(eds), Democracy and Counterterrorism

E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F C O M M U N I C AT I O N 2 3 ( 2 )

Straubhaar, Joseph (1991) ‘Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity’, Critical Studies in Mass Communications 8: 39–59.

Paul Rixon Roehampton University

Robert J. Art and Louise Richardson (eds), Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons from the Past. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007. US$65.00 (hbk), US$28.00 (pbk). 638 pp. In this age of 24/7 saturation coverage of all things terror-related, it is hard to conceive of a book about terrorism that does not touch on the synergistic relationship between terrorists and the media. That is doubly true of a collection marketed as ‘a comprehensive study’ of the lessons drawn from recent history. Yet Democracy and Counterterrorism manages to avoid the issue almost entirely. Absent from the index to this 640-page tome are the words ‘media’, ‘television’, ‘newspaper’ and ‘Internet’. Nowhere in the 14 case studies from Europe, South America, the Middle East and South Asia is there a substantive discussion of media as a tool of terror or a weapon of counterterrorism. ‘Terrorism, let’s recall, is the deliberate use of violence, more often than not against non-combatants, to induce political change through fear’, the editors write in their introduction, paraphrasing Rand expert Bruce Hoffman (p. 8). That definition is repeatedly cited throughout the book. But the editors seem to ignore the implicit fact that, like the tree falling in the woods, the terror act must be communicated to a wider audience if it is to be heard – or, in this case, to create fear. Media is the critical missing piece in this strategic equation. That was recognized as far back as 1979 at the First International Conference on Terrorism, which denounced the ‘special relationship’ between media and terrorism (Netanyahu, 1986). ‘Before Munich, we were a forgotten people’, a PLO official involved in planning the first wave of Palestinian terrorism once told me, referring to the capture of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. ‘Afterward, everyone knew our plight.’ The Munich hostage drama, broadcast to an estimated global audience of 900 million people, ushered in an era of mass-mediated terrorism. That link between terrorism and media ultimately produced the poster-child of the media age, Osama bin Laden, who would never have achieved the stature he commands today without ready access to satellite television and the Internet. As a reporter who has covered countless acts of violence – from guerrilla massacres and sabotage to hijackings and suicide bombings – by militant groups on four continents, I cannot think of a single attack that was not calculated to reverberate in the media, whether locally or on a global scale. That is why any working definition of terrorism must include publicity as a key component. The act itself is not enough. It must strike fear in the broader public. And to do that, it must be widely reported in the media. Yet none of this is discussed by Art and Richardson or their contributors. Even the role of the Hizballah1 television station, Al-Manar, the first media outlet included on the US list of terrorist organizations, is largely ignored. A single sentence, in the chapter by Byman, talks of the fact that ‘Hizballah’s radio and television stations . . . 240 Downloaded from ejc.sagepub.com at WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY on December 10, 2015

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help glorify the Palestinian struggle in the Muslim world and try to foment fear in Israel’ (p. 313). The book does not mention the far more important role the station played in undermining support for the Israeli occupation of Lebanon among the Israeli public by regularly broadcasting pictures of dead Israeli soldiers and attacks on Israeli troops. Ironically, the need to influence publics is frequently acknowledged in Democracy and Counterterrorism. Italy’s success in creating opposition to the Red Brigades within the Italian Communist Party is noted as an important element in the Marxist group’s destruction, as is the mobilization of moderates in the Punjab and the shift in Basque public opinion against the militant group ETA. Likewise, the failure to win ‘hearts and minds’ is discussed, particularly in terms of how easily military action can alienate the broader public, thus generating greater support for militants. Yet the role played by the media in the process, either as an overt weapon of war or an echo chamber, is never mentioned. For the communications scholar, the book also – inadvertently – says much about the power of language and the way in which selective terminology so easily reduces the world to black and white dichotomies, which in turn shape policy and drive attitudes at the receiving end of policy. Nothing has had a more polarizing effect in the post-9/11era than the Bush administration’s ‘with us or against us’ framing of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ and its largely successful effort to reduce the root causes of terrorism to a series of bromides about how Islamist militants are ‘psychopaths’ and ‘fanatics’ who ‘hate our values’.2 The editors of this book make a strong argument that the causes of radical Islamist terrorism: . . . are complex and deeply rooted, deriving partly from present social, political, and economic circumstances in the Muslim and Arab worlds, but also from a historical Muslim sense of humiliation at the hands of the West and from the failures of successive Arab leaders to improve the lot of their peoples. (p. 596)

