The Press is playing patsy with terrorist propaganda

BY JONATHAN POWER

5 April 2007

DOUBTLESS, at the moment of impact, the shards of the suicide bombers’ device will turn me into an emotional wreck, not to say a physical mess. But until that moment arrives I trust that I am in charge of my mental faculties.

Pace 9/11, I am not afraid of terrorism, even though I lived in London during the worst years of IRA activity and already this year I missed a terrorist attack on my hotel in Islamabad by only a couple of days. Terrorism and the damage it can do -- in particular the political and societal damage -- is greatly overrated. Who to blame? Doubtless, the politicians have a vested interest in whipping up the populace’s reaction, but most of all we should blame the media. They behave like patsies to the terrorists. They give their dirty deeds every bit of publicity they could ever dare to hope for and, as I saw last month in Nigeria’s oil producing delta, ignore the often valuable activities of the plethora of non-violent activists.

By and large the media get the perspective totally wrong -- who but a few observant folk know that the Tamil terrorists (Hindus for the most part) have a much worse terrorism record than Al Qaeda, with their attacks on Sri Lanka’s Buddhists and fellow Hindu’s? If there is a clash of civilisations anywhere on the planet -- which frankly I doubt -- it is on this pear shaped, tropical paradise of an island in the balmy Indian Ocean far away from any strategic interests of the big powers.

Second, the media, with only a handful of worthy exceptions, do an appalling job of presenting the facts behind the outrages. In the new issue of Prospect Magazine, Robert Dreyfus reports that Wayne White -- who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005 -- describes most of the “terrorists” in Iraq today as POIs, or “pissed off Iraqis “ who are fighting because “they don’t like the occupation”. Yet the press, until relatively recently, constantly replayed the Bush administration’s plain chant that without the American/British military presence Al Qaeda might take over Iraq. No wonder it has taken four years too long for the American and British public to turn against the war.

Ronald Steel noted in the New Republic after the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans, that the US media were fixated on “who or what bin Laden attacked” but “what bin Laden had been saying about why he and his Al Qaeda forces were attacking was given short shrift”. Only since the publication of Michael Schueur’s “Imperial Hubris” in 2004 has some of the media been shamed into regularly publishing excerpts of Al Qaeda’s communiques.

But there is an even more serious problem than that. The way the media and the politicians always play it is that the terrorists are in danger of winning and unless our political leaders are licensed to get tough we are going to succumb. A new study by Max Abrahms in Harvard University’s quarterly, “International Security”, shows the shallowness of such thinking. The study analyses the political life of 28 terrorist groups -- the complete list of foreign terrorist organisations designated by the State Department. The data yield a quite unexpected finding -- the terrorists accomplished their objectives only seven per cent of the time.

This is not an argument for giving into terrorism. It is a foul tactic that claims too many innocent lives. It is an argument simply for de-emphasising it and allowing the space for diplomacy and negotiations to work, and for the terrorists to get old and tire of the rough life, as they often do.

Look at the political plight of the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero. Since the first day he took office he has constantly been pilloried by the principal opposition party for being soft on the Basque terrorist group, ETA. The Popular Party has kept up the false refrain that the Madrid station bombings of three years ago that took 190 lives were the work of ETA. For long enough Zapatero tried to ignore them, and continued his quiet and seemingly progressing negotiations with ETA. But then late last year what is probably a dissident ETA grouping killed two people at Madrid airport and most of the media, softened up by three years of the opposition’s carping, turned on Zapatero. His negotiating hands are now effectively tied.

In Britain, progress was only made with the IRA because the government simply lied over many years that it was negotiating with the terrorists.

Who today would dare stand up and say talk to Al Qaeda, negotiate with the Taleban or treat the leaders of Hamas as sincere fellows whose agenda is worth discussing? There are few of our politicians, and even fewer members of the media.

Jonathan Power is a widely published commentator based in London. He can be reached at JonatPower@aol.com