Discursive pragmatics of justification in terrorist threat texts: Victim-blaming,denying,discrediting,legitimating,manipulating,and retaliation

Discrediting

Discrediting, a primary tactic employed by threateners, is pivotal in creating disalignment between the threatener and the victim by tarnishing the image of the targeted audience, such as American citizens or specific entities like the Bush administration. This is achieved through critical, accusatory or insulting descriptions that challenge their credibility and capabilities. Grounded in Poggi et al.’s (2011) concept of discrediting in political discourse, this practice involves casting doubt on opponents by negatively evaluating their characteristics, vilifying dissidents and victims as opportunistic and untrustworthy, and simultaneously enhancing the threatener’s moral superiority. Discrediting is notably prominent in the texts of OBL and Shekau.

OBL strategically employs discrediting in his threat texts to sway the American people’s trust in their political leadership, particularly the Bush administration, and to influence anti-war sentiment. This serves as a precursor to urging Americans to protest the Iraq war and avoid a recurrence of the 9/11 attacks. In OBL1, Bush and his administration are portrayed negatively, being held responsible for the 9/11 attacks, benefiting corruptly from wars, and failing to protect Americans from al-Qaeda. OBL attacks Bush’s features of propriety, capacity, tenacity and veracity. For instance, while al-Qaeda is positively coupled with capacity as a deterrence feature, OBL discredits Bush and his administration by questioning their ethicality through negative propriety, aligning them with Arab regimes and accusing them of tyranny (Examples 2–3). Additionally, OBL challenges Bush’s veracity, accusing him of waging war under false pretences for personal gain. Accusations also target Bush’s impropriety, greed in Iraq’s oil, and lack of tenacity, prioritising private interests over the public’s, despite rising casualties and economic drain (Example 4). This analysis illuminates the intricate use of discrediting by OBL, attempting to influence American trust and anti-war sentiment through a systematic dismantling of the perceived moral standing and competence of the Bush administration.

In response to perceived ethical shortcomings in the US political leadership, al-Qaeda is portrayed not only as capable of confronting the US leadership and troops but also as possessing superior morality (fighting against oppression) (Example 5). This self-moral empowerment contrasts with US Army Generals’ incapacity (‘losses’), lack of tenacity and unethical use of power for personal gains (Example 6). In addition to underlining ‘America’s human, economic, and political losses’ and Bush’s ‘resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq’, al-Qaeda emphasises their capacity in guerrilla and attrition warfare, positioning themselves as a force capable of inflicting more losses on the oppressor-superpowers.

Discrediting is strategically employed to instil doubt about key aspects of the threatened audience, particularly the Bush administration. This aims to shape Americans’ perception of and relationship with their leadership, influencing their stance and actions towards ending the Iraq war. OBL employs discrediting to depict the American leadership as untrustworthy and incapable of securing citizens, emphasising the real losers as the Americans, not president-associated corporations like ‘Halliburton’. In terms of Poggi et al.’s (2011) and D’Errico and Poggi’s (2012) framework, discrediting enables OBL to challenge Bush’s benevolence, presenting him as a politician engaged in malevolent actions, aligning with the manipulative function of OBL’s threat texts. This construction serves to prompt the threatened audience to reconsider their ties with corrupt entities and position them as being with capacity and responsible for their own security (Example 7).

Regarding Shekau’s act of discrediting, it serves to undermine governance and power image in Nigeria. Shekau discrediting tactics aims to establish his caliphate as an alternative to what he perceives as weak, dishonest and illegitimate governance. Shekau enhances his own capacity while casting doubt on the victims’ capacity, manipulating their perception of his power and his opponents’ incapability. He achieves this through announcing commitment to future violent actions and claiming responsibility for past deeds, strengthening the image of Boko Haram’s power. Shekau also manipulates the victims’ perception of Nigerian officials and troops as weak, presenting conversion to Islam as the sole choice for security. For instance, in a clear threat to Nigerian security forces, Shekau challenges President Jonathan’s capacity, implying incompetence to stabilise the country. Similar doubts are cast on the capacity of the Nigerian President Jonathan about his capability to extract the so-called Boko Haram ‘cancer’ from Nigeria (Example 8) and the capacity of the Civilian Joint Task Force, (CJTF) and the vigilant youths who work to extirpate Boko Haram fighters, and the Chief of Nigerian Army Staff General Buratai (Example 9), building a negative image to influence their actions and choices.

