken-for-granted feature and indeed dilemma of mainstream security newsenvironments. But although news coverage of terrorist shocks disrupts, securitycoverage of terrorism in general is for the most part benign. The pattern of newsreporting of terrorism-related events modulates between short and intensive

bursts and the ongoing containing of the shock of attacks through familiar newspackaging and analysis, rendering them intelligible.1 However dening events like9/11 and 7/7 are as tangible moments or ruptures in news and political discourses,it is actually the ongoing, and less tangible, medial everyday communication thatstructures what we are calling here the mainstream.2 We use the term medial torefer to the way in which media texts are interwoven into our lives: the continuityand familiarity of news production and consumption practices. In this article weargue that much more attention needs to be given to what we shall call the medialunderlayer that mainstream news security discourses help to constitute, if we areto more eectively understand the orientation of and responses to radicalizing

discourses. In particular, we focus on British Muslim and other racialized minorityethnic groups in relation both to extremist messages that invoke their (collective)name and to the translations of these messages by western news media, especiallyin the UK and the US. We aim to show that it is via a pervasive and continu-ously present medial underlayer relating the suering of persecuted groups (forexample, Palestinians), and the weakness of western administrations responsesto that suering, that the mainstream is viewed and understood by those seen as

1 Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, Television and terror: conicting times and the crisis of news discourse (Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

2 See also, R. Grusin, Prediation: aect and mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).


2/22

Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin

904International Aairs 86: 4, 2010 2010 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aairs

potentially vulnerable to violent extremist messages. In this way, the mainstreamis constituted to an extent that its parameters are xed in terms of how it operatesand who is presumed (by newsmakers, audiences and policy-makers) to inhabit it

and be subject to its inuences.Our approach to the mainstream also includes consideration of the remit andthe functions of security journalism. This is a relatively underexamined genreof news (especially compared to war journalism, for example), which should bemore explicitly addressed and opened to change, and we hope that this article willstimulate debate to this end.

We will present data from interviews with Muslims in Britain that demon-strate that the mainstream is a legitimate and timely subject in security studies.For instance, coverage by mainstream media organizations such as ITV, Sky andthe BBCfamiliar, trustworthy Auntieof events in the Middle East, SouthAsia and indeed Europe and Britain perpetuates longstanding understandings ofMuslim suering. The websites that combine to form a jihadist media system oerreporting on the same events, with a dierent slant of course. But in the newmedia ecology,3 in which news consumers are alert to the partiality of any newsreporting, whether from the BBC or Al-Qaeda, allnews of these eventswhatwe call the medial underlayer of the mainstreamfunctions to remind Muslimaudiences of underlying narratives of grievance and frustration. This is part of awider process, then, beyond the weaponization of the media: it is not simplythat media provide an oxygen of publicity to terrorist groups, but that there isan enduring and underlying medial or structured dimension in the iterations ofpotentially radicalizing news content.

Our argument stems from a series of interviews with individual Muslims inBritain in 2009 in which the interviewees were asked to compare jihadist mediaproductions in Arabic with English-language translations.4 Research participantsalso reected upon mainstream news reporting in Britain. We drew three ndingsfrom our study. The rst is that participants treat jihadist and mainstream textsalike, seeking to identify the biases, institutional agendas and styles of reportingthat might manipulate audiences. Second, participants were able to reject jihadisttexts while arming the perceived historical injustices and struggles to whichthose texts refer and which they represent. Any media representation of Muslimssuering could activate emotional responses and potentially trigger an urge totake action. In addition, the task of comparing dierent versions of jihadist textsenabled them to articulate critiques of such materials and the uses to which theyare put. This led to our third nding: that participants assumed othersordinarypeoplecould be aected and manipulated by jihadist texts but believed thatthey, as not-your-typical-viewer, were immune. Our participants had a keen

3 The new media ecology is our current media-saturated environment of perpetual connectivity, in which weare intensely aware of distant conicts or close-to-home threats yet in which insecurities are also containedrendered intelligiblethrough mainstream news discourses.

4 Developing our understanding of the language of extremism and its potential for predicting risk, funded bythe Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI). The research team included the authors andPaul Taylor, Paul Rayson, Sheryl Prentice, Carole Boudeau and Mark Carrigan.


3/22

Security journalism and the mainstream in Britain since 7/7


sense of the vulnerable group jihadists are targeting but did not recognizethemselves as members of that group, even if they sympathized with the sameissues and struggles. Such individuals could easily be conceived of as extremist,

then, despite occupying a position across the mainstream and margins and actuallyexplicitly rejecting violence.These ndings support those of the only comparable study conducted in Britain,

by Baines and colleagues in 2005.5 This involved a series of focus groups in whichBritish Muslims were shown radical material: the results suggested that the researchparticipants could understand the events depicted, and sympathize with the motivesof some jihadist actors, without actually supporting the violent action itself. Thekey nding was that such materials activate and reinforce pre-existing narrativesof Muslim grievance. By implication, these activation and reinforcement functionscould be performed by any media, not just radical or Arabic-language media.

This further implies that we must think beyond existing categories and assump-tions about the relationship between media and terrorism, and about mainstreamsand margins or extremes, in the broader condition we describe below as diusedwar, a condition marked by increasing connectivity and communication acrosscultures, languages and security situations. News reporting, in the form ofsecurity journalism, has performed some predictable functions in British societyand culture since the London bombings of 7 July 2005. It has delivered regularrepresentations of terrorist threats to a presumed national audience, showing usthe threat we face, by oering coverage of Al-Qaeda leaders speeches, bombattempts, criminal trials and radical protesters in Britain. Security journal-isms delivery of Al-Qaeda speeches is particularly signicant. By repackaging

and remediating jihadist media productions from one context and language intoanother, reporters oer to British audiences messages presumed to be radical-izing to would-be jihadist recruits.

Such reporting serves a second function: it constitutes a version of Britishsociety made up of, on the one hand, a small set of vulnerable or threateningindividuals to whom Al-Qaeda productions must be appealing and, on the other,a majority or mainstream who must be aware, concerned, vigilant and, if calledupon, resilient in the face of such projected threats. Elsewhere we have shownthat British security journalism systematically reduces complex jihadist texts suchas productions by bin Laden and Al-Zawahari to short clips of angry, gesticu-lating men.6 This blocks understanding of the apparent threat, because aspects ofjihadist texts that might be persuasive to some Muslim audiences, such as religiousquotations, political analysis, conciliatory oers and various songs, poems andother modes of attunement to the mood of the text, are entirely omitted fromwestern media reporting. In this way, it will appear improbable to some that theremediated residue alone could be persuasive.

