On Instilling Fear and Selling Security: The Counterterrorist-Media-Industrial Complex
Published by Hanno Kaiser August 19th, 2006 in CultureSex sells alright, but fear is the real deal. Fear creates demand for security. Fear of terrorism, specifically, creates demand for government provided security. Demand for government action also creates legitimacy, which is precisely why the broader public doesn’t seem to be particularly worked up about ongoing torture in Guantanamo, the NSA’s illegal spying program, extraordinary rendition, useless bag searches in the subway, etc. At some basic level, the government is satisfying public demand (”Someone please do something!) For the same reason, the democratic opposition to the executive’s power grab has been muted, to put it charitably. Lastly, where there’s demand for political action, there’s a budget. In the case of terrorism, the budget is huge with excellent prospects for sustained growth.
Terrorism, as a social phenomenon, involves a large number of constituents. It involves, of course, the terrorists and their victims. But it also involves potential voters most of whom are not threatened by terrorism but very much afraid of it (e.g., pretty much everyone who doesn’t live in New York, DC, LA, Chicago, and San Francisco), politicians, who only stand to gain from being tough on terrorism, bureaucrats who promise to deliver increased public perception of safety in exchange for agency funding, and, of course, a rapidly growing counter-terrorism industry, ready, willing, and perhaps even able to supply the government with secutity-enhancing products, e.g., airport scanning equipment, data mining solutions, etc. Of all the constituencies involved in terrorism as a social phenomenon, by far the smallest, least well funded, least well educated, and ultimately least influential are the terrorists themselves.
The less-than-central role of the actual terrorists for the rapid expansion of the counterterrorist-industrial enterprise should not come as a surprise. By all historical accounts, terrorism has really not been all that dangerous. (John Mueller provides an interesting summary of well known facts in his article A False Sense of Insecurity). The risk of drowning in one’s pool - let alone driving one’s car on the freeway - is greater by orders of magnitude than being killed by a terrorist attack. And how realistic is the threat of terrorists setting off WMDs outside of the fictional universe of “24″? Probably rather remote. Biological and chemical weapons have been around for well over a century. By and large, they have been of limited military value. They are hard to use, depend on conditions beyond anyone’s control, and just aren’t particularly lethal compared to conventional weapons. What makes us think that terrorists will be able to use those weapons more effectively than trained military specialists? Similar skepticism ought to apply with even greater force to dirty bombs and nukes. The terrorists that we are presently dealing with (the real ones, not the unfortunate bystanders that are still being held in Guantanamo and elsewhere) are certainly motivated, evil, and deserve to be hunted down - but they are simply not sufficiently dangerous to warrant a $35.6 billion response - and that’s the President’s budget for the Office of Homeland Security alone, not counting any terror-related allocations from the $439.3 billion DOD budget. (Note that I am not talking about North Korea and Iran here. Those present different issues.)
The crux with terrorism is that it terrifies, even though it is, objectively speaking, not particularly dangerous. Terrorism exploits various vulnerabilities of our cognitive operating system, such as probability neglect (we discount the improbability of a negative event, if the negative event has strong adverse moral connotations) and availability bias (we tend to recall the sensational, even though it is not representative). Unfortunately, for-profit media largely relies on exploiting the same cognitive vulnerabilities to boost sales and ratings. As they say: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The fact that terrorism instills fear so well makes it, as a topic, irresistible to both media and politics. A positive feedback loop kicks in. The media makes a huge deal of every moderate incident (e.g., British police shutting down a possible plot to blow up airplanes, which was weeks if not months away from execution), politicians have to respond accordingly, and the terrorists are delighted, because the media-machine amplifies their every rumbling into a civilization-threatening thunder. That’s just not particularly smart. Few things would hurt the terrorists more than a combination of (i) level-headed reporting; (ii) destruction of their financial support networks by kicking our addiction to oil; (iii) well-run domestic police and foreign secret service operations, using lawful means and resulting in public trials of the accused; and (iv) our refusal to understand and tolerate violence by religious fanatics as justifiable forms of self expression or outcries of the oppressed.
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I agree with almost everything you’ve said here (and you say it extremely well). The points about cognitive heuristics are absolutely essential to understand what’s going on, and I’m glad to see them mentioned.
