Stereotypical representations of Muslims and Islam following the 7/7 London terror attacks

Abstract

Samuel Huntington (1996) argued that the source of the great divisions and conflicts between peoples of global society would be cultural, and not necessarily ideological or economic as in the last century. Although, the validity of Huntington’s claim was not clear at the time, it certainly began to gain credence in western circles following recent terrorist attacks ranging from 9/11 in the US, 7/7 in London to the bombings in Madrid, the Philippines and Mumbai, all in the space of seven years. These events have undoubtedly reinforced hostile perceptions and attitudes towards ‘other’ cultures and the peoples that live in some distant countries. Drawing on a 2007 study of Germany’s Muslim community which revealed a consistently close link between radicalization and ‘vicarious’ experiences of marginalization and discrimination, this article critically analyses eight British newspapers’ coverage of the 7/7 London terror attacks to determine the extent of the stereotypical representations employed and their implications for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention.

Keywords

Civilization human rights journalism intercultural communication Islam London 7/7 terror attacks Muslims peace journalism stereotype terrorism war on terror

Introduction

Political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), argued that culture would replace ideology and business as the source of great divisions and conflicts in the post-Cold War era. Yet few people in the West took this claim seriously until the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, and other subsequent ones in Madrid, London, the Philippines and Mumbai. Huntington’s claim, which he first made in an article he wrote in 1992, has apparently come to pass as these recent events have let loose large molecules of hostile perceptions and attitudes toward the ‘uncivilised’ Muslim world. In the post-Cold War era, ‘the friendly/enemy country dichotomy is determined not necessarily by east/west/communist/capitalist ideologies but by who is on our side in this “war on terror” ’ (Shaw, 2012b: 28). Thus Muslims and the Islamic world, who are largely perceived in the West as targets, and not helpers, in the ‘war on terror’ have since the end of the Cold War replaced the ‘Soviet Union’ as the new ‘uncivilized’ enemy of the ‘civilized’ western world.

The central aim of this article is to examine the extent to which the reporting of recent terrorist attacks has contributed to the clash of cultures or civilizations between the so-called ‘civilized’ West and the so-called ‘uncivilized’ Muslim world. Roy and Ross (2011) argue that this ‘us/them’ binary consistently frame ‘others’ as ‘radical, oppressive, fanatical, irrational’ enemies of ‘civilized’ western values and beliefs which are often presented as normal and devoid of any politics or ideology. ‘Together, these two discursive strategies – normalizing the West and fanaticizing the rest – construct binaries that naturalize divisions and undermine informed deliberation of the causes and solutions to terrorism’ (Roy and Ross, 2011: 3). There is a common adage which says: ‘the use of words is a choice of arms’. Words indeed represent striking modes of expression and communication. In this way they have always played a sensitive role in debates involving cultures, traditions and civilizations (Rehman, 2007). However, as Rehman argues, ‘a reckless and uncaring usage of words could jeopardise relations between various communities and societies, and can easily provoke anger and resentment’ (Rehman, 2007: 198). When words are used ‘recklessly’ and ‘uncaringly’ they can easily translate into ‘fighting’ or ‘hate’ words, or worse still, ‘words of mass destruction’. It is the aim of this article to examine these ‘fighting’ or ‘hate’ stereotypes and clichés employed by the mainstream British press in their coverage of the terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005 in London that claimed the lives of 54 people, including four suicide bombers, and their wider implications for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention. It is hoped that the findings of this article will contribute some fresh insights to the 1997 Runnymede Trust report on Islamophobia produced by the Commission for British Muslims and Islamophobia. The report, authored by Chris Allen, noted in its opening sections, ‘Islamophobic discourse, sometimes blatant but frequently coded and subtle, is part of everyday life in modern Britain… in the last twenty years… the dislike [of Islam and Muslims] has become more explicit, more extreme and more dangerous’ (Allen, 1997: 6).

