The Boston Game and the ISIS Match

Abstract

The world is becoming largely interconnected. This notion has thought-provoking implications due to the fact that this interdependence affords terrorist organizations opportunities to perpetrate attacks. It is inevitable that an increased risk of terrorism, especially on the forefront of megasporting events, is on the rise due to the global publicity such attacks receive. This article focuses on the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Islamic State and illustrates how high-profile news coverage and coverage on social media (through user-generated content or “terrorist organization”–generated content) advance terrorist groups’ attempts to use large-scale sporting events to leverage their agenda and ideology.

Keywords

ISIS media terrorism terror organization Twitter

Along with the emergence and fast changes of the ubiquitous computing era, a myriad of social media networks on the Internet have emerged. These electronic communication channels are devoted to community-based content sharing, characterized by synergetic effects, and potentially serve as a powerful information and collaboration tool in the hands of terrorism. Terrorist organizations use violent military strategies in the pursuit of changing political situations or achieving social objectives (Harari, 2015). Similarly, terror attacks target public places with the goal of pursuing their ideology, which in many cases is justified on the grounds of religion (Galily, Yarchi, & Tamir, 2015; Yarchi & Tsfati, 2009). Terrorists argue that through acts of violent terror, they serve a greater good by righting a greater wrong (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2015).

The Islamic State, otherwise known as ISIL or ISIS, demonstrates how terrorists integrate sport and the media. This militant Jihadist group in Iraq and Syria uses the media to document its members’ vile acts of inhumanity that range from human slaughtering to public beheadings and suicide bombings—the act of sacrificing oneself with the aim of murdering and/or injuring others.

In July 2014, one of the ISIS London cell’s ringleaders, Nero Saraiva, tweeted: “Message to America, the Islamic State is making a new movie. Thank u for the actors” (Crone, 2015). This comment gained further attraction from the Western community, on social media 39 days later, when James Foley, a Western journalist and video reporter who was held hostage by ISIS, was beheaded.

Just as social media during this ubiquitous era is allows discussion of outrage by its users to be expressed when it comes to terrorist-related events, so too does television, through the act of sound and images, allow its viewers to feel as if they were actually part of what is viewed behind the screen. It is essential to note that media outlets and platforms can both be used to illustrate positive as well as negative occurrences. Often, marathons are inscribed in history when world records are made. The 2008 Sri Lanka Marathon in the town of Weliweriya, however, became a part of history as it began with a massacre when a suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber detonated a device at the race’s starting line. The bombing resulted in dozens of victims murdered, including Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, a government minister, and a former Olympic marathon runner K. A. Karunaratne. The attack also caused close to 100 casualties, and indicated that the rebels, despite being subject to extreme force by government troops, retain the power to perform acts of destruction. Many watched this race on television, witnessing the shock and panic of viewers along the course who screamed as they fled the blood-stained streets (Buncombe, 2008).

The 9/11 (September 11, 2001) attack is one of the most widely discussed, studied, and documented acts of terror. This terror attack constituted a media event on an unprecedented scale: The incident was broadcasted live on television. The Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda was extremely shrewd in planning this coordinated terror attack on the United States with great precision. The highjacked American Airlines Flight 11 (the first aircraft) hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. The highjacked United Airlines Flight 175 (the second airplane) hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. These 17 minutes, between the attack on the two towers, facilitated coverage of the events by the media that arrived on the site and witnessed and filmed the second attack live. The Internet, for the first time, allowed for instant worldwide responses and debates. The terrorist organization gained the worldwide attention it requires to promote its agenda-setting goals. By gaining such attention, the terrorists achieve their main target of exploiting the media to spread fear and have their motives recognized by authorities and the public at large (Awan, 2007). Terrorist organizations seek to be in the media as long as possible and as often as possible. To prevent compassion fatigue, each act of violence is more extreme than the previous act. This event, September 11, in which thousands were killed and wounded, turned our worst nightmare into reality.

While it can be argued that events of terror in sport that do not inflict injuries (Walsh, 2010) often do not attract public attention (Clark, 2004), a vast array of sport-related terror attacks ending in bloodshed have gained attention on a global scale.¹ The attack by the terror group, Black September² at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, ended in a massacre of 11 Israeli national team members and one German police officer. This event had enough “meat on the bone” to receive 16 hours of live television coverage,³ which allowed Black September to auspiciously transmit news of the event to a wide audience by merely using the Munich Olympic Games as their “stage” to carry out an even attack of terror. Surprisingly, 800 million individuals attentively watched the screen in awe while they received the news of the hostages’ killing. The Munich Games were suspended in order to pay respect to the murdered athletes, and a crowd of 84,000 people gathered for a memorial service at Munich Olympic Stadium (Gromelski, 2012). For many viewers who were previously unaware of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, media coverage of the Games visualized the existence of the conflict and the organizations that were eager to resort to acts of violence to champion the Palestinian cause.