I only take exception to part of the last sentence. According to classic “Art of War”-style wisdom, it seems to me quite prudent to try to understand one’s enemy. Indeed, that’s what seems to be the purpose behind level-headed reporting in the first place.
‘our refusal to understand and tolerate violence by religious fascists as justifiable forms of self expression or outcries of the oppressed.’—
Like Ben, I have a problem with this, although perhaps for slightly different reasons:
First, as for the label ‘religious fascists’ (there are and have been ‘religious fascists,’ but Islamist militants don’t fit this description) which I assume to mean ‘Islamist fascists,’ one should read L. Ali Khan’s commentary in JURIST, ‘Fighting Words: The Abuse of Islam in Political Rhetoric’: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/08/fighting-words-abuse-of-islam-in.php
See too, Henry Farrell’s post at Crooked Timber, ‘Islamofascism and Its Predecessors’: http://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/21/islamofascism-and-its-predecessors/
I wrote the following in the comments:
You’re spot on indeed. The term simply doesn’t have a referent in the real world (at most, it’s an awful metaphor). There is still widespread and appallingly stubborn ignorance of all-things-Islamic, be it groups like Hizbullah or Hamas, or classical Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence, or Islamic art, or Islamic mysticism (Sufism), and so forth and so on. I’ve grown quite weary of hearing so much pretentious and condescending blather from putative pundits and blinkered academics. People with little or no knowledge of such things utter pontifical nonsense in quarters high and low: highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow alike unconstrained by the elusive but no less real parameters of truth.
And I made the following comment after some others chimed in:
There exists no government in the world today based solely upon ‘Islamic law’ as such. Fiqh may in fact be part of a country’s legal system as in, say, Egypt, Iran, or Indonesia, but in all ‘Islamic countries’ such law is invariably mixed with legal systems of non-Islamic provenance. And what counts for Islamic law as such is likewise different, so one needs to specify the country or countries in question in any reference to or discussion of Islamic law (fiqh).
Furthermore, not a few contemporary Muslims and quite a few non-Muslims mistakenly conflate Shariah with fiqh, as if there were no conceptual, logical, and practical distinctions between the two, while in fact there is, and these distinctions are of the utmost importance, as Abou El Fadl, among others, makes plain.
If one argues, say, that Iran is a country ‘based upon Islamic law as interpreted by an elite group of clerics’ and therefore bears some similarities to a Fascist government, one in fact says very little: it illuminates virtually nothing about putatively Islamic governance in Iran, which has some similarities with democratic modes of governance as well. It ill-serves us to view matters here as a contemporary instance of the historic conflict between ‘fascism’ and ‘democracy’ on the order of the Spanish Civil War, when such a conflict was all-too-real. Although I’m a Marxist of sorts (with regard to the critique of capitalism), I agree with Roger Griffin that some culpability for ‘eroding fascism’s lexical value must be placed at the door of Marxist theoreticians.’ This lexical laxity lends license to the likes of Hitchens and helps account for the ease with which some will speak of ‘Islamofascism,’ one of the nastier neologisms of late.
If we want to express our moral indignation and opprobrium at, or political revulsion and rejection of, the political agendas, strategies, and tactics of self-described ‘jihadist’ Islamists, then surely we can find terms better suited to their actual ideology and politics. For example, it behooves us to retain some distinction between a political ideology and a religious ideology, even if the former has mythic elements at its core, as Griffin claims for fascism: ‘a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in various permutations is a palingenetic forms of populist ultra-nationalism.’ In Griffin’s words, fascism is ‘a political ideology not a political religion.’ That said, there may yet exist reasons for making comparisons between aspects of fascist ideology and elements found in militant Muslim critiques and political agendas (for example, the approach to features of modernity or the nostalgia for an earlier age, although in the case of fascism the ‘arrow of time…points not backwards but forwards, even when the archer looks over his shoulder for guidance on where to aim.’).
But in the end, if we’re to understand the motley Islamists of the modern and post-modern world we need to spend more time carefully examining what they say and do, relying on phenomenologically sensitive descriptions that evidence a deep understanding of the history of Islamic civilizations and peoples, including the interactions and intermingling with, and integrations and absorptions of, non-Islamic religions, cultures, and civilizations. Recent and quite accessible (for the non-specialist) illustrations include Charles Glass’s review essay, ‘Cyber-Jihad,’ in the London Review of Books, 9 March 2006 (Vol. 28, No. 5), and Henry Siegman’s essay, ‘Hamas: The Last Chance for Peace?,’ in the New York Review of Books, 27 April 2006 (Vol. 53, No. 7). In neither article will one find facile invocations of fascism, let alone ‘Islamofascism.’