Yet the contributors themselves sometimes seem to ignore that. In his foreword, the president of the US Institute of Peace, Richard Solomon, refers to ‘political violence and terrorism’ (p. ix). It is one of the few times the distinction is made. The actors in all 14 case studies are reduced to ‘terrorists’, whether they are trying to overthrow the domestic order, drive foreign troops off their soil or declare independence. Nor does it matter whether their primary targets are military or civilian. The simplistic labelling applies equally to those fighting the ‘terrorists’. ‘Our case studies include only democracies’, the editors explain. ‘We have avoided using authoritarian or totalitarian governments as “control states” for the simple reason that democratic states are more constrained in their ability to deploy military force domestically’ (p. 3). That might come as news to the tens of thousands of Chechens and ethnic Russians estimated to have died at the hands of Russia’s ‘democratic’ government (Amnesty, 2007) or the 2038 Palestinian non-combatants, including almost 860 children, reportedly killed by Israeli forces between 29 September 2000 and 31 October 2007 alone (B’Tselem, 2007). A communications scholar examining this book might also be on the lookout for other ways in which language – purposely or not – skews the readers’ perceptions. The two chapters most relevant to the so-called ‘War on Terror’ are the most troubling. In writing about Israel’s protracted conflict with Hizballah, Daniel Byman says that after Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, ‘the 241 Downloaded from ejc.sagepub.com at WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY on December 10, 2015


Shia movement occasionally shelled settlements, engaged in cross-border raids, and kidnapped Israeli citizens’. Note that last word: citizens; the clear implication is that it is a synonym for civilians and that Hizballah has grabbed unarmed Israeli men, women and children and spirited them back into Lebanon. That has never happened. A total of five Israeli soldiers, all in uniform, have been abducted while on patrol along the border since October 2000. Three others were taken captive during the 1982 Israeli invasion, along with a pilot whose plane crashed over Lebanon. The only non-combatant Israeli ever kidnapped by Hizballah was Elhanan Tennenbaum, widely described in the media as an innocent ‘businessman’ supposedly kidnapped in Switzerland or Dubai. It turned out he was trying to set up a drug deal with a Hizballah operative in Lebanon when he was abducted.3 Meanwhile, the Israelis rounded up thousands of Shi’ites who were held without trial in camps in Lebanon or prisons in Israel itself. The above is not meant as some naive defence of Hizballah. As a Beirutbased television correspondent in the 1980s, I covered the suicide bombings of three US embassies and the US Marine and French military barracks carried out by militants associated with Hizballah. I knew diplomats whose lives were snuffed out and saw hanging from the trees bits and pieces of marines with whom I had been playing basketball and drinking beer just hours before. Several of the Americans taken hostage were acquaintances, and a close friend, AP correspondent Terry Anderson, spent seven years chained to a radiator in a series of makeshift prisons. Ultimately, the kidnapping threat forced me to leave Lebanon. But as Byman himself acknowledges much later in the chapter, ‘By the late 1990s, Hizballah was refraining from such actions and operating largely as a guerrilla organization.’ Misrepresenting how Hizballah operates, by implying it actively sought to kidnap Israeli civilians, in no way contributes to the goal of educating future counterterrorism strategists. Byman, the author of a 2003 article in Foreign Affairs arguing that ‘[g]iven the organization’s record of bloodshed and hostility, the question is not whether Hizballah should be stopped; it is how’ (Byman, 2003), also fails to directly address the fact that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon gave birth to Hizballah, a fact crucial for any future counterterrorist strategist looking for the lessons of the Lebanon debacle (for a detailed discussion of the birth of Hizballah, see Pintak, 2003). And his characterization of the invasion as ‘militarily masterful and strategically disastrous’ is chilling given that, as he acknowledges, it cost the lives of 17,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians (p. 307). So much for the ‘constraint’ of ‘democracies’ mentioned earlier. His version of what came next could also easily be misconstrued. ‘In 1985, Israel withdrew to a security zone in southern Lebanon’ largely manned by its Lebanese Christian allies, Byman writes (p. 309). It is an interesting way to frame the occupation of 328 square miles of Lebanese territory, an area that included the Shi’ite heartland and reached half-way to Beirut at its widest point, involved the permanent deployment of some 1500 Israeli troops and 2500 Lebanese surrogates of the largely Christian South Lebanon Army (SLA), and was punctuated by almost constant incursions deeper into Lebanon, including 15–20 air raids north of the zone per month. To be fair, Byman does write extensively about the fact that Israel’s concerted campaign to destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure and drive civilians out of south Lebanon backfired and radicalized Shi’ites and other Lebanese, but by implying that 242 Downloaded from ejc.sagepub.com at WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY on December 10, 2015