This article illustrates how terrorist organizations aspire to change political situations by using large-scale sporting events and the media to instill fear and terror. Likewise, this writing aims to illustrate that terrorist organizations have realized the potential of mass-mediated terrorism for effectively reaching large spread audiences.

The Boston Marathon: An Explosion at the Finish Line Equals an Explosion on Social Media

After a mere 2 hours 10 minutes and 22 seconds, Ethiopia’s Lelisa Desisa won the World Marathon Majors series’ Boston Marathon men’s division. Sadly, a few minutes following Desisa’s victory, the 2013 marathon, organized by the Boston Athletic Association, ended unanticipated when two bombs exploded within close proximity of the finish line, resulting in the deaths of three individuals and a further 264 wounded. The two young men responsible for this act of terror had packed explosives into pressure cookers then stuffed these into black backpacks that they carefully placed at the site, without arousing suspicion. Four days later, on the April 19, 2013, the one million residents of Boston were told to lock their doors and remain indoors; schools were closed, public transportation was shut down, and businesses were ordered to be closed as SWAT teams and army police canvassed the area in search of the surviving Boston Marathon bombing culprit: The entire city of Boston was on security lockdown, an extremely frightening and unprecedented event for the United States.

News of the two bombs that detonated at the finish line at 14:50 Boston time (18:50 GMT) instantly spread through social media, reaching nearly every continent on the globe within minutes of the catastrophe. Twitter, a social network, acted as a source of breaking news as tweets instantaneously reported the event. Within 10 minutes of the explosion of the first bomb, 750,000 mentioned the event. That more than 3.5 million Boston Marathon–related tweets were sent in the following 24 hours highlights the incredible effectiveness of social media as a medium of disseminating predominantly news related, both during and after the event (http://www.mediameasurement.com/). The offender was captured with the same speed and ease in which news of the bombing was quickly picked up and shared via social media. At 5:58 Boston time on April 19, 2013, the Boston Police Department tweeted that the manhunt was over as they had successfully captured the second Boston bomber: “CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody” (Boston Police Department, 2013).

This update was “retweeted” 130,319 times and marked as a “favorite” tweet by 44,239 Twitter users, illustrating social media’s rapid impact on many individuals within minutes, which is something that was difficult to do in the pre-new-media era. Back then, it would have taken hours or, more commonly, days for information to spread on a similar scale. The terrorist attack in Boston is an excellent example of the emergence of media-oriented terrorism, or what scholars call “modern terrorism” (Weimann & Winn, 1994).

Furthermore, in order to understand the linkage between how terrorism prospers between two gigantic entities, namely, sport and the media, theories of terrorism as symbolic communication need to be analyzed. Jenkins explains this accurately by stating:

Terrorist attacks are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press. Taking and holding hostages increases the drama. The hostages themselves often mean nothing to the terrorists. Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims. Terrorism is a theater. (Jenkins, 1975, p. 77)

Jenkins, however, later understood that this description of the interplay between electronic communication and terrorism was incomplete, and he subsequently altered his conclusion, which stands as an accurate representation of modern terrorism: “Many of today’s terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead” (Jenkins, 2006). The interlinked that Rohner and Frey (2007) identified mutually beneficial relationship between terrorism and the media as follows:

Terrorist attacks are a particular form of communication by terrorist groups. The media are used as a platform for securing a broad dissemination of the terrorists’ ideology. The media benefit from terrorism, as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers. There is a common-interest-game, whereby both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents and where both parties adjust their actions according to the actions of the other player. (p. 133)

The ISIS Match

The word ISIS repeatedly sparks uproar, especially on social media. Rory McLeon, the only British Muslim on the snooker circuit, wore an ISIS badge in the 2015 Welsh Open. McLeon gained fame from this game between him and Ronnie O’Sullivan not because it was a 2-hour game that was well played, but because of the logo on his badge. Twitter users bombarded McLeon with tweets. McLeon was force to defend the “ISIS” badge he wore, which he did using social media: He clarified that the logo belongs to his personal sponsor, the ISIS Business Solution, and not to the terrorist organization.

Additionally, in 2015, cyber Jihadists waged an online war on social media including threats of a forthcoming attack on the streets of London. They publicized their plans to administer a bombing campaign in the capital. An ISIS fighter tweeted, “Just learned how to make suicide belt by my brother . . . will be using in #LondonAttack” (Batchelor, 2015). The hashtag #LondonAttacks went viral and swept through the Internet, heightening concerns regarding the rise of ISIS and ISIS-affiliated groups that operate in the West.

