Although this discourse is generated in the Occident, its influence is so powerful that it has significant impact on discursive practices in the Orient as well.
Both Hewitt and Abdul Wahid Q-News, July decry attempts to foist acceptable Muslim identities onto Muslims in the UK through media and government discourse and often specific initia- tives. Bush, but I can be against you and the terrorists and still be a responsible mem- ber of society.
Ditto, Mr. The Siege and Executive Decision and as Hewitt points out these also inform cur- rent political discourses on Muslims. Methodology This report follows a sociological approach based on a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews. Ameli et al. A detailed description about participants and their demography has been offered in Volume One.
Here follows a summary.
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The total number of quan- titative responses came to , with some being collated by hand, and the rest through a widely publicised on-line facility, over a three-week period. They are from diverse ethnic backgrounds and the level of their reli- giosity and identification with Islam is also diverse, ranging from devout practitioners to cultural and secular Muslims. About 43 percent of the respondents are employed, while the rest of the par- ticipants fall into the categories of the unemployed, self-employed and stu- dents. We also interviewed 52 Muslims from England, Scotland and Wales of whom 24 identified themselves as female and 23 as male.
Further to the data collected, analyses and case studies of news media, Hollywood films and classic and modern literature have also been carried out to provide additional insight into varying forms of media. The language of news media was particularly focused on throughout the analyses. The frequency of selected words was tabulated and presents comparisons between the various news pro- grammes. Furthermore, an array of literature ranging from various classical works to more recent publications were also analysed focusing on Orientalist and Eurocentric discourses.
Representation is not simply perception; reader and audi- ence have a critical role in creating a discursive understanding which creates, replicates and perpetuates inequalities. This is why non- British Muslims and British Muslims sometimes have dissimilar understandings of Muslim repre- sentation in the media.
Part One: Textual Analysis — Representation of Muslim in Media Text With Orientalist ideas still dominating Western media, the first part of the analysis focuses on television news, English literature and Hollywood films with the aim to expose such misrepresentations of Islam and Muslims which exist within these forms of media. As well as presenting an overall understanding of the discourses being articulated in the news about Islam and Muslims, a framework of selected words and phrases provided a comparison between the different news pro- 11 grammes. There were a number of similarities in the news coverage and the terminol- ogy used by all four news sources.
Newsnight and Channel 4 news presented a greater depth and range of news items and dedicated time to more informed analysis in comparison with the BBC and ITV news. The news coverage will be analysed below using a number of themes for more details see Appendix 1. This was for at least two reasons. The first is that there is already a perceived link between Islam or Muslims and terrorism in the minds of many people because of ongoing media coverage, a recent and very significant factor being the attacks in September in the USA Ansari, Therefore it did not require an explicit connection to be made by media sources for people to generate underlying assumptions and stereotypes.
The relationship between the media and the portrayal of Islam and Muslims provides a context within which to investigate the use of seemingly neutral words and objective state- ments Said, The limited frameworks Poole, within which Islam is almost always framed in the media, means that people already have a particular set of opin- ions and ideas about it — very often these are negative.
In the case of reporting of July 7, , when Muslim names were used at an early stage of news coverage, the connections were made in the minds of most viewers and readers. It could be argued that the media had no choice but to make public the names of the suspects and that it was not in their control of whether these would be Muslim names or not, but what is being explored here is the overall impact of the coverage.
The nature of the event necessitated that certain details were provided and as such particular words were used frequently. This use, limited though it was, makes a direct and obvious link between the religion of Islam and its followers and motivations as well as justifications for acts of terror. Asylum and Immigration One of the dominant themes in all of the coverage was asylum and immigra- tion.
Some reports placed considerable emphasis on the backgrounds of the suspected bombers, describing how they had sought asylum in the UK some years prior to the event, had either been or were in the process of being granted indefinite leave to stay or citizenship and had now partaken in these acts of violence on British soil. The nature of their new lives, mainly that they had received an education, financial support, housing and similar benefits, were all outlined.
Closely linked to the debate around asylum and immigration was that of 12 In the case of Muslims, most notoriously used to describe Omar Bakri Mohammed, leader of Al-Muhajiroun, but also other political refugees such as Abu Hamza. Thus, the crucial factor that was sometimes ignored in the debate on asylum and immigration was that most of the suspected bombers, linked both to July 7, as well as July 21, , were actually British citizens. Obviously, deportation or other methods of control became more complicated if the authorities were dealing with UK citizens.
Discussions on introducing anti- terror legislation and similar laws took place on all news channels and this will be analysed below. The debate on asylum also served to make the connection between terrorist activities in the UK and overseas influences, that is, the global terrorist move- ment. This was another pertinent theme in most news coverage and will also be explored.
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Loyalty and belonging All channels identified the phenomenon of young British men choosing to participate in such acts of terror against their fellow citizens. By describing the young men as having had a normal upbringing, education, job, family and living ordinary lives, until their re discovery of Islam, the reports focused on Islam as being the main factor that had lead them away from this normality into something extreme and sinister. They had now become the enemy within Ansari, In fact this purported that any Muslim, especially a young male — ordinary as they seem — had the potential to become a recruit for this type of extreme activity.