Shekau also strategically discredits opponents by linking them to negative veracity. This serves to portray figures like President Buhari as deceitful (e.g. ‘lying’) (Example 10). This manipulates perceptions, compelling threatened Buhari to follow Shekau’s religious path for stabilisation. Shekau, in contrast, associates himself with positive veracity, intensifying fear to discourage support for government troops (Example 11). Negative valuation and propriety are also used to portray victims, respectively, as inhuman (e.g. ‘sheep’) and wrong-doers (practicing ‘paganism’ (Example 12)), cheaters, killers and humiliators of Muslim Nigerians, urging conversion to Islam for salvation (Example 13). Shekau’s two-camps worldview, depicting ‘bad’ Christianity and ‘good’ Islam, operates to compel victims to choose sides for salvation (Example 13). In summary, Shekau strategically employs discrediting to, in Poggi et al.’s (2011) terms, attribute lack of power, veracity, impropriety and negative valuation to opponents, presenting them as inferior to his attributes.

Blaming and denying: Responsibility and blame shifting

The tactic of blaming and denying is employed by OBL and Shekau to disalign threateners from responsibility and shift blame onto the victims. This manipulative strategy, rooted in Hansson’s (2015) blame-avoidance and Van Dijk’s (2006) blaming as a discursive manipulation, shapes audience perceptions of harm and agency. OBL, in OBL1, attributes the 9/11 attacks to Americans’ historical actions in Lebanon, casting them with impropriety (Example 14). This reattribution serves to generate fear, compelling Americans to reconsider responsibility and avoid Bush’s disinformation campaign (Example 15), to avoid future threats. To manipulate perceptions of agency and potential losses by al-Qaeda, OBL contends that the inflicted harm is a proportional punishment and relatively less damaging, (Example 16) as implicated (Grice, 1975) in: firstly, the use of the phrase ‘in kind’, that is, ‘We’ target towers in America for towers ‘You’ the Americans targeted in Lebanon; and secondly, the losses presented as creating relatively less harm, as implicated by the partitive article ‘some’, as in: ‘. . .so that [the Americans] taste some of what we tasted’. This serves manipulating the perception of the threatener’s actions as being loaded with propriety, unlike those of the Americans.

Shekau strategically employs responsibility shifting to deflect blame, attributing harmful actions to a divine source, specifically God, in order to enhance positive propriety. In Example 17, Shekau shifts responsibility for arrests to God’s instruction, coupling his actions with positive propriety. Similarly, Example 18 attributes violent acts to Allah’s command, utilising the topos of divine law (e.g. Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 79) to justify and legitimise his positions. Shekau, following Bandura’s (2016) framework of sacred justification, avoids personal accountability by invoking divine authority, aiming to manipulate audience perceptions and reconcile with his violence by constructing his actions as fulfilling God’s will (Example 18). This manoeuvre also operates to exempt him from blame and placing responsibility on victims for violating religious norms through choosing Western education and democracy, hence coupled with negative propriety.

Blaming and denying: Framing

Framing, a tactic employed in OBL’s and Tarrant’s texts, plays a crucial role in shaping threatener-victim disalignment by structuring experiences to establish situational definitions (e.g. Goffman, 1974). Rooted in Hansson’s (2015) blame avoidance concept and Gordon’s (2015) framing role in positioning and (dis)alignment, this tactic is utilised to manipulate perception and realign participants. OBL uses the ‘Bad Apple’ frame (Lakoff, 2008: 163–167), illustrated in Example 19, employing a proverb – ‘An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure’ – to convey a moral imperative for the American people to save their country. Positioned positively with capacity, Americans are morally compelled to curb the ‘White House-liar’ (Bush) as an act of propriety to safeguard security, wealth, and children. This framing influences impressions, guiding Americans to perceive OBL as not blameworthy and directing blame towards their society, thus shaping their understanding of the path to preserving security. Positioning the American people relative to their security experiences within the Bad Apple frame simultaneously presents OBL as a protector against a perceived immoral authority. This framing, in a sense, offers evidence of what Culpeper (2011: 233) referred to as acts of ‘realignment of values between the [threat] producer and the target such that the producer benefits or has their current benefits reinforced or protected’.

OBL also employs the ‘Rescue narrative’ frame (Lakoff, 2008: 24) to assign blame to the American people and manipulate their stance. Within this frame, OBL constructs a social reality where the Bush administration (Villain) harms Americans (Victim), and the wise or inherently good social actor (Hero) must defeat and punish the Villain to rescue the Victim for security and wellbeing. In Example 20, OBL positions Americans as potential Heroes, wise enough to take actions against those causing harm. Failure to punish the Villain, responsible for ‘killing over 1000 of their sons for money’ in Iraq and Palestine, renders Americans blameworthy. The entire nation is framed (Example 21) as having the capacity to punish or let the Villain escape, determining whether they will be heroes securing wellbeing or allowing the improper acts of terrorising, killing, and imprisoning to persist. In an act of attempting realignment, OBL strategically manipulates perception, emphasising his role as an actor against improper actions rather than a Villain deserving blame, urging Americans to secure their own safety as in Example 22.