It is also the aim of this article to demonstrate the intersection of intercultural communication, peace journalism and human rights journalism on one hand, and the cultural miscommunication, war journalism and human wrongs journalism, on the other hand. It argues that news media discursive stereotypes and clichés portraying Muslims as ‘inferior’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘violent’ and ‘destructive’ constitute ‘fighting’ and ‘hate’ words of cultural miscommunication. These words have the potential to incite hostility towards all believers of Islam on the one hand, and provoke Islamic radicalism or extremism on the other hand. It is clear that cultural miscommunication constitutes what Galtung (2004) calls ‘cultural violence’ which can manifest into ‘direct violence’ such as acts of terrorism or conflict if not brought under control. Forms of ‘cultural violence’ include xenophobia, racism, hate speech, Islamophobia, etc. (Shaw, 2012a). This article draws on a 2007 study of Germany’s Muslim community, which revealed a consistently close link between radicalization and ‘vicarious’ experiences of marginalization and discrimination, and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the coverage of the 7/7 London terror attacks of 2005 by eight British newspapers to determine the extent of the stereotypical representations employed and their implications for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention. This article is important, not only because of its major contribution to updating the literature on the wider academic debate largely informed by Van Dijk’s (1990) study of discourse and racism involving the British and Dutch press, but also because of its attempt to open new insights and vistas to the media’s use of stereotypical representations that have ramifications for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention (Van Dijk, 1990). The article aims to answer three main questions: What are the intersections of intercultural communication, peace journalism and human rights journalism, and how are they used to prevent or address conflicts and human rights violations? How are stereotypes and clichés related to intercultural communication or miscommunication, on one hand, and how are they related to terrorism or terrorism prevention/counter-terrorism, on the other hand? To what extent was the news media coverage of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London punctuated by negative and destructive stereotypes, how did they constitute discourses of discrimination of Muslims and marginalization of Islam, and what are the implications for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention? The discussion that follows attempts to answer the above questions in the order in which they flow.

Intercultural communication, peace journalism and human rights journalism

As Shaw (2012a: 12–13) argues, ‘By taking part in an act of communication, one can contribute to the creation of peace, which can also be indispensable for human rights promotion and protection.’ Lack of communication or some sort of cultural miscommunication, on the other hand, can lead to cycles of violence which can have the knock-on effect of causing severe human rights violations. It is also important to note that the existence of peace and human rights is necessary to guarantee the security and freedom to communicate. Shaw (2012a: 148) draws on the philosophy of Immanual Kant (1963) who ‘believed in both peace and human rights and saw a clear overlap between the two notions’.

Having discussed the nexus between communication, peace and human rights, this article now proceeds to demonstrate the important intersections between intercultural communication, peace journalism and human rights journalism. But first, what do we mean by intercultural communication?

Intercultural communication

To better understand the concept of intercultural communication it is in place to unpack the two keywords – culture and communication – from which it is drawn. Klyukanov (2005: 9) defines culture as ‘a system of symbolic resources shared by a group of people’. Symbolic resources ‘are shared with others and constructed jointly through interaction’ (Littlejohn, 2002: 165). The term culture can be applied to any group of people on the basis of their nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion or physical (dis)ability. The term communication, on the other hand, has been defined as ‘the practice of creating meanings or symbolic resources’ (Klyukanov, 2005: 10). In other words, communication is the process by which cultural meanings are created and exchanged as symbolic resources. Thus, ‘resources (cultures) and practices (communications) are tightly connected and cannot really be separated. Resources are constructed in practice, and practices are shaped by resources. This is the recursive loop of resources and practices’ (Littlejohn, 2002: 165). Based on this culture–communication nexus, Klyukanov (2005: 10) defines intercultural communication as a ‘process of interaction between groups of people with different systems of symbolic resources’.

Klyukanov (2005) uses the ‘punctuation principle’ to conceptualize intercultural communication. The word punctuation etymologically originates from the Latin word puntuare meaning to break or to mark with a point (Morris, 1982: 1060). In the literary sense Klyukanov (2005) notes that traditional punctuation marks perform the same role of breaking the stream of writing into separate, discernible elements to help us understand the correct meanings of these elements within a given text. The meaning of a piece of writing can for instance be dramatically altered by simply putting a comma in the wrong place. But, according to Bateson and Jackson (1964) and Watzlawick (1984), the term ‘punctuation’ can also be broadly applied to communication. ‘In the study of communication, punctuation is a process of perception through which people organise their on-going interactions into recognisable openings, closings, causes, and effects’ (Anderson and Ross, 2002: 147).