5 Paul Baines, Nicholas J. OShaughnessy, Kevin Moloney, Barry Richards, Sara Butler and Mark Gill, Muslimvoices: the British Muslim response to Islamist video-polemic: an exploratory study, research paper 3/06,Craneld University, 2006.

6 Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, Remediating jihadfor western news: the renewal of gatekeeping?,forthcoming inJournalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 12: 1, 2011.


4/22



It is clear, then, that both security journalism itself, and the notion ofmainstream media more broadly, face challenges. Security journalism reports onterrorism in a way that retards public understanding of Al-Qaeda and its sympa-

thizers. Meanwhile the news media more broadly, whether mainstream or jihadist,English-language or Arabic, can activate frustration in some Muslim audiences.Does this mean the BBC should stop reporting on relations between Israel andthe Palestinians, or on the conict in Afghanistan? Does this mean ITN mustacknowledge its inevitable institutional biases and simply be transparent aboutwhat it is not covering and why? Does this mean that Sky News should oerexcerpts from Al-Jazeera and even from jihadist media itself, to allow all viewersto become critical comparativists across the global media menu? While muchattention is focused on the role of the media around shocking terrorist attacks,security journalisms presumptions about to whom, and for whom, it is reportingraise fundamental questions about the eects of a much broader range of routinenews reporting.

Research framework: diffused war and media translation

The context for examining security journalism is a condition we call diused war,a new paradigm of war.7 There are three axes to diused war. First, like all aspectsof social life, the relationships and institutions of war are increasingly constitutedby digital media connections and networks and take on a medial formwhatsome media scholars have called a mediatized condition.8 Second, as war is increas-ingly mediatized, we witness more diuse causal relations between action and eect:

the properties of networked communication enable emergent dynamics in whichoutcomes cannot be predicted or reduced to the capacity of actors or existingstructures. Rather, unforeseeable and amorphous publics can be harnessed throughdigital technologies and softwares and an increasingly global information infra-structure to carry out actions or disrupt the operations of conventional militaryor security agents.9 Just as Devjis analysis shows how Al-Qaeda demonstrates aterrorism dened by eects without causes,10 so citizen-led cyberconict, public

7 Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, War and media: the emergence of diused war(Cambridge: Polity, 2010).8 Simon Cottle, Mediatized conict: developments in media and conict studies (Maidenhead: Open University Press,

2006); N. Couldry, Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digitalstorytelling, New Media and Society 10: 3, 2008, pp. 37391; S. Hjarvard, From bricks to bytes: the mediati-

zation of a global toy industry, in I. Bondebjerg and P. Golding, eds, European culture and the media (Bristol:Intellect Books, 2004); S. Hjarvard, The mediatization of religion: a theory of the media as agents of religiouschange, Northern Lights 6: 1, 2008, pp. 926; Hoskins and OLoughlin, War and media; K. Lundby, ed., Media-tization: concept, changes, consequences (New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); W. Schulz, Reconstructingmediatization as an analytical concept, European Journal of Communication 19: 1, 2004, pp. 87101; S. Living-stone, On the mediation of everything: ICA presidential address 2008,Journal of Communication 59: 1, 2009,pp. 118.

9 The phrase information infrastructure is Sir David Omands, cited in M. Dillon, Governing terror: thestate of emergency in biopolitical emergence, International Political Sociology, 1, 2007, pp. 728. Cf. G. C.Bowker and S. L. Star, Sorting things out: classication and its consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000);Paul Edwards, Infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotech-nical systems, in Philip Brey, Andrew Feenberg and Thomas Misa, eds, Modernity and technology (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 185225.

10 F. Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: militancy, morality and modernity (London: Hurst, 2005), p. 1.


5/22



diplomacy, information leakage and other aspects of war become more dicultto control. Third, the consequence of mediatized, diused relationships is greateruncertainty for policy-makers in the conduct of war. These three axesmediati-

zation, causality and decision-makingcan shape and reinforce one another inways that make diused war a coherent and intelligible paradigm. We use the termaxes because each is a matter of degree rather than being simply present or absent.Not all war is mediatized; not all actions have unforeseen eects; and uncertaintyrarely paralyses policy-makers absolutely. Rather, there is a modulation of each;policy-makers certainty oscillates over time, for instance.

These three axes capture the dynamics of an emerging paradigm of war withinwhich the battle of ideas between governments and Al-Qaeda-inspired jihadistshas unfolded in recent years.11 The latter take full advantage of a mediatized world,operating a mix of hierarchical ocial propaganda production and distributionsites alongside a diused network of supporter sites which both push ocialmaterial out through online networks and pull in ideas, user-generated contentand new sympathizers, as well as monitoring mainstream media to identify newevents salient to jihadist politics and to evaluate how mainstream Arabic andwestern media are covering jihadists themselves. Hence the condition of diusedwar creates unprecedented real-time multidirectional relationships betweenmainstream and extremist media (of which mainstream media professionals maynot even be aware) and between societies and cultures, conducted through severallanguages and in several styles.

Translation is an important process in diused war. As information fromdierent linguistic groups party to security events circulates in increased quanti-

ties, more accessibly and at higher speed, we would expect security actors to seekto understand and inuence those working in other languages. Manuel Castellshas recently written that the network society diuses selectively throughoutthe planet,12 and translation is one mechanism through which selection occurs.This process operates through news institutions: a recent study of the BBCWorld Service indicates how a single story such as that of Obamas victory inthe US presidential election gets trans-edited by journalists for the WorldServices various language websites, mixing translation of original story textwith additional contextualizing material to render an American electoral contestintelligible in a range of societies.13 Trans-editing also occurs through individualsown media practices: for example, in migrant families in which those born inthe host country translate personally for friends and family from the country oforigin, or in individuals use of social media to send stories to friends and familyaround the world with translations, links and so on. Examining the BBC WorldServices decision to open up Arabic-language services during the war on terrorperiod, Podkalicka argues that translation policies reect power asymmetries and

11 HM Government, Countering international terrorism: the United Kingdoms strategy (London: TSO, 2006), p. 13.12 Manuel Castells, Communication power(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 25.13 Tom Cheeseman and Arnd-Michael Nohl, Many voices, one BBC World Service?Gatekeeping and transedit-

ing the Obama elections 2008, forthcoming inJournalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 11: 1, 2011.