Only news reports on C4 and on the Newsnight programme went on to analyse in some detail the possibilities of why this was happening. They presented both national issues of concern — such as depriva- tion and marginalisation, as well as international dimensions relating directly to British foreign policy, most recently the war in Iraq and looked at how being disenfranchised from the mainstream — socially, culturally and politi- cally — meant people felt compelled to take such drastic measures.
C4 also looked at the possible role of propaganda by political organisations such as Al-Muhajiroun in the recruitment of young men who were then encouraged to translate their political beliefs and grievances into physical action such as the bombings.
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Subsequently, after the July bomb- ings the same kinds of questions were being asked of Muslims living in Britain. When it came to the moment of truth, their opinions and actions would reflect more accurately the values of some other universal value system that is, their religion and all that it implies rather than what could be expected from the majority of citizens in the UK. The discovery that the perpetrators were British merely confirmed for some commentators what they had already suggested for some time, the conflict between the British way of life and values and belonging to the global Muslim community — the ummah, especially in its political manifestations.
28 February News Archive | Daily Mail Online
The idea that a young British Muslim man could blow up not only himself but also innocent people, who were also fellow citizens, was something which caused great consternation amongst all observers. Suicide bombing on British soil marked a watershed in the threat of terrorism. Apart from the obvious dismay this caused, it also had far reaching implications for the way the terrorist threat would be policed and how related intelligence would be sought.
These ideas are obviously debated in relation to all minority popula- tions, but particularly Muslims. Arguably this stems from the historical assumptions that Islam is not compatible with Christianity or Europe or the West or its modern secular principles. No number of external ref- erence points can change the basic fact that they will always remain different. It is this difference that results in any Muslim being seen as a potential dan- ger, capable of perpetrating such acts of terror.
Reporting of the July bombings was no exception. However with the above discourses, describing Muslims as having a potential to develop such extreme views and behaviour regardless of their moderate standing, differen- tiating between different types of Muslims can prove to be ineffective. These global connections were analysed by all of the news programmes, to a greater or lesser degree. One of the findings of research looking at media coverage of Islam and Muslims is that a substantial proportion of the news material has an interna- tional dimension Said, Thus, whilst the focus of the London bombings was the UK, links between overseas Muslims and groups were made and Islam was presented as a global force.
Global terror networks were invoked as well as terror cells developing and operating within the UK. In connecting overseas cells with those in the UK, comparisons were made between the bombings here and other 14 attacks abroad.
London Metropolitan Archives: City of London
The incidents in Kenya, Bali, Turkey and Egypt were some of the examples used by way of reminding the viewer of the kinds of dangers posed by extreme groups. One important factor in referring to this global 15 connection was the role of Al-Qaeda. The attacks on the USA made an obvious point of comparison and the idea that terrorists were targeting powerful western nations was confirmed by 16 other attacks in Paris and Madrid — London being the latest victim.
His stance on western foreign policy towards Muslim countries, particularly that of the USA but also of the UK and other Western nations, was cited as an explanation of why many Muslims felt disillusioned with certain governments and policies.
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As such the role of foreign policy was discussed directly by the news programmes though surprisingly, to a lesser degree by the BBC. The war in Iraq, including the decision to go to war; the reality of the situation there; long term policy, and, the actual impact of the continuing occupation by foreign forces, were all points of discussion with respect to recent foreign policies.
However, a deeper understanding of the politics of the region, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and specifically the role of Western nations in this, was almost com- pletely absent from news reports.
A study by the Glasgow University Media Group shows the effect of this on public understanding. The BBC launched an inquiry into allegations of bias in its reporting of the Palestinian — Israeli issue, and whilst not finding itself to be biased, took measures to ensure that more context is explained, notably by appointing vet- eran journalist Jeremy Bowen as a senior correspondent in the area to provide context to reports from the conflict in addition to pieces filed by other reporters BBC, Tuesday, 22 June, Though the news programmes talked about related issues, they did not con- centrate enough on presenting broader historical and political arguments that were being articulated by different voices, especially Muslim voices.
Only then can there be a move towards eliminating, or at least reducing, the factors that motivate these terrorist attacks. Though wider debate and context has been found to be lacking in news reporting of many issues Conte, , it would not have been difficult to provide this in the case of the bombings because all the programmes gave continuous coverage of the event for several weeks. If more time had been dedicated to developing a body of knowledge around the topics relating to the bombings, the audience may have been able to better understand the wider issues of concern and perhaps even be presented with alternative per- spectives.
The BBC bulletins were particularly restrictive and repetitive in their reporting and did not appear to investigate outside a fixed set of notions, whereas C4 and Newsnight at least enabled varied discussions and interviewed representatives of different organisations and standpoints which assisted audiences in constructing a broader framework within which to locate the bombings. The analysis charts for both BBC and ITV news show that similar words and phrases were used by both programmes in their over- 18 all reporting.
Apart from the obvious mention of Iraq in news programmes, other coun- tries were also referred to, including, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other east African countries. The actual debate around foreign policy issues was on the whole limited. Whilst the war in Iraq was cited sev- eral times as being a reason for the attacks, this did not portray the full extent to which global political situations in the Muslim world were impacting on the perceptions of Muslims about western governments.