Klyukanov (2005) notes intercultural communication is punctuated by marks such as skin colour, land and water borders. ‘Our experiences are divided through such marks, or boundary lines, into different cultures with their own identities. In essence, the Punctuation Principle is the Principle of Boundary Lines’ (Klyukanov, 2005: 16). These boundaries are becoming more difficult to detect as they become less and less tangible. While it is much easier to literally put your finger on a land border, Klyukanov (2005: 16) rhetorically asks,

… but how can you grasp lines in the universe of beliefs and values? What about people who have the same skin colour and yet to do not communicate at all or, even worse, are ready to kill each other? Where does the boundary line between these people lie?

Klyukanov refers to boundary lines as our thoughts, perceptions and expectations. They are born in people’s minds as conceptualizations which can later translate into borders, walls, lines in the water, language barricades and so on. It is people who create boundary lines, for better or for worse (Klyukanov, 2005). For better, when they are used constructively (intercultural communication), and for worse, when they are used destructively (cultural miscommunication). Boundary lines in communication can be likened to stereotypes and clichés which can be used in both negative and positive senses.

The nexus between intercultural communication, peace journalism and human rights journalism

Intercultural communication succeeds when the boundary lines are constructive, that is when we respond positively towards other people’s cultures. This is what Laing (1961) called identity confirmation, the ‘process through which individuals are recognised, acknowledged, and endorsed’ (Laing, 1961: 83). Identity-confirming messages generally show empathy towards others by way of using supportive language when referring to them. However, intercultural communication fails leading to cultural miscommunication when the boundary lines are destructive, that is when we respond negatively towards other people’s cultures. This is called identity disconfirmation, the ‘process through which individuals do not recognise others, do not respond sensitively to dissimilar others, and do not accept others’ experiences as valid’ (Ting-Toomey, 1999: 47). Identity-disconfirming messages generally dismiss others as less important by using language which can sometimes be racist or xenophobic at best. Here language can be distorted to the extent of rendering ‘other people’ in a contemptuous and less dignified light, and unleashing untold suffering on them.

Intercultural communication based on constructive boundary lines that value and endorse individuals for what they are and use supportive language when referring to them is largely similar to peace journalism because the latter encourages a win-win approach of constructive dialogue with due respect to the views and opinions of all parties to the conflict. Lynch and McGoldrick (2005: 5) define peace journalism as ‘a set of tools, both conceptual and practical, intended to equip journalists to offer a better public service’ and provide society at large with opportunities ‘to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict’. Both intercultural communication and peace journalism demonstrate empathy for cultures and peoples, and have orientation towards truth and solution instead of propaganda (lie) and problem (conflict), respectively.

Intercultural communication based on constructive boundary lines that attach value and respect to the ‘other’ resonates with the idea of human rights journalism, which Shaw (2012a: 46) refers to as ‘journalism without borders – a journalism based on human rights and global justice, a journalism that challenges political, economic, social and cultural imbalances of society at both local and global levels’. In fact human rights journalism (HRJ) goes one step further than peace journalism in resonating with intercultural communication in that it moves beyond the double win, that is win-win involving the cultural groups involved in the cultural exchange, to a triple win, that is a win-win involving not only the groups engaged in the cultural exchange but also third party bystanders who are not directly involved. Moreover, HRJ goes further in resonating with intercultural communication in being more proactive in challenging indirect structural and cultural imbalances of society as cold conflicts, instead of waiting until they manifest into direct political violence as hot conflicts. Chow-White and McMahon (2012: 348) affirm that peace journalism research has largely focused on examples of ‘hot conflict’, such as media coverage of wars/conflicts.

Stereotypes, intercultural communication, miscommunication, terrorism, counter-terrorism and terrorism prevention

This section explores the resonances between the concept of stereotype and the concepts of intercultural communication and miscommunication on the one hand, and that between stereotype and the concepts of terrorism, counter-terrorism and terrorism prevention, on the other hand.

