Terrorist vs Religion P1

With regard to religious terrorism, Al Qaeda’s representation of the Arabian Peninsula as the spiritual home of Islam has provided the basis for its justification of the US as both an invading and infidel force.

The fourth wave of terrorism, roughly the 1990s to the present day, displays a continuation of this geographic trend but with a dramatic change in the motivation for terrorist activity. Rapoport (2001) claims that we are living in an era of religious terrorism; described as a fundamental shift and an unprecedented situation. Though focus in the US and Europe may simply identify religious terrorism with Islamic extremism, it is actually identified as a global phenomenon. Extremist Christian, Jewish, Sikh, and Buddhist groups have also been identified as advocating and committing acts of terrorism (Juergensmeyer, 2000).

A general trend in terrorism coverage is that western media are more likely to label Islamic violence as terrorism, as compared to Christian or Jewish violence (Nacos, 2002).

With a consideration of the fact that the 9/11 attacks and most of the post-9/11 terrorism acts have been committed by Islamic extremists, it is not surprising that Muslims are frequently portrayed in the media as perpetrators of terrorism. A largely ignored fact, however, is that most victims of terrorism operations are Arabs and Muslims (Perl, 2007; Stolbery, 2010).

Past research suggested that Islamic radical groups or those from the Middle East are more likely to be framed as terrorists than groups of other religions (e.g., Nagar, 2007). In an analysis of primary terrorist portrayals after 9/11 in major release film trailers, Middle Eastern or Arabic groups are the most frequently represented non-White ethnic groups, accounting for a third of the total primary portrayals (Ivory, Williams, Hatch, & Covucci, 2007). Similarly, Kalyango (2006) found that Islamic groups are the most frequently mentioned terrorist groups in the New York Times’ coverage of counter-terrorism efforts.

September 11 had a major impact in the world, and this impact is also reflected in the news coverage in the following years. With this study, we wanted to investigate to what extent 9/11 had an impact on the creation of one global public sphere in the Western world.

On the contrary, we found that the classic news value of geo- graphical proximity is still dominant: The news coverage increases most clearly the moment an event occurs on a local level.

The extreme example of this was the murder of van Gogh, which was widely covered in the Dutch newspapers while relatively neglected on a global level. The other key events discussed also show strong and significant local focus.

Whereas 9/11 was mainly seen as an American event by both local and international press, an interesting difference is seen looking at Madrid and London.

While Madrid was localized almost to the same extent in the newspapers, the London bombings were far more localized in the U.S. press, even more so than in the British press.

The portrayal of Muslims also reveals an interesting pattern. Although no significant shifts in negativity were found after 9/11 or after the local key events, 9/11 did create a strong framework of Muslims as terrorists in all investigated media. After the creation of this global frame, the identification of Muslims with terrorism was transformed by local events; it was reinforced in the British press after the London bombings and deconstructed in the Dutch press after the van Gogh assassination, with more attention focusing on domestic rather than international problems with Muslims.

2004 killer: Dutch- Moroccan Muhammad Bouyeri

This table further reveals the relative stability of terrorism across nations, with 71.43 percent (n = 140) of countries remaining in the equivalent trajectory group before and after the killing of bin Laden. Interestingly among this stable subset were notable countries including Afghanistan, France, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Qatar, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates.