The commentariat and discourse failure: Language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

International Affairs

Volumn 82, Issue 6, 2006, Pages 1077-1100

  Jones, David Martin ^a   Smith, M L R ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33846452192     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2006.00589.x     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. Marshall McLuhan, 'Why have the effects of media been overlooked?', in G. E. Stearn, ed., McLuhan hot and cool (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 138.
2. Before the attacks, the prevailing stereotype, reflected in both official and media commentary, presented British-based Islamist militants, with their predilection for kaftans, beards and colourful rhetoric, as ersatz revolutionaries indulging their exhibitionist fantasies at the taxpayer's expense. Interestingly, this caricature recalls the way the liberal establishment dismissed the German fascist threat. In 1940, for example, the Fabian socialist H. G. Wells considered Hitler a 'screaming little defective in Berlin', presenting no threat to Europe. Indeed, Wells observed the Nazis' 'jerry-built discipline ... wilting under the creeping realisation that Blitzkrieg is spent'. Writing later in 1941, after the blitzkrieg had seen Germany occupy France and the Low Countries, overrun the Mediterranean and penetrate the Soviet Union as far as Stalingrad, George Orwell maintained that, for Wells and the progressive intelligentsia more generally, Hitler represented 'an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately'. As Orwell presciently continued, this Panglossian faith 'in the equation of science with commonsense does not really hold good'. Much of what Wells and his ilk imagined and worked for was physically present in Nazi Germany. But it was 'all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age'. It was impossible for the progressive mind, in Orwell's view, to accept this state of affairs. Therefore, 'the war-lords and witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph'.
3. Quoted in David Rose, 'Flashy tactics won't defeat the terrorists', Observer, 24 July 2005.
4. 5 official stands in direct contrast to the sentiments of the president of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, Mr Justice Collins, who described Qatada as a 'truly dangerous individual' (as opposed to just a loud-mouth), who was 'at the centre in the United Kingdom of terrorist activities'. Quoted in Sam Knight, '"Al-Qaeda" cleric among ten detained for deportation', The Times, 11 Aug. 3005.
5. Quoted in Richard Woods and David Leppard, 'Focus : how liberal Britain let hate flourish', Sunday Times, 12 Feb. 2006.
6. Quoted in Rose, 'Flashy tactics'.
7. Simon Freeman, 'Leaked security services memo said Britain was safe', The Times, 19 July 2005.
8. Peter R. Neumann and M. L. R. Smith, 'Missing the plot? Intelligence and discourse failure', Orbis 49: 1,
9. Anatole Kaletsky, 'The act of small-time losers', The Times, 14 July 2005.
10. Rose, 'Flashy tactics'.
11. Peter Sanders, 'The rise of the opinionators', Policy 22: 2, Spring 2006.
12. Press reports and academic accounts of the threat over this period constitute the data for this analysis.
13. Peter Neumann, 'Inquire within', Prospect, Nov. 2005 ;
14. 'Unanswered questions of the London bombings', Daily Telegraph, 15 Dec. 2005
15. M. L. R. Smith, 'Guerrillas in the mist: reassessing strategy and low intensity warfare', Review of International Studies 29, 2003, pp. 29-34.
16. President George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People (Washington DC: Office of the Press Secretary), 20 Sept. 2001.
17. For a survey see Philip Hammond, 'Postmodernity goes to war', Spiked, 1 June 2004, at http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA554.htm, accessed 20 July 2005.
18. Tom Utley, 'The moment I saw Bush has grasped the point of this war', Daily Telegraph, 28 Sept. 2001.
19. See Michael Portillo, 'We all just sat back and let Londonistan rise against us', Sunday Times, 24 July 2005.
20. See 'The underground groups', Sunday Times, 24 July 2005;
21. Anthony Browne, 'Threat of Islamic extremism that stretches across Europe', The Times, 26 July 2005.
22. Deborah Davies, 'Traitors welcome', Daily Mail, 8 Aug. 2005.
23. Quoted in Hala Jabar, 'Safe haven claim: Pakistan accuses Britain of failing to tackle militants', Sunday Times, 31 July 2005.