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Israel largely ‘withdrew’ to a ‘buffer’ means the resultant anti-Israeli violence – seen by most Lebanese as a legitimate campaign of national ‘resistance’ – lacks context. The ongoing occupation fed a vicious guerrilla war that lasted another 15 years, took the lives of 256 Israeli soldiers and 450 of their Lebanese allies, left another 840 Israelis and 1300 SLA militia wounded, displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians and killed or wounded thousands more (200 in one 2006 operation alone), and cost Israel US$350 million per year. It ultimately produced what was widely perceived as Israel’s first defeat at Arab hands; and allowed Hizballah to hone the tactics that Osama bin Laden once said so inspired his own approach and which are today emulated by Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups. If Byman had recognized the quantum difference between his characterization of Israel’s post-1985 involvement and the reality on the ground, he might have spared himself the painfully inaccurate analysis with which he concludes. ‘Hizballah’s fortunes may have peaked. [ . . .] The lack of a rallying cry [. . .] may lead support for the movement to decline.’ In the summer of 2006, not long after Byman penned those words, Hizballah once more fought Israel to a standstill, rallying (albeit briefly) the entire Arab world behind its banner, and cementing its position as the most powerful single military and political force in Lebanon today. Even more problematic is the chapter ‘Israel, Hamas and Fatah’, written by Boaz Ganor, founder of Israel’s International Policy Institute for CounterTerrorism. Given that the point of the book is to offer lessons to future counterterrorism strategists, the selective presentation of facts, bordering on rewriting of history, is particularly worrisome. Nowhere does Ganor mention that Hamas’s rise to power was facilitated by the Israelis. In 1998, when Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin was released from prison and allowed to make a fundraising tour of the Middle East, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak boasted that Israel had put ‘a ticking time bomb at Arafat’s doorstep’ (‘Yassin to Return by End of Week’, 1998). It is a classic lesson of the potential blowback of such divide-and-rule tactics, but one that readers of Ganor’s chapter will not learn. Equally problematic to those seeking lessons, is Ganor’s examination of deportations of suspected militants, which he describes as ‘the most severe’ punishment meted out by the Israeli military – a strange characterization given the Israeli government’s official policy of assassination, which Ganor had briefly mentioned just eight pages before (p. 288). In terms of overall effectiveness, he concludes that the deportation policy achieved mixed results; the more deportations were used, the less effective they became. But he misses the real lesson, epitomized by the December 1992 deportation to Lebanon of 452 Hamas activists, which he says was designed to ‘weaken the supportive environment in which Hamas functioned’. What Ganor fails to mention – or, perhaps, recognize – is that the December 1992 mass deportation was a historic disaster from the Israeli standpoint. Up until then, relations between the Shi’ite Hizballah and the Sunni Hamas were cool. But the Hamas deportees were met in south Lebanon by a Hizballah welcoming committee, which resulted in an ongoing relationship between the two groups, under which Hizballah trained Hamas cadres, smuggled weapons to the Occupied Territories, and ultimately exported to Hamas the suicide tactics it had so effectively honed against the Israelis in Lebanon. Ironically, much of Ganor’s apologia is indirectly punctured by Byman. Where Ganor writes of Israel’s desire to ‘minimize damage’ (p. 295) and the 243 Downloaded from ejc.sagepub.com at WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY on December 10, 2015


government’s view that ‘collective punishment should be avoided at all costs’ (p. 300), Byman devotes a whole section to ‘Collective Punishment Through Military Force’ (p. 317) and details Israel’s conscious targeting of civilian villages, hospitals and Lebanon’s civil infrastructure, concluding that such a strategy was ultimately counterproductive. To effectively evaluate the strengths of the past, an analyst must be objective and thorough. Unfortunately, those attributes are missing from what are arguably the two most critical chapters of a collection meant to offer lessons for the socalled ‘War on Terror’. Likewise, to craft a strategy to counter terror without taking into account the degree to which the media have become a weapon – for both sides – is the Information Age equivalent of going to war without a gun. As US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said in a November 2007 speech, in which he called for a dramatic investment in the tools of ‘soft power’, including strategic communications: ‘Success will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping the behaviour of friends, adversaries and, most importantly, the people in between’ (Shanker, 2007). Strategists seeking lessons in how to achieve that will not find them between the covers of Democracy and Counterterrorism.

