Media Misdirection & The Origins Of Extremism

IN the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris a fortnight ago, political discourse within the UK mainstream media was permeated by reflexive opinion pieces demanding all-out war with ISIS.

The Guardian went as far as censoring rational discussion of cause-and-effect for three days, taking a conscious decision instead to promote a series of visceral opinion pieces focusing on a need for vengeance.  As the bloodlust began to settle, the moratorium on sensible discussion was lifted and attention inevitably turned to the role Western foreign policy plays in fueling the rise of terrorist organisations such as ISIS.

The intention here is not, however, to discuss the rights and wrongs of ‘Western’ foreign policy; rather, the intention here is to instead draw attention to what has been less openly discussed but is surely of equal importance to any debate on combating terrorism: domestic policy.

Whilst politicians and commentators of all hues have been debating the wisdom and legality of striking ISIS ‘over there’, very little attention has been paid to how we strike ISIS over here.

Indeed, as the SNP MP Philippa Whitford told the House of Commons yesterday:

“The people who bombed Paris, and who bombed London in 2005, lived here.  We cannot bomb them.”

This seemingly pertinent fact appears to have been overlooked by almost the entire political commentariat.  Almost the entire political commentariat.

It was, however, picked up by Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and world renowned linguist and public intellectual.  In a curiously scheduled 03:00 GMT slot on BBC Radio 5  – perhaps the schedulers were working to EST – Chomsky laid out the case for tackling the root cause of terrorism:

“The first thing to do – always – is to try to understand the roots and the causes of the attack; if you don’t do that you can’t have a sensible response.”

Chomsky’s rational analysis belies the response from virtually the entire mainstream media in the West.  He goes on:

“There have been extensive studies of what makes young people from almost always Muslim communities in the West become part of this monstrosity.  It turns out… it doesn't have strong Islamic roots, and in fact many of these people are second generation Muslims who have very little tie to the Muslim community.  They pick up the radical Islamic ideology which, incidentally, traces back to our ally Saudi Arabia.

But they join for other reasons; mainly, it seems, to find some kind of meaning, dignity and hope, and their existence as marginalised people with no opportunities; they’re not necessarily from the very poorest sector but these are young men with nothing in their lives, and this gives them a cause.

Well if that’s the driving force, you have to deal with that.  And the way to deal with that has been discussed by, for example, William Polk – one of the leading Middle East scholars with a long record in high level US National Security Council planning in the Middle East – and what he’s pointed out is the main thing you have to do is improve their lives; give them some alternative to the search for dignity, meaning, honour in becoming violent murderers, with the Utopian goal of establishing an Islamic utopia.  You just have to create that alternative.”

The observation that commitment to Islamic faith plays little role in the lives of many ‘would-be terrorists’ is also borne out by a 2012 Home Affairs Committee report into the Roots of violent radicalisation.  It notes:

Genuine theology also appeared to play a very limited role: Alyas Karmani noted that the Islamic understanding of individuals at risk of radicalisation seen by his organisation, STREET, “equated to a primary school level”.

Furthermore, the centrality of domestic policy as opposed to foreign policy as a key driver of radicalisation is highlighted in the same Home Affairs Committee report:

Murtaza Hassan Shaikh, of the Averroes Institute, argued in particular that “the common denominator is not the foreign policy but the perception, whether it is perceived or real, that there is an attack or a targeting or a singling out or a discriminatory attitude towards Muslims and Islam.”

In addition, a 2008 article in The Guardian, citing a classified MI5 internal research report into radicalisation, states:

They are mostly British nationals, not illegal immigrants and, far from being Islamist fundamentalists, most are religious novices. Nor, the analysis says, are they "mad and bad".

Figures released by the Muslim Council of Britain, drawing on the 2011 census, indicate that almost half of the Muslim population in the UK lives in the most deprived areas and that just 1 in 5 are in full-time employment; the disenfranchisement of British Muslims was highlighted in an August 2014 report by ITV.  Muslim leader Ajmal Masroor, who works against extremism, said his biggest problem in tackling the issue was the failure of Government policy in the past.  Surely, then, asking Muslim children to fill out “counter-extremism” tests only adds to the sense of isolation we should be working to counter.

It can be seen then that tackling the root causes of terrorism must start at home.  The first and most important task of any legitimate government is to ensure the safety of its own people; the importance, therefore, of challenging and eliminating the kind of dangerous, divisive rhetoric which The Sun ran this week (and subsequently reported by The Times) and which has even been attributed to the Prime Minister cannot be overstated.

As Lord David Puttnam observed in his astute TED talk:

“The media set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse.  Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. It's about reconciling conflicting preferences wherever and whenever possible based on fact. But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform?”

Recent polling indicates that the media are failing in their duty to inform, and as can be seen from the knee-jerk, irrational response to the Paris attacks, it is sadly doing much more to inflame.  This must be challenged.

None of this is to downplay the role of foreign policy: it seems clear decades of Western support for oppressive dictators and a series of reprehensible wars of aggression throughout the Middle East play a significant role in stirring up Muslim unrest particularly in that region.

It is rather an attempt to draw attention to other significant factors into what is undoubtedly a complex phenomenon to unravel.  We must have serious public discussion about the inequalities, prejudice and disenfranchisement which so often act as a catalyst to radicalisation.  As Chomsky cogently notes, unless we do so, we cannot have a rational response.