6/22



political priorities in contemporary geopolitics.14 Which institutions and viewers-cum-users in which countries are translating for whom and why?

The question of translation allows us to step back and consider the role of the

mainstream in radicalization. In terror and security discourses, jihadist terrorismis often disembedded from ordinary society: populations may be sources of legiti-macy and consent, but they are rarely actively involved in the battle at hand,other than as passive victims. Yet the terror and security discourses run throughthe mainstream: jihadist violence, arrests, trials, plots are all regularly present inmainstream news and an underlying if unarticulated concern for publics. Themainstream may also be a source of recruits to such violence. Consequently,how translation shapes the version of jihadism present in mainstream public lifebecomes important; but this point is being overlooked. Take recent research inthe Change Institutes comprehensive series of Studies into violent radicalisa-tion commissioned by the European Commission. This aimed to explore thebeliefs, narratives and ideologies that underpin violent radicalism with a view todeveloping a much deeper understanding of the causes and remedies for violentradicalisation as part of an ideological response to the main terrorist threat facingEurope.15 Yet, despite the resources invested in 145 stakeholder and primary eld-work interviews in four Member States and an extensive analysis of the contentand imagery of terrorist rhetoric and propaganda found on the internet,16 thisresearch excluded consideration of other mass media and the role of its agents(commentators, journalists, experts, etc.) in translating and repackaging thebeliefs, narratives and ideologies that it sought to interrogate. Our analysis belowshows why this is a signicant omission.

The distribution and translation of media content also matter because theyilluminate a historical transformation under way in the relationship betweenmedia, audiences and terrorism. For a long time news media have vacillatedbetween amplifying terror and containing it, delivering alarming and often graphicnews while embedding it within familiar formats and narratives so that breakingevents are not too shocking to comprehend and so that audiences keep watching.Research has been carried out in Britain since the attacks of 11 September 2001to evaluate how multilingual, multi-ethnic audiences respond to news aboutterrorism and security crises.17 This research indicates that mainstream media,particularly the BBC, remain the primary source of news across all demographicgroups in times of crisis, but also that viewers able to watch news in severallanguages attain greater media literacy through their daily practices of consumingand comparing news in both, say, South Asian and British television, or Middle

14 Aneta Podkalicka, A translation factory or translations with soul? Changing practices by international broad-casters, forthcoming inJournalism: Theory Practice, Criticism 10: 6, 2010.

15 The Change Institute, Studies into violent radicalisation, Lot 2: the beliefs, ideologies and narratives (Brussels: EuropeanCommission, 2008), p. 4.

16 Change Institute, Studies into violent radicalisation, pp. 4, 8.17 Marie Gillespie, James Gow and Andrew Hoskins, Shifting securities: television news cultures before and after

Iraq 2003, funded by the Economic and Social Research Councils New Security Challenges programme,award no. RES-223-25-0063. Ben OLoughlin and Ivan verhanovski were employed as research associateson the project. The empirical research for the project is located at www.mediatingsecurity.com.


7/22



Eastern and British newspapers. Research also indicates that news consumersacross demographic groups speak about terrorism and indeed radicalization as ifthese were topics with which everyone and anyone would be familiar, but they also

speak of themselves assomeone more cynical or independent-minded than others inthe presumed news public they position themselves within; as not-your-typical-viewer.18 The combination of critical comparative competence in media literacyand self-positioning as both within a mainstream audience-cum-public and yetapart from it indicates that audiences for security journalism are possibly moresophisticated than journalists and indeed policy-makers recognize.19

The only existing academic study in which British Muslims have agreed toreect on jihadist materials was that referred to above, conducted by Paul Bainesand colleagues in 2005. They established four focus groups in dierent UK townsand cities and showed the participants, all Muslim men and women, propagandafrom Al-Qaeda and radical Iranian television broadcasters. The researchers foundthat some participants expressed understanding of the actions and arguments inthe footage shown, even if they did not explicitly support them. Baines and hiscolleagues concluded that, although such material might not radicalize peopledirectly, it can often reinforce wider negative attitudes towards the west, andin some cases demonstrate evidence of contempt for Western and/or Britishvalues. Equally, despite for the most part rejection of the intrinsic message ofthe material, there is almost always perceived to be an element of truth to thecontent.20 They found that participants understood the Al-Qaeda protagonistsas victims, forced into action out of frustration at continued Muslim suering,and that certain genres and styles elicited dierent degrees of engagement and

sympathy: an animated movie of Palestinian children encountering Israeli soldierswas moving for mothers but not for young men.Our challenge, then, was to build on these insights about diused war, the

increasing signicance of translation and the potentially complex audience inter-pretations of media coverage of terrorism to see how the apparent audience forjihadist materials responds to propaganda aimed at them. In the next section webriey introduce the methodology of our study and some of the ethical issuessuch research involved, before we present our analysis and ndings.

18 Ben OLoughlin, Carole Boudeau and Andrew Hoskins, Keeping the extraordinary at a distance: audienceunderstandings of discourses of radicalisation, forthcoming in Continuum: Journal of Media and CulturalStudies, 2010. Cf. Paddy Scannell, For-anyone-as-someone structures, Media, Culture and Society 22: 1, 2002,pp. 524.

19 Marie Gillespie, James Gow, Andrew Hoskins, Ben OLoughlin and Ivan verhanovski, Shifting securities:news cultures, multicultural society and legitimacy, Ethnopolitics 9: 2, 2010, pp. 23953; Marie Gillespie, Shift-ing securities: news cultures before and beyond the Iraq crisis 2003: full research report, ESRC end of awardreport, RES-223-25-0063 (Swindon: ESRC, 2007).