Stereotypes, intercultural communication and miscommunication

Media scholars have been critical of the media’s obsession with personalization of issues – the use of persons as symbols or images to make sense of issues and events to the public – as this casts aside serious discussion and explanation of underlying social and economic issues. For instance television screens and newspaper front pages during the 2011 London riots were awash with images of brick throwing and looting rioters but the undercurrents of racism, poverty and unemployment, especially among youths of the lower classes, hardly featured. Yet Walter Lippmann, who made a case for the use of stereotypes to facilitate speed and familiarity of issues by audiences, said: ‘For the most part we do not first see, and then define; we define first and then see. …Without standardisation, without stereotypes, without routine judgements, without a fairly ruthless disregard of subtlety, the editor would soon die of excitement’ (Lippmann, 1922: 58–59).

Stereotypes and clichés are the staples routinely deployed by the news media in an attempt to make sense of issues and events they report or comment on. Fowler (2001) observes that stereotypes provide the currency through which the reciprocal and dialectical process of the formation of news events and the formation of news values is negotiated. When a striking event, such as the 2011 Japanese earthquake, comes to pass it will reinforce a stereotype, and reciprocally, the firmer the stereotype, the more likely are relevant events defined by this stereotype to become news. Thus, stereotypes are used to promote standardization in news production.

Yet, while stereotypes can be used positively and constructively in news media discourse, it is their negative and destructive uses that have started to attract much scholarly attention in recent years. Thus Roger Fowler (2001: 17) defines stereotype as ‘a socially-constructed mental pigeon-hole into which events and individuals can be sorted, thereby making such events and individuals comprehensible’. When stereotypes are used in positive/constructive ways they promote intercultural communication, which in turn promotes peace journalism and human rights journalism. However, when on the other hand stereotypes are used in negative/destructive ways they promote cultural miscommunication, which in turn promotes war journalism and human wrongs journalism.

Stereotypes and terrorism, counter-terrorism and terrorism prevention

The definition of terrorism has been contested in academic circles. For instance, counter-insurgency experts have offered a more orthodox interpretation of an act of terrorism by reducing it to an act of violence intended to attract publicity to a political cause. This has made the relationship between terrorism and the media ‘one of “symbiosis”, in which terrorism’s primary aim is media coverage’ (Bell, 1978, cited in Hocking, 1992: 88). The publicity focus perception of terrorism measures its success not by the meeting of the political demands of the terrorists, but rather by the volume of publicity it is able to generate (Hocking, 1992). Referring to acts of terrorism in Northern Ireland in 1985, for example, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously articulated this view when she declared that ‘democracies must find a way to starve the terrorists and hijackers of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend’ (cited in Cottle, 2006: 144).

Yet this orthodox interpretation of terrorism has invariably reduced the development of counter-terrorism measures to the unquestionable reaction to acts or threats of terrorism. Thus, counter-terrorism measures are simply conceived as reactive to terrorism in generally the same way in which the media is reactive to acts or threats of terrorism. Acts are defined as ‘terrorism’ on the basis of counter-terrorist reaction to them. Terrorism is thus defined only by a reaction to it (Hocking, 1992). This underpins Soulier’s argument that ‘the terrorist is “whoever is classified and prosecuted as such” ’ (1978: 30).

This raises the question of the identification of the ‘terrorists’. For instance, is it possible to tell the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter in any given conflict situation? The way we perceive acts of violence carried out by groups such as the Palestinians, the Kashmiris, the Tamil Tigers and the Northern Irish Republicans can vary from person to person or from one place to another. This reinforces the cliché that ‘one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ (McCoubrey, 1997: 258). The politics of terrorism as framed by the media therefore informs decisions by states and state leaders to perceive an act as terrorism and the person carrying it out as a terrorist, and this is subject to change in accordance with changing political or ideological alliances. This apparent nexus, not just between the political class and the media, but also between the latter and the public, is well illustrated when we see, for instance, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban were all in the recent past described as terrorists, but they have all been at one stage hailed as friends of the West, and in fact regarded as freedom fighters and those fighting a just war (Thomas, 2002, cited in Rehman, 2007: 202).