24. Irwin Steltzer, 'Letter from Londonistan', Weekly Standard, 1 Aug. 2005.
25. Jonathan Guthrie and Chris Tighe, 'The cerily ordinary extremists', Financial Times, 15 July 2005.
26. See Libby Purves, 'The land that lost its pride', the Times, 26 July 2005;
27. Minette Marrin, 'Confronted with our own decadence', Sunday Times, 31 July 2005.
28. Steltzer, 'Letter from Londonistan'.
29. 'A failure of political will', Daily Telegraph, 14 Aug. 2005.
30. 'Who will be deported and who decides', Guardian, 6 Aug. 2005.
31. 'Blair says the "rules are changing" on extremism', Daily Telegraph, 5 Aug. 2005.
32. 'Blair's extremism proposals attacked as the hunt continues for terror's new breed', Sunday Times, 7 Aug. 2005;
33. Andrew Porter and Robert Winnent, 'Law may halt Blair's war on extremism', Sunday Times, 7 Aug. 2005.
34. 'Ministers are powerless before our judges', Daily Telegraph, 13 Aug. 2005.30 'Calling terrorists traitors is no answer', Daily Telegraph, 9 Aug. 2005.
35. This remains the default position of Blairism. Thus, in August 2006, Blair called for a rethink on the war on terror strategy and called for an 'alliance of moderation' to combat the growing arc of extremism. This is in fact not a rethink but a return to the muddled multicultural approach to the 'war' that Blair announced in Sept. 2001. See 'Blair's multicultural stance', The Australian, 3 Aug. 2006.
36. See Jörg Freidrichs and Raphael Muturi, 'Anything new under the sun? The political struggle behind the legal debate on international terrorism', in From government to governance: 2003 Hague Joint Conference on Contemporary Issues of Law (The Hague and Cambridge: Asser/Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 463-71.
37. See Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan, The 'terrorism' industry: the experts and institutions that shape our view of terror (New York : Pantheon, 1989), pp. 229-46.
38. for a more recent rendering of the same sort of argument, see Natasha Hamilton-Hart, 'Terrorism in Southeast Asia: expert analysis, myopia and fantasy', Pacific Review 18: 3, 2005, pp. 303-25.
39. For a survey of this area, see Karin Von Hippel, 'The roots of terrorism: probing the myths', in Lawrence Freedman, ed., Superterrorism: policy responses (Oxford: Blackwell/Political Quarterly, 2002), pp. 225-39;
40. Neil J. Smelser and Faith Mitchell, eds, Terrorism: perspectives from the behavioral and social sciences (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2002), pp. 18-36 ;
41. Dilip Hiro, War without end: the rise of Islamist terrorism and the global response (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 409.
42. See e.g. Rama Mani, 'The toot causes of terrorism and conflict prevention', in Jane Boulden and Thomas G. Weiss, eds, Terrorism and the UN: before and after September 11 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 219-43;
43. Susanne Karstadt, 'Terrorism and "new wars"', in Bülent Gökay and R. B. J. Walker, eds, 11 September: war, terror and judgement (London: Cass, 2003), p. 140;
44. Thomas G. Weiss, Margaret E. Crahern and John Goering, 'Whither human rights, unilateralism, and US foreign policy?', in Thomas G. Weiss, Margaret E. Crahern and John Goering, eds, Wars on terrorism and Iraq: human rights, unilateralism and US foreign policy (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 231-41;
45. Tom H. Hastings, Nonviolent response to terrorism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), p. 160;
46. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, 'Public opinion among Muslims and the West', in Pippa Norris, Montague Kern and Marion Just, eds, Framing terrorism: the news media, the government and terrorism (London: Routledge 2003), p. 206.
47. Tarak Barkawi, 'On the pedagogy of "small wars"', International Affairs 80: 1, Jan. 3004, p. 28.
48. Moharnmad Yunus, 'Commonwealth lecture 2003: Halving poverty by 2015', The Commonwealth Yearbook (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2004), p. 58;
49. Jody Williams in Irwin Abrarns and Wang Gungwu, eds, The war in Iraq and its consequences: thoughts of Nobel laureates and eminent scholars (Singapore: World Scientific, 2004), p. 31.