Notes 1. The Arabic term, meaning the Party of God, is transliterated into English in several ways. To avoid confusion, this review will adopt the spelling use by Art and Richardson. 2. For a more complete discussion of this, see the chapter ‘The Myth of Terror and the Terror of Myth’ (Pintak, 2006: 103–32). 3. Tennenbaum was freed in a controversial trade that involved the release of 430 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners and the remains of three captured Israeli soldiers. According to papers filed in an Israeli military court and cited by the Israeli media after the exchange, Tennenbaum admitted to drug trafficking, fraud and forgery. He was ultimately stripped of his reservation rank (Harel, 2007).

References Amnesty (2007) Small Steps toward Justice in Chechnya. London: Amnesty International. B’Tselem (2007) ‘Statistics: Fatalities’, B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Jerusalem. Byman, D. (2003) ‘Should Hezbollah Be Next?’, Foreign Affairs 82(6): 54. Harel, A. (2007) ‘Prosecution asks IDF to Strip ex-Hezbollah Captive of Officer Rank’, Haaretz 16 January. Netanyahu, B. (1986) Terrorism: How the West Can Win. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Pintak, L. (2003) Seeds of Hate: How America’s Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad. London: Pluto Press. Pintak, L. (2006) Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam and the War of Ideas. London: Pluto Press.

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Shanker, T. (2007) ‘Defense Secretary Urges More Spending for US Diplomacy’, The New York Times A1. ‘Yassin to Return by End of Week’ (1998) ArabicNews.com.

Lawrence Pintak The American University in Cairo

Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera (eds), Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. £50.00. 251 pp. This collection of essays pushes forward in often stimulating ways the growing debate on the Internet and options for a full-blooded rather than largely tokenist democracy. It is written by a wide-ranging group of researchers, mostly based in the UK and the US, but also in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Sweden. The editors define the volume’s objective as the exploration of how to ‘develop radical democratic cultures through networked systems’, and to provide ‘points of disagreement and agitation’ rather than a comprehensive coverage. Liberal democracy in the formal sense is not the book’s focus. Rather, the various authors draw upon a variety of approaches to constructing an active, living democracy, though their approaches are not necessarily compatible. Predominant among them are Habermas’s deliberative democracy vision, Mouffe’s conflictual democracy analysis and the autonomist Marxist tradition, sadly often identified at present with Negri and Hardt’s wildly fetishized collaborations (though a number of these authors do not share this judgment). Still other theorists of a variety of persuasions are drawn upon by various authors, including Arendt, Castoriadis, de Certeau, Dewey, Debord, Foucault and Zˇ izˇek. The first essay, by Kahn and Kellner, provides a rapid array of examples of what the authors term ‘technopolitics’, meaning for them the linkage between political activism and Internet use. Not all the examples they cite are progressive in nature, though most are. It is a very useful rapid checklist to begin a discussion, though as a result they give themselves little time to reflect on any of their examples in depth. Darin Barney’s essay that follows swings in the opposite direction, offering a concentrated theoretical reflection on the nature of citizenship, liberalism and technology, proposing that many current definitions have the effect of closing down free thinking about fundamental political issues. Dahlgren’s chapter that follows his also engages with conceptual issues, in his case issues of civic cultures and civic identities, with particular reference to movements against capitalist globalization and with particular reference to Mouffe. Among his themes is the decentred character of the Internet and approaches to fluid and overlapping political identities. The next chapter addresses hacktivism (Jordan, Chapter 5), and then there follows a cluster of chapters (Chapters 6–10) examining agonistic and deliberative approaches to democracy. The first two are largely conceptual in focus, while the latter two simultaneously engage in some detail with specific cases (Islamic web-

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