20 Baines et al., Muslim voices, p. 2.


8/22



Methodology and ethics21

One of the profound diculties in making claims about the nature and inu-ences of political and media discourses in the new media ecology is that the verydynamic phenomenon of connectivity identied above, and the diused andubiquitous nature of digital technologies, inhibit standard empirical contentanalysis of media. Conventional content analysis can show systematic patternsacross a narrow range of media outlets.22 Yet we know that audiences consumenews from a much broader set of primary and secondary sources. Moreover,measures of exposure to media have become so problematic that researchers arelargely at sea in their capacity to make claims about the power or role of newsmedia in shaping public opinion.23

Our approach seeks instead to track a set of ( jihadist) texts through commu-nication networks to illuminate how meaning is created through the remedia-

tion and translation of a given text as it is passed or diused through a range oflinguistic, cultural and institutional contexts. In this way we are not seeking asample of some imaginary comprehensive corpus, but, rather, seeking to illumi-nate the transformations in media texts as dynamic and uid entities that areremediated in and through a new media ecology.

The analytical framework we employ is nexus analysis.24 A nexus analysis mapsthe semiotic cycles (the circulation of symbols, including media content) gener-ated in the formation of a social network or institution such as a public sphere,sphericule or issue public, or in response to a mediated event such as a majortelevision broadcast, terrorist attack or sporting event. Nexus analysis explores thepast, present and future trajectories of meaning implicated in the sum of commu-nications around the phenomenon. Scollon and Scollon later revealed that theyhad arrived at this methodology after realizing, in a study or racism, that therewas no single point at which we could address problems of societal discrimination,institutional structure, and social change with any sense that this point was thefulcrum point around which everything else rotated.25

Elsewhere we have conducted a broader nexus analysis of the culture of jihadistmedia to which government, journalists and others have attributed a radicalizingeect in the past decade.26 We have studied apparently radicalizing communications

21 The necessary length constraints on this article restrict us to a summary of our methodology here; for a fullerexplanation of our approach, see A. N. Awan et al., Media and radicalization: political violence in the new media

ecology (London: Routledge, forthcoming), and Hoskins and OLoughlin, Television and terror.22 For instance, P. Goddard et al., Patriotism meets plurality: reporting the 2003 Iraq war in the British press,Media, War and Conict 1: 1, 2008, pp. 930 and W. L. Bennett et al., When the press fails: political power and the newsmedia: from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), demonstrated regularities in coverageof the 2003 Iraq war across a small but signicant set of mainstream UK and US newspapers respectively.Bennett et al. also analysed framing in US television news.

23 M. X. D. Carpini, Somethings going on here, but we dont know what it is: measuring citizens exposureto politically relevant information in the new media environment, in G. King et al., eds, The future of politicalscience. 100 perspectives (New York, and London: Routledge, 2009), p. 55.

24 R. Scollon and S. W. Scollon, News analysis discourse and the emerging internet (New York, and London: Routledge,2004); Awan et al., 2010.

25 R. Scollon and S. W. Scollon, News analysis: refocusing ethnography of action, Journal of sociolinguistics 11: 5,2007, pp. 60825.

26 Awan et al., Media and radicalization, 2010.


9/22



by jihadists as well as communications about jihadist radicalization issuing fromgovernments, journalists and other experts.27 The former involves semiotic cyclesfeaturing religious imagery, historical references, the legitimation of contempo-

rary violence and complex relations between on- and oine behaviour. The latterinvolves a series of statements about threats, extremists, resilience and vulnera-bility, a number of security practices, and emerging norms of security journalism.In this article we witness the procedures and networks through which texts byjihadists in one language become mainstream news reports in another languageabout texts by jihadists. Nexus analysis oers an essential openness to new andemergent phenomena rather than a reication of existing institutions and struc-tures (as exemplied by some more traditional static media content approaches)and is thus a more eective tool for studying communication networks in ux.

Furthermore, the majority of existing research has not engaged in a substan-tive and methodical way with potential consumers of such literatures in motionand has tended therefore to lack an understanding of patterns of reception andinterpretation. This has contributed to a generally poor understanding of howany extremist literature is understood by its target audience. Given that theecacy of such literature relies on its successful persuasion of individuals withinthe target audience, this has been an explanatory gap and a signicant problemin understanding dynamics of radicalization and counterradicalization. We arguethat, by exploring the resonance which extremist messages hold for vulnerablesections of the UK population, it is possible to gain insight into how, when andwhy those messages spread and the relationship in which this transmission standsto radicalization.

The analysis in this article represents one strand of our wider nexus analysis,in which we took the original (Arabic) and the translated (into English, as usedwidely in a range of media texts) texts and sought comparative analyses from ourinterviewees (see below). All three texts were chosen because they had receivedmuch publicity on jihadist forums and in western media alike upon their release.The texts were all statements made by major Al-Qaeda gures:

Text one: Address by Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the Americanpeople. The message is related to 9/11, released in October 2004 and entitledThe best way to avoid another Manhattan.

Text two: Address by Al-Qaeda second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri,mainly to the British. The message is related to the 7/7 London bombings,was released between September and November 2005 and was entitled Willsof the knights of the blessed London raid.

Text three: Address by Al-Qaeda third-in-command, Abu Yihya Al-Libi. Themessage is related to the Gaza conict in 20082009, released on 22 January2009 and entitled Palestine, erce ghting is now.

27 Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: political violence in the new media ecology, funded by theESRC New Security Challenges programme, award no. RES-181-25-0041, led by Andrew Hoskins: seehttp://www.newmediaecology.net/radicalisation/.


10/22



The main context of our approach may be summarized as follows. Not long afterthe 7/7 bombings it became clear that many Muslim communities in the UK, andspecic groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, felt overresearched as well as suspicious

of potential collaboration between academics and state institutions. Drawing onthe research teams network of contacts, access was facilitated to a diverse rangeof participants within groups that were both potentially vulnerable to extremistmessages and part of the target audience of extremist literatures.

Our work proceeded through a series of semi-structured interviews and a focusgroup. Details of the interviewees and focus group participants are given in theappendix. Questions covered a range of topics (also set out in the appendix). Inter-view transcripts were coded using the qualitative software package NVivo 8, whichis established as an authoritative analytical tool across the social sciences. An initialcoding framework was formulated from the interview schedule and the aims ofthe project.