50. Barkawi, 'On the pedagogy of "small wars"', p. 22.
51. Barkawi, 'On the pedagogy of "small wars"', p. 27.
52. It is notable that Barkawi's article ('On the pedagogy of "small wars"') contains over 50 references to a generic 'West' or 'western' that is deemed to cover a negative spectrum of phenomena from the Spanish conquest of the Philippines in the sixteenth century through the Zulu wars in the late nineteenth century and the First World War battlefields of Flanders to the IMF and globalization.
53. See in this context John Gray, False dawn: the delusions of global capitalism (London: Granta, 2002),
54. and Manfred Steger, Globalism: the neu' market ideology (Lanham, MD: Rowmau, 2002).
55. See Greg Bankoff, 'Regions of risk: western discourse on terrorism and the significance of political Islarn', Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26, 2003, pp. 413-28;
56. See Seng Tan, 'An enemy of their making: US security discourse on the September 11 terror problematique', in Kumar Ramakrishnan and See Seng Tan, eds, After Bali: the threat of terrorism (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies/World Scientific Publishing, 2003), pp. 281-304;
57. John Esposito, The Islamic threat: myth or reality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 231;
58. Meaghan Morris, 'White panic or Mad Max and the sublime', in Chen Kuan-Hsing, ed., Trajectories: inter-Asian cultural studies (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 246.
59. David Campbell, Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 68.
60. Campbell, Writing security, p. 68.
61. Azza Karram, 'Islamisms, globalisation, religion and power', in Ronaldo Munck and Purnaka de Silva, eds, Postmodern insurgencies: political violence, identity formation and peacemaking in comparative perspective (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 217.
62. See Richard Jackson, Writing the war on terror: language, politics and counter-terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
63. Michael Moore, Dude, where's my country? (New York : Warner, 2003), p. 101.
64. See David L. Altheide, Terrorism and the politics of fear (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006).
65. Jackle Ashley, 'Be afraid, be very afraid'. Guardian. 25 March 2004.
66. Quoted in Andy Beckett, 'The making of the terror myth', Guardian, 15 Oct. 2004.
67. See Adam Curtis, 'Feign of terror', Village Voice, 19 April 2005.
68. 'The power of nightmares : baby it's cold outside', BBC News, 14 Jan. 2005, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/r/hi/programmes/3755686/stm, accessed 17 July 2006.
69. For example, King's College London-Monash University conference on 'The roots of terrorism', Florence, 7-8 July 2005.
70. Quoted in Beckett, 'The making of the terror myth'.
71. Charles Kennedy's new year message 2005, Liberal Democrats press statement, 1 Jan. 2005.
72. 'The judiciary should not patrol our borders', Daily Telegraph, 30 July 2005.
73. Quoted in Clare Dyer, 'How the law lords reached their conclusion in one of the most important cases of recent years', Guardian, 17 Dec. 2004.
74. Dyer, 'How the law lords reached their conclusion'.
75. Dyer, 'How the law lords reached their conclusion'.
76. Bill Durodié, 'Al-Qaeda: a conspiracy of dunces?', Spiked.com, 14 April 2005, at http:www.spiked-online. com/Articles/0000000CA90.htm, accessed 2 August 2006. According to the byline Durodié is a 'senior lecturer in risk and security at the Royal College of Military Science'.
77. See Anthony Giddens, 'Scaring people may he the only way to avoid the risks of new-style terrorism', New
78. See Frank Furedi, The politics of fear (London: Continuum, 2005).
79. Obviously, the Internet provided a repository for much conspiratorial thinking on this subject. See e.g. Todd May, 'Religion, the election and the politics of fear', Countercurrents.org, 19 Nov. 2004, http://www. countercurrents.org/us-may191104.htm, accessed 5 August 2006: Jeanne Carstensen, 'Neocon "Nightmares"', SFGate.com, 30 April 2005, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/04/30/curtis.DTL, accessed 5 August 2006.
80. Quoted in Ferdinand Mount, 'Our law lords act bike children presented with a new Lego set', Daily Telegraph, 17 Aug. 2005.