The changing contours of what constitutes terrorism and who is a terrorist apparently came to a head with President Bush’s famous declaration of the ‘War on Terror’ following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This ‘War on Terror’ frame has since then defined the way not only acts of terrorism, narrowly defined, but also all conflicts involving direct political violence ranging from civil wars and inter-state wars to violent riots and demonstrations, are mediated (Shaw, 2012b). Islam has since been framed, or demonized, as ‘enemy no. 1’ in this ‘war on terror’ within the context of both global terrorism and home-grown terrorism. However, as Khiabany and Williamson (2012) observe, anti-Muslim racism predates immigration from Muslim majority countries to the UK or the ‘war on terror’. The ‘backward, atavistic, barbaric and fanatical’ stereotypical representations of Arab-Muslim majority countries date back to several centuries ago during the eras of western imperialism and colonialism of the Middle East and North Africa (Khiabany and Williamson, 2012: 138). But the authors acknowledge that these stereotypes have been reanimated after 9/11 with a redefinition of Islam as a purely cultural problem to the ‘civilized’ western world. Italian Premier Berlusconi said: ‘We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights – and in contrast with Islamic countries’ (Berlusconi, 2001, cited in Baig, 2004).

Khiabany and Williamson (2012) have identified three main elements in this stereotypical process of the redefinition of Islam. First, the reduction of diverse Muslim populations across the globe ranging from Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan to Sudan into a single homogenized Islam. This stereotype flies in the face of the diversity of Islam going by the observation of Aziz Al-Azmeh (1993: 1) that there are ‘as many Islams as situations that sustain it’. The second element has been the redefinition of this homogenized version of Islam as a ‘culture’ and an ethnicity. Anne-Marie Fortier points to a kind of ‘taxonomic shift in Britain, from “ethnic minorities” in the 70s to “minority faith communities” today’ (2008: 5). The third element is that this ‘universal’ Islamic culture is preached in direct binary opposition to another invention – western culture. The most famous conceptualization of this Islamic vs western culture binary was offered by Samuel Huntington (1996), who argued that culture had replaced ideology as a source of global conflicts following the end of the Cold War era. It is interesting to see how journalists and politicians across the political spectrum have embraced Huntington’s thesis that counter-poses ‘a supposed rational Occidental (Western) culture against a rigid, stagnant Oriental (Muslim) culture and religion’ (Khiabany and Williamson, 2012: 139).

7/7 terrorist attacks, discourses of discrimination of Muslims and marginalization of Islam

Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the British press coverage of the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005 (commonly referred to as the 7/7 attacks), this article furthers the findings of a 2007 study of Germany’s Muslim community which revealed a consistently close link between radicalization and ‘vicarious’ experiences of marginalization and discrimination, according to an article by Busso von Alvensleben of the German Foreign Ministry. Although the study showed valuable insights into home-grown terrorism, it failed to show any hard and fast link between Islamist sympathies and the condoning of extremism and violence (Von Alvensleben, 2008).

Other studies in Europe by the Open Society Institute (OSI) have also confirmed how sustained negative stereotyping of Islam and Muslims in the mainstream news media can foster a sense of alienation against those identifying directly or indirectly with this religion. For instance, when a Belgian boy was recently stabbed at a train station in Brussels, ‘the reporting of this incident (based on eye-witness accounts and video surveillance) suggested that the perpetrators were Moroccan’, a predominantly immigrant Muslim community (OSI, 2010: 214). Groups are commonly stereotyped through under-representation, over-representation or misrepresentation. All these forms of stereotypical representation constitute a culture of miscommunication or the failure of intercultural communication. Thus, as Stuart Hall (1974: 18) argues, ‘a group of people can be marginalized by their portrayal as an unrepresentative minority or denigrated by being presented as abnormal and peculiar, or excluded by only appearing in the media when they present a problem’.