The ndings of this strand of the project are not intended to be statisticallyrepresentative or generalizable to local populations. The purpose of the analysis israther to generate rich insight into the reception and interpretation of extremistmessages by western target audiences.

In approaching this project we draw upon our experience of ESRC NewSecurity Challenges (NSC) research,28 in which the sensitivities of both audiencesand professionals presented more of an issue than we had initially assumed, andthe concurrent ESRC NSC project Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation:political violence in the new media ecology.29 In the course of this work we wereaware of notable sensitivities on the part of many of our audience research subjects

about issues of condentiality, anonymity and the proposed uses of the research,even after they had received a full brieng about the project and granted informedconsent. The initial suspicion towards not only our own but also other similarpublic perceptions research projects on security reects a political climate inwhich many people are very guarded about expressing their opinions in publicarenas about Islamist terrorism and security policy. Common reasons given werethat they feared appearing to be racist or seeming sympathetic to terrorism, if theycriticized government policy. This reluctance reects a very widespread view thatwhatever public perceptions are uncovered by the research will not be taken intoaccount.

The particularly high sensitivity of British Muslim and other racialized minorityethnic groups meant that we had to be constantly vigilant about the ethical as wellas the political dimensions of our research. Muslims, in particular, report feelingthey are under constant scrutiny and surveillance and must negotiate accusationsof terrorism (implicit or explicit, subtle and overt) on a daily basis. This discour-ages public expression of views, and encourages a retreat into alternative spheresof political discussion and debate. As a result of such sensitivities, all names used

28 Gillespie et al., Shifting securities: television news cultures before and after Iraq 2003, funded by the ESRCsNew Security Challenges programme.

29 www.newmediaecology.net/radicalisation.


11/22



in the research were pseudonyms. Only the interviewer has knowledge of the trueidentity of the interviewees.

Analysis

Our rst nding is that interviewees treated jihadist texts as they would treatcontent in the non-radical news media, in terms of the texts bias, the agenda ofthe source, and the eects they presume such texts would have on other audiencemembers. British media were criticized for perpetuating ocial discourses thatwere perceived to be representing Islam as a threat to Britain and the West, suchthat news organizations were culpable of being manipulated. However, inter-viewees rejected the jihadist texts not only because of what they identied asa hatred expressed within them and the violence the texts advocated, but alsobecause the interviewees felt the rhetoric and styles were manipulative. JP said:I feel they use Islamic issues for their own purposes and interests, so I cannot seeit as convincing. This sentiment was echoed by a number of participants whosaw jihadists as manipulating more generalized Muslim concerns for their ownparticular ideological ends. In other interviews this perception was underscoredthrough discussions of the outcomes of jihadist actions. Rather than furtheringthe Islamic cause, such actions were seen to actively undermine the interests ofMuslims. As LN said, Look what happened after just one attack in 2001, invadingAfghanistan and Iraq, threatening Iran and putting the whole Middle East onthe edge of civil war as [is] the case now in Syria and Lebanon. There are twoseparate but related points here: rst, that extremists are seen to manipulate talk of

Muslim interests to further their own agenda; and second, that this agenda itselfoften produces geopolitical consequences which run contrary to Muslim interests.Our second nding is that interviewees could simultaneously reject jihadist

texts and politics and arm some or all of the stated grievances upon whichthe jihadists politics are based. Interviewees wished to repudiate the actions ofviolent extremists but resist any mainstream or ocial media/political discoursewhich seeks to discount the grievances underlying those actionsgrievancesthat are legitimate in the eyes of the target audience if our sample is any indica-tion. It would make no sense, therefore, to ask whether a British Muslim person(or anybody for that matter) was pro- or anti-bin Laden, for/against a jihadistmessage, or radicalized/non-radicalized. Individuals understandings and inter-pretations are more complex than this. Our ndings suggest that reducing theseattitudes to a stark dichotomy may even lead members of vulnerable communitiesto feel they must pick a side. The manner in which these issues are representedin the media and by ocials both obscures the relative sophistication and nuancesof individuals attitudes and potentially contributes to radicalization within thatgroup.

A rst consequence of these two ndings is that mainstream media may havethe potential to radicalize by reporting on Muslim suering: many of our partic-ipants said they found any news about Muslim suering upsetting and enraging;


12/22



their emotional response is not determined by particular framings or styles ofreporting, whether that of the jihadists or that of BBC News. Asked aboutwhether online jihadist material might be persuasive to some audiences, AT said

that these materials simply feed a kind of long-time feeling of oppression that hascome into existence even before inventing online ways we have a deep-seatedfeeling the western world is biased and these presentations just add to it. FP saidhe was persuaded in cases featuring long political struggles: The most convincingmessages, I would say ghting occupation forces such as in Iraq, Afghanistan andin Southern Ireland. Most of the participants identify the Arabic jihadist materialsas more persuasive than the English versions. JA said: The Arabic version plays onchords of feelings. Although the literal [English] translation is ne, [it] does notgive the implications of how the Arabs feel when they read or hear the word ofPalestine. However, he added: I am already convinced, regardless of the presen-tation. Hence the distinction between mainstream and extremist media becomesirrelevant because what provokes feeling is not the form but the substance; notthe representation but what is represented, and the sense of a continuity to whatis represented. A further consequence of this pattern is that people may fall into anextremist category because they sympathize with issues on which, it transpires,extremists or jihadists focuseven though they support these causes whether ornot jihadist media propagandize about them.

Given that participants treated jihadist and mainstream texts alike and were ableto reject jihadist texts while arming the perceived historical injustices and strug-gles to which jihadist texts refer and represent, it comes as no surprise to nd thatseveral interviewees articulated critiques of the jihadist texts and the uses to which

they are put. Studies show that multilingual, multi-ethnic news consumers aremore media-literate and reexive about how news is produced and consumed thanthe British population as a whole,30 and we soon observed interviewees identifyingweak points in Al-Qaedas strategic communications products. Many participantsshowed a conceptual grasp which is rarely reected in academic or media discoursesconcerning the target audiences of extremist messages. Through an empiricallygrounded conceptualization of the production and format of jihadist materials,participants were able to identify actions of Al-Qaedas strategic communicationswhich undermined the communicative ecacy of such producers and speakers inrelation to properties of the texts.

