For
the foreseeable future one of the central preoccupations of the global press,
and certainly of the American press, is going to be the communications
challenge presented by the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, or Da'esh,
the acronyms we use when we don't want to dignify this group with a name that makes it sound like a
national entity.
And let’s make no mistake, the danger it poses is, first and
foremost, one of communications. Its military victories have mostly been
against hollow armies rife with corruption or weakened by other insurgencies.
Its impact on global opinion, however, is based on its creative exploitation of
media and myths, some old and some new, all wrapped up in an iconography that
is deeply seductive for many young people in many different parts of the
world.
I think all of us here can agree that we do not agree with
almost anything that Da'esh represents, but we would be making a major mistake, as
people who work in the media, if we did not admit the agility and creativity of
its messaging, which is much more supple and much more focused than most of the
media when we are trying to tell something like the truth
about the events that surround us.
If you want to understand one key aspect of the way Da'esh
gets its message across, you would do well to spend a little time playing "Call of Duty," which has gamers enraptured all over the world.
Start at 00:33
If you then look at any of the highly produced films by
Da'esh showing the actual murder of Western hostages, Syrian soldiers, Egyptian
and other Christians, crucifixions, stonings, people thrown from towers and,
most notably, the burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot — then you, as a
player of "Call of Duty," will find yourself in very familiar territory.
In Call
of Da'esh real people really are dying these gruesome deaths, but the video
presentation has moved all that into a more accessible and, for a certain
mindset, more acceptable dimension.
...
...
While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly have been revolutionary
communications tools, relatively few people in the press have understood how to exploit them
effectively.
Journalists are probably the least imaginative users of
social media. We employ them to gather information partly to compensate for the
fact we no longer have the budgets to go ourselves to the places where the
story is happening. Thus when the earthquake hit Nepal on Saturday, I saw three
of my few thousand Facebook “friends” were there and notifying the world that
they survived. I asked them to write about it and one of their excellent pieces
is on The Daily Beast today.
Blurring intentionally and cruelly the lines between the Xbox and the execution grounds of Raqqa.
But the most imaginative and effective users of social media
as a tool to try to change the world are not doing what journalists do—grabbing
bits of fact here and there to try to discover a truth—they are creating
narratives to engage a following. And the most successful of all are those who
create a narrative for a targeted audience that can be moved to action that
then reinforces the narrative.
Barack Obama won the presidency this way in 2008. His
campaign’s use of social media first engaged people who might only be vaguely
interested in supporting him. Then it asked them to carry out specific acts, ringing
specific doorbells to talk to people face to face to raise money and encourage
voting. Then it asked people to
record the results so it could gauge where their performance might be improved.
And the narrative? The election of the first black president of the United
States, a young man who said, “Yes, we can.” (Ironically, since he has been in
office, he has found it difficult to construct such effective narratives around
his key programs.)
I actually wrote in 2008 that these same kinds of tactics
could be employed by terrorists. It's a question of tools, after all, not of ideology. At the time I was thinking of Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda, who had first used CD-Roms and DVDs to spread their narrative, then
satellite television, and who had just begun to experiment with YouTube.
From 2009 to 2011, we saw the power of narrative combined
with social media and satellite to create diplomatic uprisings in Iran,
Tunisia, Egypt and much of the rest of the deeply frustrated Arab world. But
their narrative was a short one—to gather, to protest, to try to bring down the
government—with no real strategy for what might come after. I remember when I was in Tahrir Square in Egypt
people talking about “crowd sourcing” the leadership of the revolution. Well,
we know that doesn’t work. Militant groups with long histories of discipline
and organization move into the vacuum and, more often than not, frustrate
entirely the hopes of the free-thinking crowd on Facebook and Twitter.
Also see: In an Age of Information Insurgency, Notes on My History in the Mainstream Media
Also see: In an Age of Information Insurgency, Notes on My History in the Mainstream Media
In fact, coming full circle, we have to understand that the people
who truly mastered the new media are those associated with the Al Qaeda
spin-off that we’ve been calling Da’esh, because it understood its
audiences—there are several; it knew how to develop narratives that they would
feel compelling; and it has the leadership to continue an organized drive to
create a new state in the Middle East that has goals far outside the region.