Tarrant employs framing in his threat against Turks (in Tarrant2), shifting responsibility onto them for their security or any potential violence against them. Through Examples 23–24, he manipulates Turks’ perception, compelling them to reconsider their stay in Europe and opt for living in Turkey ‘On the east side of the Bosphorus’, coupled with positive security (Example 23). Using the ‘Bad Apple’ frame, Tarrant dehumanises Turks, labelling them ‘roaches’ and justifying their expulsion from European lands as dirt and sickness (Example 24). Additionally, this dehumanising act morally disengages (Bandura, 2016) and disaligns the threatener from victims by erasing a sense of shared humanity, allowing Tarrant to contemplate violence while maintaining internal peace.

Blaming and denying: Denying and reversal

The denying and reversal mechanism serves as a social defence strategy for threatener-victim disalignment. This strategy involves defending against accusations and negative impressions about oneself or the ingroup (denying) and accusing victims of the same acts or portraying them as aggressors while reversing roles. This tactic is based on Van Dijk’s (1989, 1992, 1998: 92) reversal tactic (by blaming the victim) and his typology of denying which includes, inter alia, intention-denial and goal-denial. OBL, in Example 25, denies any prior intention to target the Twin Towers (‘it had never come to our mind. . .’) but attributes the situation change to America’s impropriety (‘injustice and tyranny’) and its Israeli allies. This reversal implicates a shift in the narrative, emphasising the negative properties of outgroups and the positive properties of the ingroup. By accusing the ‘American-Israeli coalition’ of targeting towers in Palestine and Lebanon, OBL ‘turns the tables’ (Wodak, 1991: 77), attributing blame for later consequences in America to them.

Reversal is also employed by OBL to accuse America of acts of impropriety, such as intentional killing and injustice (see Example 26), laying a moral foundation for OBL’s own intentional killings. This tactic creates a moral engagement when the victims are from the ingroup and moral disengagement when the victims are among the accused. In Example 26, OBL portrays America as viewing ‘resistance’ with negative valuation (‘terrorism and backward’) and ‘intimidation’ against Muslim countries with positive valuation (‘freedom and democracy’). OBL argues for the legitimacy of resistance, even if labelled as terrorism, and rejects US democracy associated with intimidation. Through denying and reversal, OBL seeks to depict his actions as ethically grounded, framing them as acts of ‘self-defence’ and ‘a must’ against American aggressors – acts of propriety, regardless of being labelled ‘vilified terrorism’ hence disaligned in American eyes.

Legitimating: Establishing a ‘proairetic’ code

Legitimating, employed by OBL and Tarrant to frame retaliation, forges disalignment by emphasising victims as wrongdoers and portraying threateners as morally and legally obliged to retaliate to immoral or illegal values, positioning threateners and victims on opposing moral poles. This tactic draws from Van Leeuwen’s (2007) legitimation techniques: authorisation, moralisation and rationalisation. OBL frames retaliation in his texts as a ‘proairetic’ code (Barthes, 1974), a legitimate action responding to previous events and aligned with a governing ‘semic’ code of moral values (e.g. justice, security and freedom). In Example 29, ‘to retaliate’ against an oppressor is portrayed as loaded with positive propriety (‘permitted’), grounded in authority references (e.g. ‘Allah’) as a shortcut to scriptural warrant (e.g. Brookes and McEnery, 2020) that ‘permitted the oppressed to retaliate’. Additionally, restoring ‘Our’ freedom and security through violence becomes a morally justified, in-kind response (Example 30), rationalising OBL’s violence which aims ‘to restore freedom’.

OBL utilises legitimation in OBL1 to bolster the credibility of his manipulative threat by employing anecdotal retaliation. While OBL1 primarily serves a manipulative function, he cites the 9/11 attacks as instances of past retaliation to substantiate his serious intentions. This anecdotal evidence aims to prompt the American people to take his threats seriously and reconsider their stance on the US war in Iraq, suggesting potential further retaliatory actions. In OBL2, retaliation is the central discursive function, presented as an imminent moral response.

Evaluative couplings operate to legitimise retaliation by appealing to a moral value system of justice and legality. In Example 31, OBL positions retaliation as ‘legal’, framing it as a justified response to the bloodshed for which the US and Israeli allies are held responsible. Similarly, OBL (Example 32) portrays the mujahidin’s fight in Iraq as a ‘just reward’ for US ‘injustice’, aligning positive propriety with the retaliation. Throughout the OBL2 text, OBL underscores the immorality of Americans and their allies, strategically disaffiliating himself from his victims. This moral disengagement serves to license his violence and portray it as a reaction to the perceived immorality of the victims.