For instance, there was a consensus among focus group participants that bothvideos they were shown (texts 1 and 2, the bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri addresses)were produced and presented in a way that renders them ill-equipped to commu-nicate eectively with a western audience. Their vantage point as Muslims livingin Britain allows them to recognize both those aspects of the videos that draw on30 Marie Gillespie, guest ed. of special issue, Television news and transnational publics after September 11, in

her article, Transnational television audiences after September 11, 2001,Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies32: 6, 2006, pp. 90323. Marie Gillespie, Media, security and multicultural citizenship, European Journal ofCultural Studies 10: 3, 2007, special issue of the same name, pp. 275293. This nding varies by country,however: for a comparison of multilingual and multi-ethnic audience media consumption habits acrossEurope, see the Media and Citizenship project ndings at http://www.media-citizenship.eu/, accessed 14April 2010.


13/22



an Islamic context and also how such references and modes of argumentation arelikely to fail to move a western audience. This is suggestive of a weakness whichperhaps inheres in all such extremist messages when received in a western context.

CL, text 1: If it were in my capacity, I would change the whole message. The repetition ofthe same images or sentences is not working. The language of the text seems to [be] stillin the past centuries. I would rather listen to everyday language and avoid all these wordsthat call for violence or arms because simply we have been struggling for years but whatsthe result, more suering and more wounds.

CL, text 2: I think it is hard for Muslims living in Europe who enjoyed the support and thefreedom of thoughts would take the video seriously. This talk can be message to Muslimswho live in isolation but in situation like nowadays is dicult. The numbers of thosewhom the message appeal to are very few and I think have exceptional circumstances thatmake them go for this way of life.

LA, text 3: I am as an Arabic native speaker felt the message boring after three minutes,I can guess what about other who cannot speak the language and receive it in translatedform.

BB, text 1: I think the main problem with Osama bin Laden here in this video is that hemisses the approach. He is unable to address the western people and he cannot go beyondthe traditional speech of a Muslim preacher.

BB, text 2:Al-Zawahiri made the same mistake which Osama bin laden made in his speechby addressing the western world in Muslim and Middle Eastern discourse. The speakerbelieves they can understand the points and the history of examples mentioned in thevideo. It is a scene from a modern drama where actors lack the capability of communica-

tion.BB, text 3: He repeated the same images used by bin Laden and nothing new in this speech.

LN, text 1: He is unable even to address Muslims, and he is a leader of a minority ofMuslims, but not all Muslims. Now he is addressing the western world and in the meantime the Muslim people who live here do not understand or comprehend what he is saying.

LN, text 1:To be honest from my point of view I still believe that his speech is contain arepetitive sentences like ghting the indels, call for Al-jihad and driving the crusadersfrom the Arab homeland and Afghanistan. To be honest he did not give a new ideas orthoughts to show that is updating himself with the current of international events.

LN, text 3:He is trying to take some examples from history to match them with newevents. And that way does not work. I think there is a gap of how to address the westernpeople and how to address the Muslim people.

TC, text 1: The lm is not convincing it wants to express the concerns of a Muslimperson to a British person who has not the same things in life and do not care about thedaily routines in the Middle East.

TC, text 1:Osama bin Laden believes he can deliver a message to the Americans. He startedwith a Quranic verses as he was giving a lesson to religious seminary school. I can tell youit is not a style used by lay person in an ordinary speech. Second, he used a very classical


14/22



language that like he is coming from old ages.

For all those who share, however marginally, a western vantage pointevenone they actively repudiate in their politicsthe construction and characteristics

of many extremist texts will seem at points anachronistic and socio-culturallyincongruous. While these weaknesses have presumably been outweighed by otherfactors in the minds of those western Muslims who have been radicalized, thesendings suggest that placing stress on such perceived anachronistic and socio-culturally incongruous elements may prove eective within counterradicalizationcampaigns. As CL put it: I think it is hard for Muslims living in Europe whoenjoyed the support and the freedom of thoughts would take the video seriously.While there are obviously many countervailing factors, emphasis on the elementswhich make it dicult to take [such] videos seriously would be an eectivestrategy for adoption in counterradicalization campaigns.

Far from being a throwback to pre-modern times, contemporary radicaliza-tion and extremismparticularly of a westernized varietyare phenomena verymuch rooted in the confusions and antagonisms of modernity. Hence there is abasis for emotional appeal to a common experience situationally rooted in westernmodernity. This could take positive forms, such as appealing to the support andfreedom of thoughts which western target audiences enjoy, or negative forms,such as emphasizing and rejectingperhaps even deriding and satirizingthoseelements in extremist discourses and literatures which seem archaic and socio-culturally incongruous from the vantage point of westernized youth among thewestern target audiences of such extremism.

The process of translation was identied by interviewees as integral to these

cross-cultural communication and interpretation practices. It was commonlyreported that in the process of translation from Arabic to English by whichjihadist texts move from their original context to western news reporting, thereis a diminishing of the meaning, impact and persuasiveness of the original text.Elsewhere we have explored the western news medias selection and remediation oftranslated excerpts and found an apparently simple and settled gatekeeping modelthat produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission wherebylengthy, complex jihadist productions are reduced to short aggressive outbursts.31We found that particular audio-visual juxtapositions common in jihadist onlinematerial are regularly edited out of the versions transmitted on western news;

missing too is the online context of a list of comments under the line of theproduction (as with YouTube). We also found that scriptural references, referencesto the speakers status and credentials, and any speech by actors other than the leadspeaker are translated out. Also omitted are the political contexts referred to byjihadist leaders.

In fact, the socio-cultural incongruities of jihadist productions are furthercomplicated through the translation process itself, as illustrated by the threeextracts below:

31 Hoskins and OLoughlin, Remediatingjihad.


15/22



AF: The whole sense of the English language is unconvincing. Certain themes whichunderstood for Arabic speakers are unclear for the West and many may nd unsatised.

FP: In fact, the lm (Al-Libi) is much more an Arabic version. The English translation is

ne, but cannot give the same impression if an Arab got when I see or hear the message.The Arab version expresses the Arab anger clearly while the English states the issue islacking the enthusiasm, I would say, you have in the original one.