Methodological approach

Drawing on the above studies of German and European Muslims, and the critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the reporting of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London by eight British newspapers, four broadsheets (The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent), and four tabloid newspapers (The Sun, Daily Mail, Mirror and The Express), this article interrogates discourses of discrimination and marginalization in the context of negative and destructive stereotypes employed. The rational for the choice of these eight British newspapers is informed by the fact that they are the most authoritative and widely read newspapers in Britain. Moreover, the studying of broadsheet and tabloid newspaper coverage of the 7/7 attacks is intended to observe similarities and differences between the two types of newspapers in their use of negative and destructive stereotypes. The choice of CDA for methodology is informed by the fact that it strongly relies on linguistic categories such as modes or nuances of communication using idioms, clichés, vocabulary, etc. in contrast to other approaches to text and discourse analyses such as content or conversation analysis (Wodak and Meyer, 2001; see also Titscher et al., 2000). This article draws on CDA’s hermeneutic method of ‘grasping and producing meaning relations’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2001: 16) to determine the resonance between negative and destructive stereotypes, on one hand, and the discourses of discrimination and marginalization, on the other, employed by the mainstream British press coverage of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. The consequence of using the hermeneutic CDA procedure is that the line between data collection and analysis is blurred. The approach of this article is therefore similar to many CDA studies that ‘deal with only small corpora which are usually regarded as being typical of certain discourses’ (Wodak and Meyer, 2001: 25). In the context of this approach, this article proceeds to critically analyse the two discourses of discrimination of Muslims and marginalization of Islam based on the use of negative and destructive stereotypes employed in most of the articles from the eight selected British newspapers. The articles analysed are mostly news reports and commentaries randomly selected from the eight selected newspapers published between 8 July (that is the day after the 7/7 terrorist attacks) to 7 October 2005 covering the period of three months. This period was chosen as it was the one that really saw the most coverage of the attacks.

Discourses of discrimination of Muslims

This section interrogates discourses of hate and fear directed against Muslims in Britain and the world at large portrayed by way of negative and destructive stereotypes or boundary lines in the British press. The corpora critically examined here are drawn largely from selected articles published in the eight British newspapers selected for this study. The discrimination discourse using a maze of hostile stereotypes portraying Muslims in hateful and fearful ways was in most cases dominated by right-wing hardline views that are very critical of the ‘soft touch’ approach of British policy towards dealing with Muslims suspected of association with extremism and terrorism. This is clearly evident in a Daily Mail editorial by Simon Heffer (2005) entitled: ‘Our lunatic laws just help Al-Qaeda’ in which he called for the British to follow the hardline example of the French:

It is painful to have to take lessons from the French, but on this we should. Since the autumn of 2002, when France learned that it was in danger of attack from Al Qaeda, 40 extremists have been expelled, 10 of them radical imams… The French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, promises ‘zero tolerance’ against French imams who hold violent and fundamentalist meetings. His British counterpart, Home Secretary Charles Clarke, tiptoes through the nonsense of our human rights laws to try to work out whether he is allowed to deport anybody.

Very explosive and offensive stereotypes highlighted (by the author of this journal article) in bold above – Al Qaeda, extremists, radical, violent, and fundamentalist preaching imams – are just too easily conflated with Muslims, who should be dealt with French style. These destructive boundary lines simplistically constitute hateful and fearful discourses of discrimination directed not only against the so-called ‘radical’ imams (clerics who lead Muslim prayers in Mosques) referred to in the article but all those Muslims who are either followers of these imams or are associated with them in Islam. This became the dominant news media discourse in Britain in the first three months following the 7 July terrorist attacks on London. In fact it turned out that this discourse resonated with the political class as a few weeks later 10 ‘preachers of hate’ (Muslim clerics) were, according to a report by Bob Robert and Victoria Bone in the Mirror (2005), arrested and put in jail following a crackdown by British immigration officers. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke was quoted as saying those detained ‘posed a threat to national security’. It is interesting to see how religion, in this case Islam, has replaced ethnicity, as the new form of identity for the ‘other’. What is more, the resonance between these discourses of discrimination and government crackdown on Muslim ‘hate preachers’ goes to confirm the media–government collaboration in the ‘war on terror’ and, by extension, the clash of civilizations as discussed earlier in this article. In fact this media–government collaboration went beyond the borders of the UK as, according to a report in The Express by Joanna Walters, entitled ‘Call for holy war on Muslim extremists’ (2005), Pakistan’s President Musharraf ordered a ‘sweeping crackdown on militants across the country that has so far seen 300 suspects arrested and religious leaders fleeing Karachi’.