ISIS further caused commotion on social media when the organization hijacked the World Cup hashtag, #WorldCup2014, to extend its terror. They spread their message in both Arabic and English, using the World Cup hashtag and other ISIS-specific hashtags. This terrorist organization floods social media with great precision. They understand the advantages that hashtags offer in major events by allowing Twitter users to easily search for related content (AFP, 2014).

Furthermore, the use of the World Cup hashtag by the Islamic State proved that sporting events, particularly those with global appeal, are obvious terrorist targets, either as a target of attack that creates cause for the event to end abruptly, or as a means of attracting global attention to their particular terrorist cause. This claim is supported by findings of a study by Weimann and Winn (1994), who examined 6,714 incidents of international terrorism between 1960 and 1990. They found that acts of terror involving media-oriented acts of terror are escalating as terror organizations realize the potential use of mass media as a persuasion tool that is able to affect a large audience (Schmid & Graaf, 1982). These findings emphasize that terrorist organizations are increasingly using social media to gain maximal exposure for the ideological messages.

ISIS realizes the potential that mass media offer, both online and offline, and the Islamic State use prodigious public displays of violence to achieve extensive dissemination of their cause, courtesy of the media. Many scholars argue that modern terrorism would likely seize to exist without the media (Shurkin, 2007).

How the Media Influences and Shapes Acts of Terror

Many terror attacks directly threat sporting events. Terrorist organizations use sporting events as a target for their attack as they attract attention, in turn, creating immediate and enormous public discourse (Schmid & Jongman, 1988). The media play a crucial role for terror organizations, which consequently contemplate the availability of the media when planning their attacks. Events, especially sport events, that attract extensive international coverage and attract public attention will, in turn, direct attention to the terrorist group’s actions and political objectives. Media and social media act as a double-edged sword as the media acts as a platform for debates (Weimann & Winn, 1994) either in support or in opposition to the terrorist organization’s cause. Likewise, the information revolution (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 2001; Ayalon, Popovich, & Yarchi, 2014; Weimann, 2006; Yarchi, 2015) allows them to conveniently disseminate information about their ideology to the public by use large-scale media events.

Acts of terrorism and terror organizations are global threats that have value as stories in both local and foreign media (Weimann & Winn, 1994; Wolfsfeld, 1997, 2004; Yarchi, 2014; Yarchi, Wolfsfeld, Sheafer, & Shenhav, 2013). Coverage of such events fits journalistic norms (Altheide, 1997; Liebes & Frosh, 2006) and the events themselves meet the criteria of news value. As a result, information pertaining to terror becomes internationally newsworthy. It is broadly understood that the international media discourse surrounding terror attacks and terror threats is supportive of the country that suffered the devastation (Yarchi et al., 2013). The media supports the discourse against terrorism and helps create antiterror legislation during these international crises (Baum & Potter, 2008).

The media have their downfalls, especially when they trigger turmoil regarding an act of terror. If a sport event is cancelled, that country is portrayed as surrendering to terror, an image that plays directly into the hands of the attackers: After all, like the media, terrorism is theater (Weimann, 1999) dominated by drama. Officials continuously state that terror should not change or alter our way of life. In the case of Boston, however, the complete lockdown of the city contradicts the aforementioned statement, although failure to do so would endanger civilians and it is the authorities’ responsibility to protect their citizens.

The annual May Day cycling race in Frankfurt was cancelled due to terrorist threats. This race, called the Rund um Finanzplatz Eschborn-Frankfurt, had over 200 professional cyclists and thousands of spectators waiting to participate and/or view the event. The state police confirmed the cancellation of the event as they believed that an extremist Islamic couple who resided along the prescribed cycling route, was planning an attack during the race:

Due to the actual and still unclear hazardous situation and its relationship to tomorrow’s (May 1, 2015) cycling race, this event must sadly be cancelled due to safety reasons. Many people look forward, as every year, to tomorrow’s traditional event. But no matter how attractive the sport—because of the hazardous situation and the fact that at this point there are still too many unanswered questions, safety absolutely comes first! (Payne, 2015, p. 2)

After the Boston Marathon, officials are extremely wary of any threat of terror, especially in regard to sporting events where large crowds and media entities gather. The terror plot in Frankfurt met the criteria of newsworthiness for mainstream media. Deirdre O’Neill explained that in order for an event to be worthy of an international broadcast as news, the events must be unexpected, negative, dramatic, and typically results in casualties (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001). Even though the Frankfurt race never resulted in casualties, it was all about terrorism and the unexpected, negative and dramatic nature of the threat, which created suspense for viewers and readers as to what will happen next: Will the married couple be found? Were they really a threat to the race? Did authorities manage to prevent an act of terror? These concerns can be illustrated by Wolfsfeld’s (2011) finding regarding terror events and conflicts, he expressed that concerns exist because the media strives off of drama, the unknown.