81. See Gerard Baker, 'Why blame the terrorists? Apparently we can agree that it's Britain's fault', The Times, 15 July 2005;
82. David Clark, 'This terror will continue until we take Arab grievances seriously', Guardian, 9 July 2005.
83. Seng Tan, 'An enemy of their making', pp. 281-304. See also Brendan O'Neill, 'Creating the enemy', Spiked. com, 18 July 2005, http://www.spiked- online.com/Articles/0000000CA492.htm, accessed 19 July 2006.
84. David Goodhart, 'It's paranoia, not Islamophobia', Guardian, 15 July 2005.
85. Referring primarily to the continuing insurgency in Iraq, one youth told the Independent journalist Shiv Malik, 'Look how many Muslims are dying and no one cares. One gora [white] person dies and it's on the TV all day.' He added : 'It's our beef because it's our people. I've never been to Iraq, yeah, and the media hide a lot of things but what they say is enough to make me angry': Shiv Malik, 'The Muslim community', Independent, 24 July 2005.
86. Quoted in Nick Britten, 'Leading cleric rails at injustice of "Muslim" bashing', Daify Telegraph, 28 July 2005.
87. Quoted in Charles Moore, 'Where is the Gandhi of Islam?', Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2005.
88. Quoted in 'Rise in hate crimes against Muslims after attacks', Reuters, 11 July 2005.
89. Mayor's statement, 7 July 2005, http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/ mayor_statement_070705.jsp, accessed 24 July 2005.
90. Simon Jenkins, 'Panic in the face of fanatics is making Britain dangerous', Sunday Times, 31 July 2005. Jenkins contended, somewhat hysterically, that 'three weeks since the attacks... a howling mob has clambered aboard the terrorists' bandwagon ... They are taking the opportunity to beat their political pectorals, roar abuse at all and sundry arid cloak prejudice in the dogma of necessity.'
91. See Christopher Adams, 'Growing fears of backlash as BNP seeks to make capital', Financial Times, 14 July 2005;
92. Tom Baldwin, 'BNP fans flames with "sick" by-election leaflet", The Times, 14 July 2005.
93. See e.g. Karen Armstrong, 'The label Catholic terror was never used about the IRA', Guardian, 11 July 2005.
94. See Cathy Newman and James Blitz, 'MPs urge fellow Muslims to drive out "evil"', Financial Times, 14 July 2005 ;
95. Burhan Wazier, 'People look at me on the tube', Metro, 14 July 2005.
96. Dilpazier Aslam, 'We rock the boat', Guardian, 13 July 2005.
97. Quoted in Jonathan Freedland, 'Tread more carefully', Guardian, 27 July 2005.
98. London Mayor Ken Livingstone, for example, maintained that the bombings were not attacks against 'the mighty and powerful' but against 'working class Londoners'. Similarly, the Metropolitan Police Assistant Deputy Commissioner Brian Paddick had also 'complained about attacks on "purely innocent members of the public"'. Moore wondered whether it would have been more acceptable if the bombs had been targeted 'against the mighty and powerful', who 'are not purely innocent and should have been attacked instead': Moore, 'Where is the Gandhi of Islam?'.
99. BBC Newsnight, 8 July 2005.
100. Richard Ford, 'Two communities that hardly ever mix', The Times, 13 July 2005.
101. See also Andrew Norfolk and Russell Jenkins, "A laughing lad from the chippie and his mate', The Times, 13 July 2005 ;
102. 'A legacy of deprivation', Guardian, 15 July 2005.
103. Mick Hume, 'The age of intolerant tolerance', Spiked.com, 19 Aug. 2005, http://www.spiked-online.com/83 Hume, 'The age of intolerant tolerance'.
104. See Will Hutton, 'Our Britishness can beat the bombers', Observer, 31 July 2005.
105. Daley, 'For British "tolerance" read "indifference"', Sunday Telegraph, 7 August 2005.
106. Sarah Oates, 'Selling fear? The framing of the terrorist threat in elections', in Security, terrorism in the UK, briefing paper 05/01 (London: Chatham House, July 2005), p. 9.
107. Bill Durodié, 'Terrorism and community resilience: a UK. perspective', in Security, terrorism in the UK, p. 4.
108. Quoted in 'The threats', The Times, 10 July 2005.
109. Quoted in 'The threats', The Times, 10 July 2005.
110. Clark,'This terror will continue until we take Arab grievances seriously'.
111. Salira Lone, 'Withdrawal would curb terrorism', Guardian, 12 July 2005.
112. 'Blair's blowback', Guardian, 11 July 2005.