Although ‘the British tabloid press have been at the forefront of anti-Muslim journalism’ (Khiabany and Williamson, 2012: 135), the broadsheet newspapers also proved to be big time contenders. As a matter of fact, if anything, the latter were ahead in delivering scathing criticism against left-wing politicians who appeared to be soft on Muslims for fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia’. For instance London Mayor Ken Livingstone provoked outrage when, according to an article by Times home correspondent Richard Ford, he compared an outspoken Muslim scholar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, ‘who backs suicide bombings to the reforming Pope John XXIII’ because as, the Mayor put it, ‘he was the most senior Islamic scholar saying that Islam must engage with the world’. And in what looks like pandering to the agenda of right-wing politicians, Ford wrote in the same article (2005):

Last night Ann Widdecombe, a former Shadow Home Secretary, criticised Mr Livingstone’s remarks. She said: ‘Ken Livingstone obviously has no idea either of the essentially holy nature of Pope John XXIII or the very dangerous nature of al-Qaradawi’. James Clappison, a Conservative MP on the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, added: ‘I must say it is not a comparison that springs to mind’.

We can see the boundary lines (highlighted in bold by this author) depicting the pope as ‘holy’ as against the ‘dangerous’ Sheik by way of dismissing Ken Livingstone’s comparison of them as problematic. The Conservative MP reinforced the portrayal of the comparison as a ‘myth’.

The left- and right-wing ideological divide in the British press appeared largely blurred following the 7/7 bombings as the chorus of discriminatory discourse against Muslims was also to some extent evident in left-wing newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent. For instance, The Guardian Weekly edition ran a report in which Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed intelligence warning a month before 7/7 linking his foreign policy in Iraq to disillusion among young Muslims as a myth. The Guardian (2005) report noted:

Last weekend Mr Blair said the fanatics who struck in London and launched other attacks around the world were driven by an ‘evil ideology’ rather than opposition to any policy, and that it would be a ‘misunderstanding of a catastrophic order’ to think that if we changed our behaviour they would change theirs. (Wintour, 2005)

Mr Blair did not waver in his doubting of any Iraqi connection to the London bombings even when this was later confirmed by a research conducted by the British think tank Chatham House and a paper which his office commissioned. For him, no matter how scientifically proven, this was not explanation for the mobilization of home-grown young Muslims into acts of terrorism.

Discourses of marginalization of Islam

This section interrogates discourses of hate and fear directed against Islam in Britain and the world at large portrayed by way of negative and destructive stereotypes or boundary lines in the British press. The corpora critically examined here are drawn largely from selected articles published in the eight British newspapers selected for this study.

The reporting of the weeks following the 7/7 bombing was awash with the portrayal of Islam as a ‘lunatic’, ‘barbaric’, ‘violent’ and ‘uncivilized’ religion and culture set in a kind of tug-of-war against the ‘peaceful’ and ‘civilized’ western culture. The tone for this was set by Tony Blair in his first speech a few hours following the 7/7 bombing as reported by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian (2005):

It is important that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction… in a desire to impose extremism on the world.

As cited in The Independent (2005), in an article entitled ‘Terror in London’, Blair is quoted as saying, ‘Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.’

This discourse of ‘our values and way of life’ against those ‘violent’ and ‘uncivilized’ (Islamic) extremists defined the rest of the coverage of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Simon Heffer in his Daily Mail editorial (2005) joined the chorus of the marginalization of Islam as a religion and culture of ‘hate’ and ‘fear’:

We have to stop this lunacy. Nothing, no human rights convention, no fear of being ‘racist’, no determination to avoid ‘Islamophobia’ (or whatever politically correct garbage Sir Ian Blair can come up with) – can, in a time of attack like this, be allowed to stand in the way of protecting our people and standing up for our way of life against those who would destroy it.

The message of the superiority of the ‘western way of life’ quickly became a consistent theme echoed not only by politicians but also by journalists and scholars. This reinforces a collaborative relationship, rather than one of watchdog, not only between politicians and journalists, as noted earlier in this article, but also between these two and academics. Samuel Huntington for instance views Islam as a ‘religion of the sword… glorifying military virtues’ (1996: 263). In his perceptions, ‘The Koran and other statements of Muslim beliefs contain few prohibitions on violence, and a concept of non-violence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice’ (1996: 263). Khiabany and Williamson (2012: 135) refer to this simplistic conflation of Islam with ‘barbaric practices’ as a ‘key aspect of the culturalization of terror and violence’. MI5 Director General Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller is on record to have said in a Telegraph article by Philip Johnston that the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its supporters had the capacity ‘to do real harm to our way of life’. Coming from such a top intelligence chief speaks volumes of how this message of the marginalization of Islam ‘as their barbaric way of life’ against ‘our civilization’ struck a chord with most British people.

