Radicalisation and Media by Hoskins Andrew;Awan Akil;O'Loughlin Ben; & Andrew Hoskins & Ben O’Loughlin

Author:Hoskins, Andrew;Awan, Akil;O'Loughlin, Ben; & Andrew Hoskins & Ben O’Loughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

World leaders had amplified the impact of the 7/7 London bombings, with Sky, the BBC and others also providing the very publicity he mentions. Media and political actors acknowledged and thereby offered credibility and potentially authority to the then-unknown perpetrators of the act and to al-Qaeda, whether as a direct co-ordinator or indirect inspiration for the attacks. The terror of the attacks had been partially contained by praise for the resilience of Londoners and emergency service workers. However, despite remaining invisible and rarely mentioned in those terms, on the 7 July 2005 Jihadist violence was a central matter of concern, and the potential for future attacks was presented as inevitable, unstoppable and diffuse.

Three days later, on 10 July 2005, BBC One broadcast a new documentary presented by Peter Taylor called – confusingly – ‘London under attack’. Taylor had been investigating al-Qaeda in the year previously, and presented the interviews and research he had compiled. As with the original ‘London under attack’ and the coverage on the day of 7/7, the thesis of the report was that future attacks were inevitable. This was because intelligence services were ‘blind’, unable to trace the sleeper cells indicated by Kochan. Taylor interviewed the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, who claimed ‘al-Qaeda’s first role is inciter and instigator rather than command control’. ‘That may explain why the cell got under the wire’, said Taylor. ‘There was not a scrap of intelligence. No tell tale “chatter” over the airwaves’.

That attention to sleeper cells entailed some analysis of the radicalisation process. Taylor noticed the lack of pattern to who had been radicalised at that time. Sajid Badat and Richard Reid had planned to attack aeroplanes, but Badat was ‘a middle class grammar school boy’ whereas Reid, the ‘shoe-bomber’, had a less affluent background. Turning to how radicalisation happened, Taylor fully implicates the Internet:

TAYLOR: Some jihadi supporters have twisted the news coverage of Thursday’s attacks to their own propaganda advantage. And the Internet carries their message that it’s revenge for Iraq.

And it’s the Internet, the World Wide Web, that drives the radicalising power of Iraq. Few attacks take place without a camcorder, computer and Internet access – to send the images spinning around the world. In Britain there’s an audience too.

EVAN KOHLMANn (US Government Advisor): While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a video, uploaded to an Internet site, is worth 10,000.

TAYLOR: Evan Kohlman studies the Internet traffic from Iraq for clients that include the US government.

KOHLMAN: Show a video of someone blowing themselves up, killing Americans, spreading American blood. That has an incalculable effect in terms of recruiting future terrorists.

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