Summary and Conclusion

The Internet, developed by modern Western societies, connects trillions of Internet users worldwide. This global network serves as a platform for exchanging data, news, and opinions and above all, it serves as a powerful tool for international terrorism. Perhaps the West created a gateway for the success of their adversary? Terror organizations, especially ISIS, use Western platforms as a means of spreading their ideology, interests, propaganda, and fund raising to seduce, radicalize, recruit, and train members, and to communicate and plan launch attacks. Terrorists have recognized the potential of online social networks and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and maintain their own accounts from which they have exploited this new media technology since the beginning of the 21st century (Weimann, 2006).

There is a powerful relationship between the media and terror. Acts of terror, especially in large-scale sporting events, are not a new venture but have been perpetrated for as long as there have been political disputes. Sport is no longer purely an arena that presupposes peace among competitors, as large-scale sporting events have become an advantageous target of terror attacks (Galily, Leitner, & Shimion, 2013). By targeting sport events, such as the Boston Marathon and the World Cup, terrorist and/or terrorist organizations are successful in attracting worldwide media coverage of their actions, creating an opportunity to they directly publicize their political objectives (Weimann & Winn, 1994; Yarchi, Tamir, & Galily, 2015). Terror acts have changed in scope and have largely adapted to the reality of the new media era. Large-scale world sport events are merely the soil that allows terrorism to prosper as the media, a gigantic entity, already covers these events that attract enormous attention. The media affords coverage to terror, placing it in the limelight of the world stage.

In the ubiquitous computing era, the evolution of terror in sport has escalated due to media coverage. It is essential to note that coverage has not caused the change in the nature of acts of terror over the past decades but it has made it easier for terrorist organizations to reach and instill fear in (most predominantly) the West, through the Internet that creates access to individuals from all over the globe. Terror organizations successfully transmit their ideology over the Internet as it is not censored, filtered, or supervised (Weimann, 2006).

Terrorist organizations choose to act at large-scale sport events (such as at the Munich Olympic Games, the Boston Marathon, and the Rund um Finanzplatz Eschborn-Frankfurt cycling race, among others), armed with knowledge that such events attract a global audience. Terrorists ensure the planned presence of communication technology and media organizations before they stage their attack. If the “incident” reaches a global audience, it can be rendered successful from the terrorists’ perspective. Based on the rationale explained by Toohey and Taylor (2008), Tarlow (2002) further elaborates, on the logistical reasons as to why sport events are attractive targets for terror organizations:

Given that contemporary terrorists seek targets that will provide them with worldwide media coverage, mega sport events, such as the Olympic Games or World Championships, seem obvious potential targets. The size of the audience and the symbolic representation of values associated with the sport event help determine its “terrorism capital.” This realization began as far back as 1972, at the Munich Olympic Games, when “Black September” terrorists killed Israeli athletes and officials. The world watched in horror as the drama unfolded on television screens, providing the terrorists with unprecedented media coverage. The enormity and immediacy of this momentous act of terrorism had ramifications beyond the Olympic event. Terrorists realized how the media could be exploited and focus the world’s attention to their cause. (Tarlow, 2002, p. 42)

These events have a massive number of spectators, which also makes it difficult to identify a terrorist in the crowd. Furthermore, masses of transportation options exist in very close proximity to the event itself, offering escape routes for these terrorists. Hence, sport events with large-scale media coverage serve as the playground for terrorism and their ideologies.

This article demonstrates the large-scale media coverage of terror-related threats and attacks on world sporting events. Past events and the media effects clearly show that social media has facilitated the evolution of terrorism in sport. Terrorism has become a modern threat that uses modern media outlets. It appears that in our global age, the media serves as an arena that integrates both support for and challenges to terrorism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Yair Galily, PhD, is the founder & head of the Sport, Media and Society (SMS) Research Lab at Sammy Ofer School of Communications, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel.

Moran Yarchi (PhD, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 2012) is a Lecturer at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel. Her main area of research is political communication, especially the media’s coverage of conflicts and public diplomacy. Integrating theories from communication studies, political science and international relations, her studies investigates the ability of political actors to promote their messages’ thru the media.

Ilan Tamir (PhD, Bar-Ilan University) is Dean of the School of Communications, Ariel University, Israel.

Tal Samuel-Azran (PhD, University of Melbourne; MA, New York University) is the Head of the international program at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications. His main fields of research are political communication, new media and media globalization.

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