113. Frank Gregory and Paul Wilkinson, 'Riding pillion for tackling terrorism is a high risk policy', Security, terrorism in the UK, Chatham House/ESRC Briefing paper 05/01, July 2005, p. 3.
114. Richard Norton-Taylor, 'Use and abuse of intelligence', Guardian, 19 July 2005.
115. 'The Iraq connection', Guardian, 20 July 2005.
116. See e.g. Peter Oborne, 'Don't te misled - the London bombs were a direct response to the Iraq war', Spectator, 3 July 2005.
117. According to an ICM poll for the Guardian;
118. see Oborne, 'Don't be misled'.
119. This position was asserted even more forcefully after the detection of the home-grown plot to detonate planes over the Atlantic in August 2006. See inter alia Wall Street Journal, 15 Aug. 2006
120. David Aaronovitch, '"If we don't provoke them, maybe they will leave us alone". You reckon so?' The Times, 12 July 2005.
121. Abu Hamza, for example, described Britain as a 'toilet', while according to a YouGov poll 32 per cent of Muslims agreed with the statement that 'Western society is decadent and immoral and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end.' See Woods and Leppard, 'Focus: how liberal Britain let hate flourish'.
122. In fact, if we are talking about simple correlations, it could be pointed out that the United States has not been attacked either since 9/11 or, indeed, since the invasion of Iraq.
123. Lone, 'Withdrawal would curb terrorism'.
124. Matthew Parris, 'Suicide bombings will pass - they are just a grisly terrorist fashion', The Times, 6 Aug. 2005.
125. Rosemary Hollis, 'Isolating extremists', World Today 62: 8, Aug.-Sept. 2004, p. 21.
126. Tariq Ali Rough music: Blair, bombs and Baghdad (London: Verso, 2005), p. 53.
127. Barkawi, 'On the pedagogy of "small wars"', p. 22.
128. This is a reference to the destruction by suicide bombers of the headquarters of the UN in Baghdad, 19 Aug. 2003.
129. Barkawi, 'On the pedagogy of "small wars"', p. 37.
130. Quoted in 'Inside the sect that loves terror', Sunday Times, 7 Aug. 2005.
131. Quoted in report by Richard Watson, Newsnight, BBC, 1 Aug. 2005.
132. Watson, Newsnight, BBC, 1 Aug. 2005.
133. 'Declaration of war against Americans occupying the land of the two holy places', in Yonah Alexander and Michael S. Swetnam, eds, Usama bin Loden's al-Qaida: profile of a terrorist network (Ardsley, NY: Transnational, 2001), appendix 1, A, p. 19.
134. See Elie Kedouri, Afghani and Aduh: an essay on religious unbelief and political activism in modem Islam (London: Cass, 1966),
135. Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic response to imperialism:political and religious writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din 'al-Afghani' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968);
136. Natalia J. Delong-Bas, Wahabi Islam: from revival to reform to global jihad (London: Tauris, 2004).
137. See William E. Shepherd, Sayyid Qutb and Islamic activism (Leiden : Brill, 1996).
138. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (New York: Mother Mosque Foundation, 1979), pp. 81, 94.
139. Qutb, Milestones, p. 94.
140. See Erich Ludendorf, The nation at war [Der totale Krieg], trans. A. S. Rappoport (London: Hutchinson, 1936).
141. Qutb, Milestones, pp. 63-70.
142. Ayman Muhammad Rabi Al-Zawahiri, quoted in Nimrod Rapheali, Radical Islamist profiles, 3 : Ayman Muhammad Rabi al Zawahiri: the making of an arch terrorist (Berlin : Middle East Media Research Institute), 11 March 2003, p. 10.
143. 'Al-Qaeda training manual', document recovered by Manchester police in 1998, translated from Arabic to English and presented as evidence at the trial of Richard Reid in the United States in 2003, p. 5. The passage continues : 'and let the Nile, al-Asri, and Euphrates rivers flow with their blood'.
144. 'Al-Queda training manual', p.3.