Tarrant employs the legitimating tactic in by leveraging the moral value of freedom and the legal right to rectify what he deems ‘rightful’. In Example 33, Tarrant frames his threat as an endeavour to ‘free’ the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, an iconic structure with historical significance reflecting religious transitions in the region. By invoking the mosque’s past as a Christian church, Tarrant positions his threat as a retaliatory effort to restore it to Christianity. This appeal to legal and moral considerations serves as a topos – a shortcut warrant – legitimising the threatener’s retaliatory intentions and positions against the targeted Turks.

Discrediting

Discrediting, in retaliation, plays a crucial role in forging threatener-victim disalignment, particularly in OBL2, where moral foundations for retaliation are established by casting discredit on the victims. OBL strategically discredits the US leadership by attacking their perceived lack of propriety, tenacity, veracity and capacity. In Example 34, Americans are coupled with negative capacity, portrayed as followers of Jewish plans in the Middle East, serving Israelis at the expense of Muslim nations – justifying retaliation. Example 35 extends this discrediting through negative tenacity, depicting US democracy as a deceptive tool to change regimes and serve Jewish interests. Bush is accused of indifference to American blood and economy, aligning with the Zionist lobby’s negative propriety. Example 36 discredits Bush further, alleging lack of veracity and propriety as a leader of a ‘gang’ involved in ‘war, theft, and robbery’ of Muslim countries’ resources. These discrediting strategies lay the groundwork for justifying retaliatory actions.

The strategic discrediting of American audiences or segments thereof serves to legitimise retaliation as a form of ‘honour violence’, as defined by Thrasher and Handfield (2018: 371). In this context, the threatened acts aim to uphold norms within Muslim societies that lack effective governance. Two specific norms come into play in inter-group relationships (see, e.g. Sommers, 2009): firstly, the norm of preserving honour as a rational response to perceived wrongdoing, and secondly, the norm of moral responsibility imposed on the threatened audience. By framing retaliation within these norms, threateners seek to justify their actions as morally and honourably motivated responses, shaping the discourse around perceived offences and the moral duties of the threatened audience.

Blaming and denying: Framing

Framing, particularly through the ‘Bad Apple’ and ‘Rescue narrative’ frames, is a prevalent tactic in Shekau’s threat communications to create a disconnection with victims and justify a retaliatory response. In Shekau1, he declares war against ‘any Nigerian’ in Cameroon, Chad and Benin Republic (Example 37), presenting it as a reaction to the joint efforts of Nigerian and Cameroonian forces against Boko Haram. This framing thus extends to victims in neighbouring African countries, and Nigerian Vigilant troops and the combined joint task force (CJTF) (Example 38), positioning them as the undesirable element. Within this context, Shekau portrays his impending war as a response to the government’s perceived impropriety, as signalled by the use of the wave-underlined phrases: ‘just as’, ‘just like’, ‘so, we too’ and ‘so shall we too’, as in claiming, ‘just like you [Minister of Defence and his troops] are searching for us in the bushes [you/ − propriety], we shall bring the war to the cities. . . [we/ + propriety]’. This construction not only denies the true purpose behind Shekau’s violent acts but also places blame on the victims for the impending violence.

In Example 39 from Shekau8, Shekau constructs his threat as a reactive response to perceived acts of impropriety by the Nigerian government and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). This reaction is triggered by the labelling of Boko Haram members as a ‘cancer’ in Nigeria, framing them as the ‘Bad Apple’, against which Shekau portrays his threat as self-defence – stating, ‘We decided to defend ourselves’ – and a reactive defence in response to factual information about perceived acts of impropriety. These include killings, wickedness and betrayals against Muslims and Boko Haram members by security forces and Christians as in Example 40 where Shekau uses the ‘factive’ presupposition (Yule, 1996) phrase ‘everyone knows’ (wave underlined) to present this information as factual, justifying revenge on the victims’ lives based on these alleged facts.

Shekau’s tactic of blaming and denying, akin to a ‘blame game’ (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012: 172), strategically shifts blame by justifying his actions as a retaliatory response. He attributes blame to government officials and ‘infidel’ troops, alleging they tend to target Muslims and Boko Haram members first. This framing creates opposing social groups, allowing Shekau to avoid the Villain role in officials’ narratives, presenting himself as a Rescuer of Muslims. Negative evaluative couplings within the Rescue narrative frame aid Shekau in escaping the Villain label in his discursively constructed act of retaliation.