Instead of getting sucked into heat-of-the-moment reactions to Boston, let’s base our responses on a more stable paradigm of contemporary global terrorism. To fight a battle of ideas successfully, one must first show what one is going up against. Amy Zalman makes the case that there are three distinct trends in terrorism — Hybrid, Multi-motivational and Narrative Terrorism.
This paradigm is evolving, but several trends are coming into view and are likely to deepen in the future:
Hybrid terrorism:
In traditional categorization of terrorists, there are “lone wolves” who are unconnected to any organized group and those who are members of organizations.
Today, a hybrid type appears to be evolving: someone who works without full organizational support or direction, but who is not working in total isolation from others. Continue reading
The narratives told in Pakistan and by international organizations about the secret U.S. drone war in Waziristan are so confused that “the people who are caught in the crosshairs of the war have lost their voice and their story to tell.” In this guest blog, reprinted from Dawn.com, Jan explains the issues.
THERE are competing narratives about the US’s drone war in the Waziristan area, a bastion of militants. These narratives have so far failed to gain traction in the public, inside Pakistan and elsewhere.
The Pakistani narrative goes like this: the drone attacks are a violation of our national sovereignty. They kill innocent people, including women and children, as collateral damage and hence incite suicide attacks across the country in a cycle of reprisal and retaliation, thus killing more Pakistanis, which again includes women and children.
In short, suicide attacks on public places like markets — and even mosques and shrines — are provoked by drone attacks. If there are no drone attacks, there will be no suicide attacks in cities and towns. Continue reading
If Zimmerman does go to trial, there will no doubt be enormous debates over his guilt or innocence. It is difficult to sort out motives and right and wrong in cases of this sort — especially when one of the critical witnesses, young Mr. Martin, cannot testify about what happened.
There is a direct link between Stand Your Ground laws, which permit those with access to deadly force to use it if they feel threatened, and Martin’s inability to tell his story.
Spirit of Justice
It is a truism when talking about narrative and public life to assert that some stories are sanctioned, and others silenced. Sometimes it is difficult to identify the mechanism through which such sanction takes place, because it lies in community tradition or social discourse. Stand Your Ground laws press into relief how law can shape which accounts will be viewed as legitimate before they are evaluated by judges and juries. Under the Stand your Ground premise, might makes right. Your ability to lethally harm someone is converted into the credible motivation for doing so, while the victim of a killing is doubly silenced, in court and in life.
When I consider the reported details of the case in the press-the accounts of Zimmerman and his father, the 911 call transcripts, the reports of the neighbors and Martin’s girlfriend, who overheard the encounter by cell phone, I hear a story of two young men who each experienced sensations of threat and fear in the presence of the other. Continue reading
In our social lives, narrative is not only something we tell but also something we perform. Public rituals like parades give us the chance to chronicle our communities in physical space and display the symbols and activities that define us. The words of George Fitch in Colliers Magazine in 1913, testifying to the popular pleasures of parades, are still true today.
The parade is an essential part of the American temperament. We not only inaugurate by parade, but we rejoice, mourn, commemorate, protest, inspire and argue by parades. Whenever two or three Americans are gathered together with a uniform within reach, they parade… The test of true brotherhood in any city is the willingness to parade in a white apron, a rooster feather hat, or a pair of baggy pink silk trousers.
Among the most joyous of these tests today is surely the annual West Indian American Day parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, an astonishing celebration of the colors, music and flavors of Carnival in the Caribbean, held this year on September 5, and an exuberant testament to multiculturalism. Continue reading
Union City, New Jersey, following Hurricane Irene's passage. Photographed by Luigi Novi under Creative Commons License
Turbocharged Reporting Underwhelmed Us
As we now know, the adrenalized coverage of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Irene as it traversed the U.S. East Coast overstated the risk of worst-case scenarios in a number of areas, like lower Manhattan and made them seem as if they were certain outcomes. In fact, hurricane modeling is not a perfectly predictive science. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, is explicit about how its annual hurricane outlooks are probabilistic, which means that potential events simply have some likelihood of occurring (and, in fact, there were areas such as Vermont where the potential for damage was under-forecasted)
I know I wasn’t alone in sensing that much of the media coverage was over the top. My relatives and friends, especially those of us in areas where the worst-case scenarios being put forth didn’t live up to the reality ended up feeling dismissive and irritated and, if we were frightened, slightly humiliated that we had been so easily spooked. I’m sure we’ll all wonder next time whether we should follow authorities’ most stringent instructions about emergency preparation.
When events don’t arrive in the dramatically bad proportions we’ve been expecting, we as likely to tune out authorities or forget entirely that the drama at hand was destructive weather, like the Washington DC woman who reported feeling that the milder than expected storm “”was a bit of a let down.”
The Challenge Communicating Uncertainty
On the other hand, there were also areas in which the degree of potential damage was under-forecast, as in Vermont. Continue reading
The competing narrative continuing to unfold about the ongoing violence in Syria reflect how completely amateur video has now transformed our understanding of what “news” is. Activists’ homemade videos have shattered the idea that the Syrian government’s claim to be restoring “stability” to towns under attack from “armed terrorists” can be taken at face value.
Yet, amateur videos cannot be verified easily, and for that reason also cannot be taken at face value. In order to try to tell the “whole” story, Reuters, CNN and other mainstream sources seem to be frequently reduced to a version of stuttering about how, although they are showing citizen footage, they can’t vouch for it’s accuracy. The New Yorker, commenting on an August 5th video below, notes that, “Like all of the amateur videos coming out of Syria, where the foreign press has been banned, this footage has not been independently verified.”
Other journalists, like Dissected News founder James Miller, are rewriting the terms of journalistic objectivity to try to make sense of, and verify, amateur video claims. Like traditional journalism, this new form requires a zealous desire get the story right and the passion-and knowledge of context-to uncover truth. But it also requires the talents of a film critic—the ability to read images, to interrogate pictures for what they reveal and conceal, and to explore how they are constructed.
As it turns out, a picture is not worth a thousand words at all. A picture is just like words – it may tell the truth, it may deceive, but it is never the transparent conduit to fact we once thought it was. It is up to good journalists to decipher them, and learn to read them as they do sources’ statements: as complex, layered signals that say as much about the worldview of the people making them, as they do about events at hand.
… Some news agencies have occasionally been duped by propaganda promoted by individual “activists”, but those observers who are more tuned in, after months of experience, to the claims of the activists, now know which individuals or groups produce credible information, and they know when to be extra-skeptical about reports. However, many of these claims are reliable, and the media who drop in on the Syria story need to pay attention to the journalists who are working hard to separate the “good” reports from the “bad”. Because in Syria — to take a position — one side is lying, one side is mostly truthful, and thousands of lives are in the balance of the two.
Reprinted from The Globalist, April 24, 2013