JA: The Arabic version plays on chords of feelings. Although the literal translation is ne,but does not gives the implications the Arab feel when they read or hear the word ofPalestine. The text in English does not give the same sense of anger running deeply insideArabs and the general thought that the westerns are biased about this key cause and itssubsequent cases.

Finally, our third nding concerns the construction of a social mainstream byand through the media. We found a consistent othering by respondents in the

categorization of those individuals and groups who were presumed by inter-viewees to be the intended or unintended recipientsof extremist messages and/or to be members of a mainstream audience. This othering also occurred in thedierentiation of themselves as outside these groups. In other words, our inter-viewees by default did not identify themselves as part of the groups and debatesdened as of interest by the project, but nonetheless they possessed a keen senseof those groups, debates and media. In one interview, for example, the respondent(PS) is employed as a TV reporter for an Arab satellite channel. In answering thequestion on his use/knowledge of media, he states:

There is a big dierence between the traditional media and the digital one. The latter work

depends largely on the Internet. The ordinary people believe there is no editorial controlover the digital media and that its contents of lms, articles go freely without any censor-ship.

This ndingthat individuals identify themselves as separate from any commu-nity of concern, as not inuenced by media, as not-your-typical-viewerisconsistent with that of our ESRC NSC research,32 but is also apparent across layaudiences and among media workers. This reveals assumptions about othersmedia and digital competencies or literacies. Furthermore, a connection appearsto be made between the unknown or unquantiable characteristics of ordinaryunderstandings of the internet, and a perception of vulnerability on the part

of people who dont understand how it works, dierent spaces and how theseare accessed or gated, and the threat posed by those who use or inhabit it, incontradistinction to more traditional media. Interestingly, this discourse mirrorsgovernment and journalistic discourses on extremist threats. Yet it is not clearwhat ordinary people, government or journalists base this assumption upon. Ourndings suggest that the elements of extremist content found in mainstream newsmedia, and the processes through which these are ltered and edited, are a crucialaspect of this equation that appears underexplored in research in the eld.

32 OLoughlin et al., Keeping the extraordinary at a distance.


16/22



Conclusion

Since the 7/7 London bombings a new genre of security journalism has becomeestablished in British news. This has contributed regular representations ofterrorist threats to a presumed national audience, oering coverage of the threatwe face in the form of Al-Qaeda leaders speeches, bomb attempts, criminaltrials and radical protesters in Britain. Security journalisms delivery of Al-Qaedaspeeches is particularly signicant. By repackaging and remediating jihadist mediaproductions from one context and language to another, reporters oer to Britishaudiences messages presumed to be radicalizing to would-be jihadist recruits.Such reporting serves a further function: it constitutes a version of British societymade up, on the one hand, of a small set of vulnerable or threatening individualsto whom Al-Qaeda productions must be appealing and, on the other, a majority ormainstream who must be aware, concerned, vigilant and, if called upon, resilient

in the face of such projected threats. These functions and the assumptions uponwhich they rest require scrutiny, however. The systematic reduction of complexjihadist texts to a few presumed newsworthy elements impedes understanding ofthe apparent threat.

On the basis of the evidence from our study of the response of British Muslimsto jihadist texts in Arabic and in English translation we have drawn three conclu-sions. The rst is that participants treat jihadist and mainstream texts alike, seekingto identify the biases, institutional agendas and styles of reporting that mightmanipulate audiences. A second nding is that participants could reject jihadisttexts while arming the perceived historical injustices and struggles to whichjihadist texts refer. From this we have inferred that any media representation ofMuslims suering could activate emotional responses and potentially trigger anurge to take action, though in the case of our participants that action would berestricted to political debate rather than violence. Furthermore, the manner inwhich participants could critically compare dierent jihadist and mainstream textsenabled them to articulate critiques of the jihadist texts and the uses to which theyare put. This led to our third nding: that participants assumed othersordinarypeople, as PS put itcould be aected and manipulated by jihadist texts butthey, as not-your-typical-viewer, were immune. Our participants had a keensense of the vulnerable group jihadists are targeting but felt themselves somehowexempt from membership of that group even if they sympathized with the same

issues and struggles. Such individuals could easily be treated as extremist, then,despite occupying a position across the mainstream and margins. This blurringof the mainstream and extreme in one regard at least is part of the conditions ofdiused war and will present an enduring challenge to journalists, policy-makersand citizens through the second decade of the twenty-rst century.

Our aim in this article has been to illuminate the potentially unfortunate itera-tions of the output of security journalism. In doing so we recognize the tremen-dous pressures on contemporary journalism in relation to the disinvestment ininvestigative journalism by news and media organizations in a new media ecology


17/22



driven to new extremes of competition. In an ideal world, security journalists inpossession of relevant language skills and religious knowledge would be aordedthe time and space to interpret original Al-Qaeda productions rather than rely

on incomplete and selective translationsin other words, to perform their ownnexus analyses. Instead, those who do not have or wish to have access to originalextremist texts, or the language skills to interpret them, are fed a very particulardiet of extremist messages. Our small interviewee corpus revealed just some ofthe complex interpretations available from multimodal extremist messages thatare lost in translation. Much more work is needed to illuminate the understand-ings and misunderstandings of extremist messages held by mainstream publicspeople who are rarely aorded such comparative and interpretative opportunitiesthrough contemporary security news.

AppendixTable 1: Interviewees; Table 2: Focus group participants; Table 3:Interview topicsand questions: see following pages.


18/22



Table1:Interviewees

No.