And now for a discussion of the problems with the appellation, ‘Islamic fundamentalist’….
Please see Juan Campo’s ‘The Ends of Islamic Fundamentalism: Hegemonic Discourse and the Islamic
Question in Egypt,’ written for the Global Studies & International Studies Program at University of California, Santa Barbara, (1995), paper no. 6: available at the eScholarship Repository, University of California.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gis/6
Toward an understanding of terrorism, I put together the following basic (hence short) bibliography:
Ali, Tariq, Christopher Hitchens, Anatol Lieven, Onora O’Neill and Jacqueline Rose (Andrew O’Hagan, moderator). ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ London Review of Books, May 15th, 2002 (transcript of debate that took place in Logan Hall,
Institute of Education, London on 15 May 2002).
Boroumand, Ladan and Roya Boroumand. ‘Terror, Islam, and Democracy,’ Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2, April 2002, pp. 5-20.
Brooks, Rosa Ehrenreich, ‘War Everywhere: Human Rights, National Security, and the Law of Armed Conflict in the Age of Terrorism,’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 153, 2004. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=573321 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.573321
Cole, David and James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution. New York: The New Press, 2002.
Dworkin, Ronald. ‘Terror & the Attack on Civil Liberties,’ The New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 17, November 6, 2003.
Gambetta, Diego. ‘Reason and Terror: Has 9/11 Made it Hard to Think Straight?’ Boston Review, April/May 2004. Available: http://bostonreview.net/BR29.2/gambetta.html
Gerges, Fawaz. The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Glass, Charles. ‘Cyber-Jihad,’ London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 5, March 9th, 2006. Available: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n05/glas01_.html
Hassan, Riaz. ‘Suicide Attacks: Life as a Weapon,’ International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Newsletter 14, June 2004: 8-9.
Higgins, Rosalyn and Maurice Flory, eds. Terrorism and International Law. London: Routledge, 1997.
Honderich, Ted. Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy. London: Pluto Press, revised ed.,
2002.
Honderich, Ted. After the Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
Khan, L. Ali. ‘A Legal Theory of International Terrorism,’ 19 Connecticut Law Review, 945 (1987).
Khan, L. Ali. A Theory of International Terrorism: Understanding Islamic Militancy. Leiden: Martinus
Nijhoff, 2006.
Khashan, Hilal. ‘Collective Palestinian Frustration and Suicide Bombings,’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 6, 2003: 1049-1067.
Kretzmer, David. ‘Targeted Killings of Suspected Terrorists: Extra-Judicial Executions or Legitimate Means of Defense?,’ The European Journal of International Law, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2005: 171-212.
Moghadam, Assaf. The Roots of Terrorism. New York: Chelsea House Publ., 2006.
O’Connell, Mary Ellen. ‘When is a War Not a War? The Myth of the Global War on Terror,’ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, 2005, Vol. 12, No. 2: 1-5.
Saul, Ben. ‘Two Justifications for Terrorism: A Moral Legal Response,’ Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) Report, January 10th, 2006. Available: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3022
Saul, Ben. Defining ‘Terrorism’ in International Law. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Seigman, Henry. ‘Is ‘Moral Equivalency’ Really So Wrong?’ Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2006.
Soto, Theodore P. ‘The Morality of Terrorism,’ Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, June 2002: 12271263. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=341600 or
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.341600
Tushnet, Mark, ed. The Constitution in Wartime: Beyond Alarmism and Complacency. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Victoroff, Jeff. ‘The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 1: 3-42.
Volkan, Vamik. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.
Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor. Terrorism and Collective Responsibility. London: Routledge, 1992.
Incidentally, over at Concurring Opinions, Daniel J. Solove has a post that agrees with much of what you say above (Aug. 24).
Patrick, regarding that essay by L. Ali Khan:
Discussions over names are often hard to pin down. Names have both a descriptive and a referential quality to them, and a spew of literature in the analytic tradition of philosophy of language is dedicated to resolving which is the primary function of a name. If we take there to be real semantic content worth being offended over in a certain name, then it would seem we are presupposing the accuracy of a descriptive account of naming. I.E., that espoused by John Stuart Mill, and more recently by Amie Thomasson (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/2006/05/amie_thomasson.html). Sure enough, these descriptive views of naming generally seem more plausible than direct reference views.