I want to focus here on the Da’esh narrative that has proved
so seductive to young people in the West, because that is the one that Western
governments have found so surprising.
In fact, today’s terrorists have certain common
characteristics. I think of them as testosterone, narrative, and theater, or,
if you will, TNT.
Testosterone because they are predominantly young men, often
frustrated in their work lives and sex lives, who want an outlet for their
energies. (This is true of many recruits in conventional armies. But one of the
things Da’esh adds to the mix is the promise of wives and even slave girls.)
Narrative, which we keep coming back to, is absolutely
central. Almost all terrorist recruits over the years, whether in the IRA, the
Sendero Luminoso or Black September, have been convinced they were fighting to
defend an oppressed people. They were not necessarily oppressed themselves, but
they identified with those who were, and they see themselves in noble, even
chivalric terms, like knights in shining armor coming to the rescue, which
gives them the ability to justify, as knights often did, absolutely horrific
acts. It is no accident that Al Qaeda’s core book of ideology by Ayman al
Zawahiri bears the title Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Young men and
women are inspired to answer their call of duty.
Theater? This is another area where social media have become
so important. The recruits of modern terrorist organizations want to project
themselves and their actions on the world stage, even if they are not going to
be around on this earth to see the result. Social media have made this effect
incalculably easier to achieve.
Fifteen years ago, Bin Laden and his men spent a lot of time
watching disaster movies like “Independence Day,” and they plotted their
attacks to imitate that sort of iconography. Without huge spectaculars, they
knew they could never command the kind of global attention that they and their
suicide troops wanted.
Ten years ago, when Abu Musab al Zarqawi was decapitating
his enemies in Iraq, he had to depend on satellite news networks to show clips
of the grotesque videotapes that preached about his sense of justice and were
intended to horrify his enemies.
Terrorists of those earlier generations had to depend on others, even on the "mainstream media," to get their message out. But no longer.
Terrorists of those earlier generations had to depend on others, even on the "mainstream media," to get their message out. But no longer.
Today, Da’esh has so many more tools at its disposal to sicken its enemies and glorify its knights in blood-spattered balaclavas, and
not only the soft social media like Facebook and Twitter, but the hard core
violent excitement of shared video games.
It isn’t so much that Da’esh produces its own version of “Grand
Theft Auto,” although it has done that, it is the way it uses the imagery and
iconography of video games to put its message across, blurring intentionally
and cruelly the lines between the Xbox and the execution grounds of Raqqa.
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| Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot. |
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| Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot. |
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| Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot. |
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| Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot. |
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| Screen shot from trailer of Call of Duty: Black Ops II |
You may have noticed I have barely mentioned religion.
When we talk about Al Qaeda and Da’esh, there is often a lot
of discussion about what the Qur’an says or does not say. And there is a lot of
tweeting from this Surah or that one. But, of course, the Qur’an can say or not
say just about anything these organizations want.
Do the Qur’an and the hadith
warn against the worship of idols? Yes. So let’s destroy Nimrud and Hatra. But have
those same lines been interpreted by scholars for many centuries to warn
against the portrayal of the human form? Absolutely. You can see the result in
mosques all over this city and the world. And earlier radical movements, like
the Saudi Ikhwan, not only fought and died to keep television out of the
kingdom in the 1960s for that reason, earlier on they smashed every mirror they
could find in Hijaz. But Da’esh has no problem with the human form because it
is so vital to its new media narrative—it won’t motivate many young men or
women with calligraphy and arabesques—and Da’esh is a very practical
organization.
So, here’s my question for you—and it is not a rhetorical
one:
Is there a narrative that we liberal-thinkers can use to
counter the TNT that Da’esh offers its recruits? Maybe that is not exactly our
duty, but it is something we have to think about in the name of humanity and,
yes, even in the name of journalism.
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