Initials

Age

Background

Location

Occupation

L

ocationof

interv

iew

Lengthof

interview

(minutes)

Questions

asked

Textss

hown*

1

SA

British-bornS

omali.Muslimborntoconservative

family

London

Network

engineer

L

ondon

62

125Qassam

Mujahida

2

PS

29British-bornIraqi.GrewupinconservativeMuslim

family

London

ReporterL

ondon

54

125Al-Libi

(Al-Qaeda)

3

AT

26British-bornA

rabandMuslim.Familyoriginally

from

anArabGulfcountry

London

CameramanL

ondon

58

125Qassam

Mujahida

(Al-Qassam

forums)

4

JP

28Syrian-bornM

uslim.Familywerepoliticalexiles

Notting-

ham

SalesmanN

otting-

h

am

61

125Al-Libi(Al-

Qaeda)on

Gaza

5

JA

21British-born.FamilyoriginallyfromEgypt

London

Adminis-

trator

L

ondon

69

125Al-Libi(Al-

Qaeda)on

Gaza

6

AF

24British-bornM

uslim.FamilydisplacedfromPalestine

in1967

London

Bakerand

Chef

L

ondon

69

125Al-Libi(Al-

Qaeda)on

Gaza

7

FP

26British-born.FamilyoriginallyfromLibya

London

SalesmanL

ondon

61

125Al-Libi(Al-

Qaeda)on

Gaza


19/22



No.

Initials

Age

Background

Location

Occupation

L

ocationof

interv

iew

Lengthof

interview

(minutes)

Questions

asked

Textss

hown

*

8

AC

26British-bornM

uslim.FamilyedcivilwarinLebanonLondon

Chef

L

ondon

69

125Al-Zawahiri

(Al-Qaeda)

on

London

bo

mbings

9

CL

25Iraqi-bornBritishMuslim.FamilywerepoliticalexilesLondon

Satellite

technician

andsports

trainer

L

ondon

68

125Qassam

Mujahida

(Al-Qassam

forums)

10

DT

24BornandraisedinUK.FamilyoriginallyfromSy

ria

London

Salesassis-

tant

L

ondon

61

125Al-Zawahiri

(Al-Qaeda)

on

London

bo

mbings

11

BS

24British-bornA

rabandMuslim.Familyoriginally

from

Morocco

London

CardealerL

ondon

65

125BinLaden

12

FS

25British-bornA

lgerian.Muslimborntoconservative

family

London

SalesmanL

ondon

62

125Al-Zawahiri

(Al-Qaeda)

on

London

bo

mbings

13

RP

23BornandraisedinUK.FamilyoriginallyfromEgyptLondon

StudentL

ondon

64

125BinLaden

14

LA

25BornandraisedinUK.Familypoliticalexilesfrom

Iraq

London

TaxidriverL

ondon

66

125BinLaden

*Forreasonsofspacewehaveconcentratedonaudienceresponsestotheoriginalandtranslatedversionsofonlythreetexts,binLaden,Al-ZawahiriandAl-Libi.


20/22



No.

Initials

Age

Background

LocationO

ccupation

Locationof

interview

Lengthof

interview

(minutes)

Textss

hown

1[individual

interview]

TC

45Workedasapresenterin

Iraq

.LivedinIranand

SyriabeforemovingtoUK

LondonJournalistLondon

52

1

11,

1925

Al-Zawahiri(Al-Qaeda)onLondon

bombings;binLaden

2[individual

interview]

LN

46Workedondierent

Jordaniannewspapersand

onJordaniantv.Livedand

workedinIraqfor5years

beforemovingtoworkin

Dubaifrom2004onwards

LondonJournalist

and

researcher

London

56

1

11,

19-25

Al-Zawahiri(Al-Qaeda)onLondon

bombings;binLaden

3[individual

interview]

BB

FOCUS

GROUP

TC,LN,BB

45,46

See

above

LondonS

eeaboveLondon

170

1218Al-Zawahiri(Al-Qaeda)onLondon

bombings;binLaden

Table2:Focusgroupparticipants*

*Someparticipantsaskedforsomedetailstobewithheld.


21/22



No. Topic Question

1 Biographical Can you say a word about yourself? Age/background/ occupation

2 Use/knowledgeof media sources

What terms do you use to describe digital media such asinternet, mobile phones, social networking sites, in compar-ison with traditional media such as television, radio, etc.? Doyou treat these very dierently? Do people you know makeclear distinctions between these?


Can you say a bit about your own consumption of new andtraditional media? Which do you tend to use most and howoften?

4 Use/knowledge

of media sources

Do you use social networking sites/services, e.g. Facebook

and/or Twitter? If so, how much and when? What is themain purpose of your use of these? Do you use mobile webservices?


Do you think some people/groups fear what is out there onthe internet? If so, why do you think this is? What is it thatpeople fear? How is the internet represented in news reportsaround terrorism?


Do you think that the advance of the internet has causedcertain terrorist activities or made existing terrorism worse?Can you give some examples?

7 Extremism What do you understand by the terms violent extremismand radicalization?

8 Extremism Have you recently come across any literature or media orpeople that you would consider to be extremist or radical-izing? Can you give some examples?

9 Extremism What extremist messages have you found to be most and alsoleast convincing?

10 Extremism Would you say that the opportunities for spreading violentextremist messages are greater online or oine? Or how doyou think these environments might operate together?

11 Extremism Do you think that there are particular media forms

(nasheeds [songs], video, graphics) or websites that are moreconvincing than others in presenting extremist messages?Any examples?

12 Shown texts I want to show you now some texts that you may consideras containing extremist messages. I would be interested toknow if you could identify themhave you seen them orheard of them before?

13 Shown texts What are the key dierences between the original and thetranslated versions?

14 Shown texts Who do you think the main message of the text is aimed at?

Table 3: Interview topics and questions


22/22



No. Topic Question

15 Shown texts Does the meaning of the texts change and if so, how?16 Shown texts Which elements of both (original Arabic and translated to

English versions) do you nd most and also least persuasive,and why?

17 Shown texts For example, what particular phrases, words, images, soundwould make most impact on you?

18 Shown texts What would you change or add to this text to make themmore convincing?

19 British govern-ment policiesto counterextremism

Are you aware of any policies the British government isusing to limit what it calls violent extremism?


Do you think the British governments policies have changedsince 9/11?


Do you think it is right for the British government to tryto identify individuals who might be vulnerable to whatit calls radicalization? Do you think government reallyknows what causes people to hold extremist views or call forviolence?


Have you heard of the Prevent strategy?


Should the British government try to go online to counterextremist messages?

24 British govern-ment policies

to counterextremism

Should the British government encourage ordinary citizensto go online and try to argue against those holding extremist

views?


Is it pointless for the British government to try to reducewhat it calls radicalized individuals in Britain when Britainsmilitary is still in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Documents

Security Journalism and the Mainstream in UK Since 2007