The real problem behind this view is in how to resolve the inevitable ambiguity of names. Names are shorter than real descriptions, they just have to be truncated for practical purposes. If we take exception to the way that certain names are used — i.e., if we say that “Islamofascism” does more than just refer to some people, and describe them as “Islamic” and “fascist”, but also intimates that Islam is fascist — then we also have to come up with either an unambiguous alternative name, or abandon the point and exercize charity. Ordinary people need guidance about the subtlties of politics, and a change in the popular lexicon is the only way politicians ever change their lingo for the better.
Certainly, because of Griffin’s point, the term “fascist” isn’t appropriate, simply because fascism idolized the nation-state, not a religion. It would be optimal if there was a word which described the concept of a radical Islamic theocrat. To put things into perspective by introducing an analogue, it seems to me that a phrase like “radical Catholic theocrat” might be unusual, but it would never be interpreted as saying that all Catholics are radicals or theocrats; so surely the same could be said of any word or phrase that meant “radical Islamic theocrat”.
Thanks Patrick and Ben for your insightful comments. My point about the “religious fascists” was aimed more broadly at those who use violence in the pursuit of “purity,” that is people, who categorically refuse to respect the views of dissenters at the most fundamental level. I was thinking primarily about radical islamists, but my broader point would also apply to christian zealots who target abortion clinincs, and violent racists. In response to your comments I changed “religious fascists” to “religious fanatics.”
Thanks for your thoughtful response
I’m not sure the ‘inevitable ambiguity of names’ is a problem in search of a solution. See, for instance, Avrum Stroll’s Sketches of Landscapes: Philosophy by Example (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Nor do I have any problem with names qua names. Names, nonetheless, can be more or less accurate, more or less misleading, more or less fitting or appropriate….
That said, I simply want to come up with terms that more accurately capture the religious ideology of Islamists. I well realize that nothing will definitively capture everything I or someone else believe is essential or important in referring to Islamist radicals of one sort or another. ‘Islamofascism’ simply doesn’t makes sense, it’s incoherent. Apart from the problems noted above, some may take it to refer to al-Qaeda and kindred groups, others would include Hamas and Hizbullah in the mix, and it’s rather clear that there are signifcant differences here, in fact, I think an argument can be made that Hamas and Hizbullah are not terrorist groups simpliciter, while al-Qaeda better fits such an appellation. There are some candidates (alternative names) out there but, to a fault, they rely on terms intrinsic to the tradition, in other words, they don’t seem to capture what is truly novel in this kind of Islamist politics (e.g., ignorance of or disdain for Islamic legal traditions, selective appropriation of aspects of modernity, etc.; this has something to do with what anthropologists refer to as the ‘etic’/'emic’ distinction). Even something as simple as ‘Islamist militants’ (or militant Islamists) is preferable, if only because it does not mislead by way of colloquial description. ‘Jihadist Islamists’ or ‘Islamist jihadists’ is problematic insofar as it allows the militants to appropriate and propagate the referential scope of ‘jihad’ in a manner intolerable to most Muslims, especially in light of the fact that what is meant by jihad here is what is known as the ‘lesser jihad,’ not at all the ‘greater jihad’ (the struggle against the ego, against nafs, against the passions or what the Christian calls the seven deadly sins…) which is obligatory for all Muslims. Furthermore, even as ‘lesser jihad,’ the term is used and applied irrespective of the tradition’s legal conditions on its use, so much so one wonders how it can be plausibly construed as any longer ‘Islamic.’ Islamist militants sometimes use ‘theocratic’ rhetoric but there are no clear models of same that help us understand what is meant by this (references to ‘the’ caliphate are hopelessly vague), and if or when they participate in electoral politics, they often alter their conception of Islamic governance in a way that is no longer theocratic (cf. the variety of Islamic republics; furthermore, consider how Khomeini had to come up with s novel concept within Shiism–vilayat-i faqih–to implement his unique vision of Islamic governance; one reason, among others, that describing the Iranian regime as ‘theocratic’ tells us very little about the goverment, whatever its theocratic features or the pretensions of some of its ideologues.