Concluding remarks, implications for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention

Having looked at the intersections between intercultural communication, peace journalism and human rights journalism; examined how stereotypes are related to intercultural communication, cultural miscommunication, terrorism, counter-terrorism and terrorism prevention; and finally critically examined the discourses of discrimination of Muslims and marginalization of Islam in the press coverage of the 7/7 terrorist attacks on London, this article concludes by discussing the implications of these discourses for intercultural communication and terrorism prevention largely drawing on some selected corpora from the selected eight British newspapers and the German and OSI studies discussed earlier in this article.

The German study of the Muslim community in that country found that the same conditions such as discourses of discrimination and marginalization that mobilize young Muslims into acts of terrorism can incite German teens and adults to embark on xenophobic and right-wing extremism (Von Alvensleben, 2008). In much a similar vein, as some of the corpora from the selected newspapers have shown, the hateful and fearful news discourses of discrimination and marginalization directed against Muslims and Islam in the weeks following 7/7 largely contributed to a spectre of hostility visited upon Muslims and Islam by certain xenophobic and right-wing extremist individuals. Edward Said, a leading authority on the representation of Islam in the media, points to this fallout of cultural miscommunication, ‘there has been an intense focus on Muslims and Islam in the American and Western media, most of it characterised by a more highly exaggerated stereotyping and belligerent hostility’ (Said, 1997: xi).

An article by Robert Verkaik in The Independent (2005), barely a week following 7/7, reported that ‘Mosques were targeted in faith-hate incidents over the weekend, including two fire-bombings of Islamic buildings in Leeds and Bradford’. Leader of the British Muslim Parliament, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui was cited in this report to have expressed concern that ‘some people would be led to believe that all Muslims were capable of suicide bombings’. He said Thursday’s attacks were the work of ‘lunatics’ who happened to live in Muslim communities. ‘There are lunatics in all societies and this attack was against all human values’, he said. Varkaik’s article cited Colin Cramphorn, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, who said he was aware that racists might seek to exploit public concerns about the threat from terrorism. This public hostility against Muslims largely caused by the negative media stereotyping of them as ‘devils’ can be likened to the hostility immigrants face in the UK and other parts of Europe as a result of a similar negative media representation, as confirmed by Van Dijk’s study in 1990.

Some media commentators were equally critical of the hardline measures. The Guardian Security Affairs editor, Richard Norton-Taylor for instance commented in an article (2005):

There is no such thing as total security. But at least the Whitehall mandarins and the security agencies are asking the right questions – rather more fertile ground than Blair’s rhetoric about a war on terror that the most draconian of laws and the most authoritarian of ministers could never win. Ministers, if not mandarins, are in danger of being chased by a mixture of fear and tabloid headlines up a spiral staircase, with each step representing a new law. At the top there will be an empty room; at the bottom, a land of unsolved problems made worse by racial and religious tensions.

Among the commentaries examined for this study there were a few, especially in The Independent and The Guardian, which like this one by Richard Norton-Taylor refused to buy into right-wing hardline policies that would only go to exacerbate, and not check, extremism and terrorism, as they would help to further discriminate against young and adult Muslims and marginalize their Islamic faith. Although this critical left-wing thinking was largely overwhelmed by the more dominant right-wing discourses of discrimination and marginalization in the coverage of 7/7 in the British press, it shows that intercultural communication and terrorism prevention based on positive and constructive stereotypes are possible.

From the foregoing anecdotal accounts of the fallouts of 7/7 by way of cultural miscommunication, hostility and hardline anti-terrorism measures, it is reasonable to conclude that discourses of discrimination against Muslims and marginalization of Islam by way of overt use of negative and destructive stereotypes have had far-reaching implications for not only intercultural communication, but also peace journalism and human rights journalism, and by extension, terrorism prevention. The fact that Islamophobia is very much alive, or has even become worse since 9/11, 7/7, etc., despite the 1997 Runnymede report and Van Dijk’s groundbreaking book Racism and the Press (1990), makes the findings of this article even more important and the need for further research in this area even more urgent.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

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